[Magdalen] A Sad Anniversary

[Jay Weigel]

I was reminded by a friend's Facebook post at the end of the day that
yesterday was the 57th anniversary of the fire at Our Lady of Angels School
in Chicago which killed 92 children and
​3 nuns. I remember coming home from school that day to find my mother
sitting quietly in the kitchen listening to the radio which was tuned to a
Chicago station. This was something not common to begin with and I started
to ask her why, but she just held up her hand and I noticed that she had an
odd, stunned look on her face. As I listened, I began to understand and was
horrified. Many of the victims were kids just a bit younger than I (I was
then 14 and in 9th grade).
Any of you who ​lived in or near Chicago at the time will doubtless
remember the fire. Eight years later, when I was a counselor at a camp for
special needs children in the Chicago area, I met a family who were members
of the OLA parish; their daughter was one of my charges and their son was a
student at the new OLA school. We didn't speak of the fire, however.

That fire made a number of changes to school safety, all of them good. The
school had been grandfathered into the existing codes by a law stating that
if they had been in compliance at the time they were built they were in
compliance. Bad move, obviously, since there were no heavy fire doors and
only 2 sprinklers.

The parish was closed in 1990 and the school was closed in 1999.