Fire in the Big House. Mitchel P. Roth
of a solid window.48 A guard looked up at the caged convicts and “saw faces at the windows wreathed in smoke that poured through broken glass.” A United Press reporter observed a fellow being lowered down with a rope until it slipped and tightened around his neck, strangling him to death—a public hanging.49
Convicts on the fifth and sixth tiers, closest to the blazing roof, cursed and prayed, others broke down and cried, while others uttered “blasphemies, too horrible to repeat.” Some early accounts described men scratching at the doors to their cells “with bleeding hands.” Others “ripped at their hair” or “chewed at the steel barriers with their teeth like caged animals.” One report had a prisoner slashing his own throat with an improvised knife. One of the heroes of the evening, later confined in the hospital with severe burns, remembered passing one cell as he held an unconscious victim in his arms, where he saw a fellow convict “dangling at the end of a twisted shirt in the last throes of death by strangulation.”50
Few prisoners chronicled their Easter Monday fire experiences, and those who did often recorded their memories decades later, when they were liable to be distorted by the passage of time. Sugar Bill Baliff, a bank robber doing fifty years, was interviewed about the fire almost twenty years later. He was housed in a nearby cellblock, and it wasn’t long before the smoke was being pushed into his quarters. He recalled shouting for help until he was rescued by two men bearing sledgehammers, who helped break him out of the cell. Baliff claimed to have joined others from his block who headed to the burning cellblock to help in the rescue. He said, “We started to move the men. We didn’t have enough stretchers, so we used blankets. Some of the boys died locked together. After we [delivered] them out in the yard, we counted them—322.”51
Sonny Hanovich shared some of his memories over a half century later, offering some of the most detailed and insightful comments on the event. He remembered that it had been “a beautiful spring day. The sun was shining. The shadows were slowly creeping over the huge quadrangle and I noticed this sort of haze or mist.” He didn’t pay attention to it until it got darker and “began to sort of roll, like a fog. The next thing I know someone says that’s smoke, dammit, that’s smoke.” One of his cellmates asked him, “Sonny, do you hear anything?” He responded, “Yeah, the last few minutes I’ve been hearing something like screams, or something like that,” and in the next moments he heard someone shout “Fire.”
Fifty years later, Sonny still vividly remembered the bodies: “[I] thought … these were all colored men in there, because when we started carrying them out, stretching them out on the grass there, I thought they was all colored, that’s how charred they were.” Sonny was among the observers who were under the impression that “no one burned to death,” and that the burns must have been received after suffocating to death.
Although Hanovich was not housed in the threatened cellblocks, he recounted that many of the convicts in his block feared the whole pen was going to go up in flames, while others took “any opportunity at all” to “join in the melee and make as much racket as they could.” Sonny considered himself lucky for having been recently transferred from the fatal 6G tier to the A&B blocks in another building.
Like many other rescuers, Sonny could only make it up to the fourth range before being forced back by smoke. He backtracked to the third tier. By then “the smoke there was already down to a couple of feet from the top of range…. We walked along the cells there peering in to see whether or not we could see any signs of life…. This one man ahead of me, he passed one cell, and just as I approached it, I thought I see a man make a movement. Now there was inmates lying in all positions, some on the bed, some on the floor, and one guy had his head in the toilet, see. This one particular body, he had his fingers entwined in the cell grating and was just hanging there.” As he and another inmate tried to pull him away from the cell bars, “it just left most of the right hand there.” Thinking he saw one body move, Hanovich “hollered to this guy, ‘Hey get back here.’ He came back and I said ‘I think I saw that guy move.’ We stood there watching for a couple of seconds and he said, ‘No hell, all these guys along here are gone. Let’s go down to the next range, maybe we can help them.’” On their way down they could hear men battering with hammers, sledgehammers—but “there was no order…. There was no one there to take command, no guard or anything.” Sonny would later help remove the bodies. He and the other rescuers were instructed to use regular stretchers, instead of the makeshift alternatives they had assembled from blankets and other materials, “to make sure bodies didn’t fall apart.”52
One guard recounted “the heart rending” screams of the dying and those helpless before the searing flames. Agonized screams echoed through the cellblocks, probably not unlike how caged animals in a zoo respond in similar circumstances. Meanwhile, terrified guards, who had been conditioned against liberating their charges, saw the flames but hesitated to immediately unlock the cells, thus losing the brief window of opportunity. This delay doomed hundreds of prisoners.
When rescuers reached the top two tiers, they found that the keys would not unlock the cells. Due to the intensity of the heat, some locks had been melted shut or were too warped to open. Guards, firemen, and inmates resorted to axes and sledgehammers to smash the locks. Of the 262 prisoners housed on the top two tiers, only 13 survived. By the time Fire Chief Nice entered the blocks at 6:16, most of the men were dead. At 6:40 the roof over G&H collapsed, preceded by bits of burned timber that ignited anything that would burn, including bedding and mattresses.
One of the more remarkable aspects of the disaster was how guards and convicts forgot their mutual antagonism, at least for the moment, in order to save their brethren. Indeed, for probably the first time in the history of the Ohio penitentiary system, convicts were entrusted with ropes, axes and hammers, and other rescue equipment, items that in quieter times might have been turned into deadly weapons to be used against each other or the guards. In the bedlam, “a Negro convict [ran] with a piece of white cloth over his nose,” carrying a rope and hook, which he made “valiant efforts to throw into a barred window.” He finally succeeded and proceeded to shinny up the rope in an effort to gain entrance to the burning block. At the same moment others were assaulting locked doors with sledgehammers.53 Once freed from their cells, most inmates headed to the safety of the prison yard, while others returned to the cellblocks to help in the rescue efforts.
Inmate survivor Chester Himes featured the fire and the heroism of the convicts in several of his early stories. In one of them, his fictitious alter ego Jimmy Monroe was most impressed by the gallantry of the convicts as they rushed into the burning G&H block. He tried hard to fathom the binary lives of these men “who were in for murder and rape and arson, who had shot down policemen in dark alleys, who had snatched pocket books and run, who had stolen automobiles and forged checks, who had mutilated women and carved their torso into separate arms and legs and heads and packed them into trunks.” How could you explain these men now “working overtime at their jobs of being heroes, moving through the smoke with reckless haste to save some other bastard’s worthless life…. All working like mad at being heroes, some laughing, some solemn, some hysterical—drunk from their momentary freedom, drunk from being brave for once in a cowardly life.” Monroe figured it out: “It was exciting. The fire was exciting. The live ones and the dead ones were exciting. It gave them something to do … something to break the galling monotony of serving time.”54
People die in fires for two reasons: they are burned to death or asphyxiated. Smoke and hot gases produced by a conflagration unite as “deadly enemies.” When fire reaches a certain stage, it creates its own draft and carries itself along. The heat mushrooms up and settles down and suffocates, as it did in the upper tiers of G&H blocks. Making matters worse were the ancient timbers and sheeting exposed on the interior