"Don't Jump!"

Shortly after midnight, people in the La Salle Hotel's big, ornate lobby in Chicago's Loop noticed a strange yellow light reflecting from polished table tops, from marble and window glass. The wavering glare grew. They looked up and saw flames billowing gustily across the dark, varnished paneling above the elevator bank.

They stood for a moment not believing their eyes. Fire? In the quiet, respectable, "fireproof" La Salle? A window drapery flared into flame. A fear-crazed crowd burst from the Silver Lounge on the ground floor, jammed through the doors. The brightly lighted lobby, deserted, crackled with fire.

Interlude. Out in the city, alarm tickers punched out tapes, bells clanged, fire trucks lurched from the stations. Inside the hotel the fire grew as if it were fed by celluloid and gasoline. In five minutes it crumbled marble, melted doorknobs, roared up the multiple chimneys formed by the elevator shafts and the stair wells of the 22-story building. Walls took fire on the first five floors. Superheated gases and choking smoke blew through corridors all the way to the roof. But for what seemed a long time the streets outside stayed as dark and quiet as if nothing had happened. Then, at last, glass shattered and tinkled and a woman screamed. Fire trucks raced up, sirens moaning.

Upstairs, hundreds of people had been awakened to horror. Some were called by room telephones--a 44-year-old operator named Mrs. Julia Barry stayed at the switchboard, managed to work a few minutes before she died. But most of the guests were awakened by screams, the smell of smoke, the noise. Almost automatically they opened corridor doors and were driven back by heat and smoke. They ran to their windows, looked down the clifflike side of the building at the silent crowds in the street.

After that, numbly or with blind desperation, they tried to stay alive. The lights went out on many floors after a while, but scores of people crept out into the hot, dark, smoke-filled corridors hunting for fire escapes. Gasping dozens suffocated, lay still after going a few feet. A few people shut themselves into bathrooms. Most stayed at their windows, screaming, waving sheets, tossing down lamps and bric-a-brac to attract attention.

Terror. One frantic man tied sheets together, dangled his wife outside a window. His strength began to fail. For a while he called hoarsely for help. Then with a desperate effort he pulled her back. A woman seized her four-year-old daughter and jumped. Her husband leaped with her. They fell together--very slowly it seemed--and thudded on the roof of a court below.

Firemen called ceaselessly above the roar of engines and the throb of the pumps: "Don't jump! Don't jump!" A latticework of ladders rose into the searchlight beams which roamed the building's face. Seven more people felt the terror, escaped the heat by diving and dying.

Meanwhile pipemen fought into the flaming lobby with battering streams of water. They edged into the heart of the fire, heads down, coughing, while other firemen in the rear sent protective streams cascading over them. The fire--apparently started by a short circuit in a false ceiling above the Silver Lounge--died) almost as abruptly as it began. In half an hour the blackened, sodden lobby was free of flame.

The Heroes. But there was still heat, smoke and fearful confusion upstairs. Firemen worked until they dropped in dark, furniture-cluttered labyrinths. Nameless heroes appeared. A tall, well-dressed man knocked on scores of doors, chatted coolly and politely, led the terrified to safety. A sailor roamed the smoking corridors knocking out fear-maddened men, dragging them limply to fire escapes. And there were more furtive figures--looters moved in the confusion, rifling suitcases and running their hands carefully over the dead.

Gradually the hotel emptied. Hour by hour half-dressed men and women climbed or were carried down fire escapes and ladders.

As dawn rose over the city many still sat half-naked in the doorways along La Salle Street. Others, begrimed and barefooted, stood weeping in the lobby of the City Hall. Forty-three blanketed bodies lay there on the marble floor, their feet carefully tagged, beneath a sign which read: "Pay Water Taxes Here." (At week's end the death list was 61.)

Up the street firemen coiled hoses, took down ladders. Morning traffic began to flow. From across the street the La Salle looked undamaged; only a few sheets dangling limply from windows recalled the nightmare.

Almost every detail of the La Salle Hotel tragedy was duplicated in miniature four days later when fire swept the 55-year-old, 150-room Canfield Hotel at Dubuque, Iowa. The Canfield fire also was discovered shortly after midnight in a cocktail room called the Red Lounge. It swept out to rage in the lobby, trapped 129 guests in smoke-filled rooms upstairs. Most escaped down ladders and fire escapes. Fifteen died that morning--two in attempting jumps into fire nets.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.