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Fire in the Big House. Mitchel P. Roth
Читать онлайн.Название Fire in the Big House
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780821446829
Автор произведения Mitchel P. Roth
Издательство Ingram
In his account of a tragic blizzard on January 12, 1888, that suddenly left five hundred dead on the prairie across Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, author David Laskin wrote, “Chance is always a silent partner in disaster. Bad luck, bad timing, the wrong choice at a crucial moment, and the door is inexorably shut and barred.”6 The same could be said about the events of Easter Monday 1930, when everything that could go wrong did go wrong.
Layout of the Ohio Penitentiary in April 1930. Map by Sam Kužel.
1
FIRE IN THE BIG HOUSE
I hope I never go to Hell if it’s this hot!
—Inmate Charles Oliver, 4H, April 21, 1930
My God what is going to happen next?
—Warden Preston Thomas, April 21, 1930
Sundown on Easter Monday 1930. The nightly lockup at the Ohio State Penitentiary had just ended. Although it was April 21, it was unseasonably cold outside, and within the forbidding thirty-foot walls of the aging and overcrowded Ohio State Penitentiary it probably wasn’t much warmer. Located less than a mile from the Columbus state capitol complex, the gray edifice was the most crowded big house in America, bulging at the seams with triple the capacity it was designed for.
While there has always been some debate over the exact time the fire broke out, all agreed that it occurred sometime after the second dinner shift, which began at 4:20. Given barely twenty minutes to consume their prison victuals, the eight hundred inmates assigned to the aging G&H cellblocks were marched back to their cells and methodically locked up for the night, four to a cell, each cell locked separately. This was rarely accomplished before 4:45. It was then customary for a cellblock officer to telephone the stockade to affirm that the night count was spot-on (that is, that the same number that left their cells for dinner had been counted on their return).
None of the inmates in the G&H blocks could have predicted, as they contemplated their well-practiced routine of winding down for the long night ahead, that by 8 p.m. more than one-third of them would be dead. Whiling away their last hours, some read or wrote letters, others played chess and checkers, and others surely dwelled on upcoming court cases and parole dates.
Although estimates as to the exact time the fire began vary by only several minutes, those minutes were enough time to mean the difference between life and death. Some convicts testified smelling smoke in the cellblock as early as 5 p.m. However, most accounts suggest that the fire became obvious sometime after 5:20 pm. Inmate trustee Liston G. Schooley was covering Deputy Warden James C. Woodard’s office by himself, just east of G&H, some 500–750 feet across the prison yard, when he first noticed smoke at 5:20 coming from the direction of the New Hall cellhouse. He had just returned from the last dinner shift and was getting ready to sit down and read a newspaper when he looked west and saw “smoke emitting from the roof or the upper windows of the cell block,” but partly hidden from view behind the chapel.
Schooley would later recount that at virtually the same time he spotted the fire from the office window, an inmate nurse was exercising, walking back and forth on the walkway in front of the deputy warden’s office. He turned and caught Schooley’s attention at the window and yelled, “The G and H cell block is on fire.” In his testimony before the fire inquiry, convened the day after the fire, Schooley noted that he called the central station in the guardroom and alerted the operator, a friend of his, who responded, “I know it, I got it.” Schooley told the operator to notify the fire department. Later he expressed certainty that this had been done in a “most efficient manner.” Predicting they would be needed elsewhere, Schooley went out on the front steps of the deputy’s office and told the exercising nurses to go to the hospital at once. By this time the yard was filling up with smoke and he found breathing already “rather difficult.”1
Inside the cell-house building itself, survivors would mostly agree that someone screamed “Fire!” around 5:21 p.m., but certainly no later than 5:35. Many sources asserted that if it had been anyone else but the convict prankster Barry Sholkey who first raised the hue and cry inside the G&H blocks at 5:20, things might have turned out differently.2 Housed on the second tier of the doomed six-tier cellblock, inmate Leo Lyon later testified that Sholkey always played the “jester or joker.” Lyon was playing cards in the cell above when he heard the fire warning and recalled telling his cellmates, “Oh, he is full of shit.”3 When nearby guards heard Sholkey’s warning, they refused to take the bait as well and simply scoffed at the alarm. Not surprisingly, when the first signs of smoke were detected, most guards played down the potential peril. They were used to small fires being set by prisoners from time to time, mostly to get attention or out of boredom. Some thought it was probably a mattress fire, since that was about the only item in a cell that could burn, and it was not uncommon for convicts to burn parts of their mattresses to smoke out bedbugs.
Nonetheless, Leo Lyon was curious enough to check it out. Getting up from his card game, he “flashed the range,” common prison parlance for the technique of taking a small mirror and sticking it through the bars to get a better look. It also allowed him to look over the wall in the building. That was when he first spotted “sparks between the blocks.” He called to his partners and told them that there was indeed a fire. He too said that Sholkey was the “first man to give the alarm.”4
A few minutes later, flames and dense smoke convinced the convicts and prison keepers that a fire was indeed threatening the prison building. Stiff winds from the northern part of the building fanned toxic smoke south into the blocks, and mayhem ensued as inmates closest to a now-billowing cloud of smoke began yelling and rapping the bars with their tin cups, like actors in some B-grade prison movie.
Many survivors pegged the time of day by their cheap dollar alarm clocks, while others depended on a centrally located wall clock to determine what time the fire began. Still others, serving relatively long prison sentences, had timed their daily routines to the minute and claimed they had little need for a clock. Edward Dolan, a prisoner out of Hamilton County, later testified that he was sitting in his cell on the first tier, reading a magazine, as three cellmates played cards, between 5:20 and 5:25 when he heard the shout of “Fire!” Asked how he was so sure about the time, he said it was because he was “waiting for the baseball man to bring the baseball extra [on the radio].”5
Six years into a ten-to-twenty-five-year stretch, Robert Farr was on the second tier playing checkers. He remembered the time because “it was customary like clockwork to play checkers from five to seven.” After just a couple of games he heard screams and shouts and the rattling of bars from prisoners on the upper ranges of the cellblock. Prisons get used to the almost nonstop noise and clamor that comes with caging up thousands of young men with nothing much to do. Like others, Farr first thought there was “nothing to it,” probably a cell fire, and no reason to get overly excited. So the checkers games continued. Farr remembered that he and his partner, whom he described as “rapid players,” had been playing long enough to have finished a game and started another one when the yelling became more intense. They finished another game and had started again when the “smoke began to roll in” and his partner insisted they had to quit.6
Inmate Roy Williams was “just getting ready to play a game of hearts” on the bottom range of cells when he smelled smoke coming from the