remembrances of the angels john kuenster

William McManus, superintendent of Chicago Catholic schools at the time, “said quite bluntly that he didn’t want to get into any lawsuits,” DeCock told Kuenster.įamilies and the public were left to draw their own conclusions. St. Mary Donatus DeCock, a retired BVM nun who came in from then-Mundelein College in Rogers Park to help out in the aftermath of the fire.

Florence, “never had a chance to tell her side of the story,” recalls Sr. The adults who had been in charge at OLA were the subject of intense disapproval after the disaster, but never had the catharsis of a definitive investigation into its cause, let alone the possibility of being exonerated, the survivors say. Parents who lost children were advised to move on with their lives. No grief counselors trooped in the next day to help the children cope with what they had seen and felt and experienced indeed, they were told not to talk about the fire. Some of them jumped 35 feet from second-floor classrooms, often to the cement below. “It’s all blended but the truth is there.”Īs children, the survivors watched their friends die, burning up or asphyxiating, their mouths and noses black with soot, and made the decision to try to live. “Everybody sees something different,” Kuenster says. The assemblage of all the disparate bits of the story in Remembrances makes for a heartbreaking montage of sorrow, horror, acceptance, regret and anger - and for a page-turner of a book. Ninety-two children and three nuns died in the fire 75 more were injured. Less than half an hour before dismissal time on that cold Monday afternoon, this typical Catholic school in a working-class community on the West Side flashed over into perhaps the worst disaster in Chicago in living memory. Dee, $22.50) holds his own vivid piece of the picture. There are the nuns in their habits, the well behaved Catholic schoolchildren seated at their old wooden desks in their old wooden school.īut each of the 28 survivors, parents, firefighters, nurses and journalists who spoke to Kuenster for Remembrances of the Angels: 50th Anniversary Reminiscences of the Fire No One Can Forget (Ivan R. The result is like opening a box of photographs from a bygone era.

1, 1958, were drawing on memories that are now half a century old. The people who sat down to talk with John Kuenster for his new oral history of the fire at Our Lady of Angels school on Dec. Riveting Oral History of City’s Worst School Fireīy Delia O’Hara / Staff Reporter, Chicago Sun-Times

Remembrances of the angels john kuenster