THE PLAIN DEALER . SUNDAY, MARCH 29, 1998 5-D

OUR CENTURY1908

AT A GLANCE

Horror in CollinwoodStrike mars joy of3-cent fare agreement

April 27, 1908, was Mayor Tom L. Johnson’sday of triumph. After a bitter seven-year bat-tle, the city and the Cleveland Electric Rail-way Co. — the “Con-Con” — agreed to a com-promise in which the private line was leased tothe Municipal Traction Co. All the streetcarswould have 3-cent fares — except that the firstday was free.

“It was like a holiday,” Johnson wrote in hisautobiography. “Men and women and childrenrode, and in spite of the crowds not a single ac-cident happened to mar the happiness of theday.”

But the happiness was not to last. On May16, employees of the private line went onstrike, arguing that under their contract, theywere entitled to a raise of 2 cents an hour. Vio-lence broke out. Cars were stoned, wires cutand dynamite placed on the tracks.

Johnson’s enemies harassed the conductors,offering $5 bills to pay their 3-cent fare. Theycirculated petitions for a vote, and on Oct. 22,the lease was repealed by 605 votes out of75,893 cast.

The Municipal Traction Co. was forced intoreceivership. Johnson’s triumph had lastedless than six months.

·If it hadn’t been for Lakeview School, 1908

would be remembered as the year of the S.S.Kresge Co. fire on Public Square. On July 3,with the store full of pre-holiday shoppers, achild’s sparkler ignited an American flag and$30,000 worth of fireworks went off in sec-onds.

By the time firemen arrived, the entire storewas an inferno. Seven charred bodies werefound in the rubble.

Like the Collinwood fire, the Kresge disas-ter quickly brought new laws around the coun-try. On July 13, City Council banned sale offireworks in the city. Other cities picked upthe cry for a “safe and sane” Fourth of July.

·Rocky Colavito for Har-

vey Kuenn may not havebeen the worst trade everby a Cleveland baseball ex-ecutive. During springtraining in 1908, the De-troit Tigers offered totrade Ty Cobb for ElmerFlick, even up.

Cobb had hit .350 in 1907and stolen 49 bases to leadthe Tigers to the pennant.Flick had hit. 302 and sto-

len 41 bases. But Cleveland owner CharleySomers turned down the deal; he thought Cobbwas too hard to handle.

In one of the most exciting races in pennanthistory, Cobb led the Ti-gers to the 1908 champi-onship with a winningpercentage of .588. Cleve-land was second at .584,and Chicago third at .579.

The disappointing fin-ish marred the thrill ofAddie Joss’ perfect gameagainst the White Sox onOct. 2. It was the secondin Major League historyand the Indians’ last untilLen Barker’s in 1981.

·The Glenville Race Track had stood on St.

Claire Ave. between E. 88th and E. 101st Sts.since 1870. But the new Glenville mayor, FredH. Goff, declared betting illegal in the suburb.Owners and bettors packed up and headed forthe newly organized village of North Randall.

·At Hiram House on Orange Ave., the pio-

neering social settlement house he hadfounded with other Hiram College students in1896, George Bellamy started a citizenshipschool for immigrants. It inspired Americani-zation programs around the country.

·Cleveland invited the schools of the nation

to send their 15 best spellers to a bee at theNational Education Association convention inJune. The home team came out on top, aheadof Pittsburgh, New Orleans and Erie.

·New this year: The villages of North Olm-

sted and Idlewood (which became UniversityHeights in 1925), the Cleveland Athletic Club,the Cleveland Engineering Society, the Cha-grin Valley Hunt Club, the Linden Co. (a pecu-liar abbreviation, later part of Sterling-Lindner-Davis Co., which closed its downtowndepartment store in 1968).

172 students die in city ’s worst disasterBy Fred McGunagle

Fritz Hirter reached into “theburning hell where the childrenwere.”

“He caught his girl’s hand whileshe kept her eyes on his face. Thenthe flames caught her. Her hair be-came a torch. She gave a last ag-onized shriek, then the father fellback blinded and beaten.”

The Plain Dealer told many suchstories.

Florence Sprung threw a ladder upto a window of the burning school.She saw Johnny, her 7-year-old, inthe classroom. “Oh, mama,” he criedout. “The next instant, Johnny wasswept into the struggling mass andpushed out into the hall. It was thelast Mrs. Sprung saw of him.”

James Turner, 14, was out safelywhen he realized his younger broth-ers still were inside. “The boy dashedback into the building, despite the ef-forts of the rescuers to keep himback. All three children died.”

William Schaeffer “caught aglimpse of his 7-year-old son Frank inthe burning wedge of humanity.Reaching in, he managed to graspone of the boy’s arms. He pulled — and the arm came off at the shoulder.The child was sacrificed with the oth-ers.”

A

The Collinwood school fire ofMarch 4, 1908 — Ash Wednesday — was the worst disaster in Clevelandhistory. Its toll of 172 children andtwo teachers exceeds the 129 killed inthe East Ohio Gas Co. explosion andfire of 1944, and the 124 in the Cleve-land Clinic fire of 1929.

But numbers can’t convey the hor-ror of the parents who ran to theburning school, saw their children,heard their screams and only couldwatch.

Lakeview Elementary School, onCollamer St. in the village of Collin-wood, had 396 pupils in 1908. Twoyears later, Collinwood would be-come part of Cleveland and the streetwould become E. 152nd St. The three-story building had a brick exterior,but the interior was all wood.

The fire apparently was caused byan overheated steam pipe that ignitedjoists under the front stairs. It was

discovered when a child who hadgone down to the girls’ bathroom inthe basement saw smoke and toldHirter, the janitor. He quicklysounded the alarm and ran to openthe front and rear doors.

In previous fire drills, the schoolhad been emptied in 90 seconds. Butthe classes marching toward thefront doors found fire and smokecoming up the stairs. They panickedand ran to the back entrance, whereothers were trying to crowd throughthe narrow vestibule doors.

Somebody fell and others tried toforce their way through. One of theexterior doors had blown shut andthe children became wedged in thenarrow space. Teacher Grace Fiskeand her second-graders weretrapped between them and the pan-icky students who continued to spilldown the stairs. Soon, the floor gaveway and they all plunged into theburning basement.

Classes on upper floors fled usingthe fire escapes. Others jumped outof windows into the arms of neigh-bors who had run to the scene.

Katherine Weller got most of herthird-grade class out safely, thenturned back to try to save other chil-dren. Her body was found withtheirs.

The bodies were taken to a make-shift morgue at the Collinwood Yardsof the New York Central Railroad.

“The ambulances galloped backand forth until their horses werewhite with lather,” The Plain Dealerreported. “The bodies were laid inrows on the ground floor, between theshelves and heaps of castings, andcovered with blankets.”

Parents were admitted in groups of10 to identify them. Many were Slove-nian immigrants, speaking little or no

English. “Some screamed, somefainted; others, too deep in sorrow fortears or words, mutely nodded theirheads, and the white sheet thatmarked the identified dead wasplaced over the corpse.”

It turned out that the team of vil-lage horses that normally pulled thefire engine was busy dragging a roadscraper a mile away. When the volun-teer firemen finally arrived with bor-rowed horses, they could do little. Be-cause the village was debatingannexation to Cleveland, it had cutback spending for equipment. MayorP.S. Westropp said the village did nothave a steam engine, and if it had “itwould be practically useless. There isbut one paved street in the village.”

Many blamed janitor Hirter, wholost three of his own children, but aninvestigation later cleared him. Astate fire marshal told reporters thedoors of the school opened inward. Itwasn’t true, as others quickly pointedout, but the false report seared itsway indelibly into people’s minds.

However, the disaster did bringabout laws requiring fire-resistantmaterials, enclosed stairwells and“panic bars” that trigger door latcheswhen pushed from inside.

Children everywhere were saferbecause of the terrible fire that hap-pened in Cleveland 90 years ago.

McGunagle is a Cleveland free-lance writer.

PLAIN DEALER FILE

Investigators look over bodies from the Collinwood fire in a temporary morgue.

PLAIN DEALER FILE

Onlookers, neighbors and grieving families watch the building smolder.

Flick

Cobb

PLAIN DEALER FILE

The names of the 172 children andtwo teachers are displayed on amemorial at Lake View Cemeteryfor those who died March 4, 1908.

LOOKING AT A YEAR

Jan. 1: Georgia’s prohibition lawtakes effect.

Feb. 1: King Carlos of Portugal andhis son, the crown prince, are assassi-nated while riding in their carriage.The ringleader of the assassins iskilled.

June 18: Meeting in Chicago, Re-publicans nominate William HowardTaft, the hand-picked choice of out-going President Theodore Roosevelt,as the GOP standard-bearer.

Aug. 12: The first Model T rolls offthe assembly line in Detroit. The two-seater costs $850.

Aug. 21: The U.S. War Departmentpays Wilbur and Orville Wright$25,000 to build a plane for the Army.The Army requires that the planestay aloft for an hour at a speed of 40mph.

Sept. 12: Winston Churchill mar-ries Clementine Hozier in a Londonchurch.

Oct. 31: In an interview with the

London Daily Telegraph, Germany’sKaiser Wilhelm makes a series ofanti-British statements that sendshockwaves through Europe.

Nov. 3: Taft crushes Democrat Wil-liam Jennings Bryan and is electedthe 27th U.S. president.

Dec. 26: Jack Johnson becomes thefirst black to win the heavyweightboxing championship, with a techni-cal knockout of Tommy Burns in Syd-ney, Australia.

Born: Lyndon Baines Johnson,

Adam Clayton Powell, JosephMcCarthy, Nelson Rockefeller, JoanCrawford, Bette Davis, James Stew-art, Rex Harrison, William Saroyan,Thurgood Marshall, Harry Black-mun, Simon Wiesenthal, Edward R.Murrow.

Died: Former President GroverCleveland; playwright John Synge,author of “Playboy of the WesternWorld”; Russian composer NikolayRimsky-Korsakov; Tz’u Hsi, empressof China.