First Person : A Small Town’s Double Grief 25 Years Ago

People all over the nation remember exactly what they were doing the day President Kennedy was killed 25 years ago and that somber weekend that followed. Like most, I recall waking that next morning to newspapers with headlines screaming of his death, TV images of his flag-draped coffin in the East Room of the White House and the sad, helpless looks on my parents’ faces.

Before Jack Ruby would gun down Lee Harvey Oswald on Sunday, before the long funeral cortege would inch its way through Washington on Monday, I remember Dad driving the family the short distance over to his parents’ house . . . and the odor of burned flesh that permeated Grampa’s heavy, black raincoat as it hung on the back porch.

Just before sunrise on Nov. 23, 1963, fire broke out at the Golden Age Nursing Home at a wide spot in the road called Fitchville, Ohio, about 5 miles west of New London, where we lived. Sixty-three patients died as Grampa, who was the fire chief, led his 20 men and half a dozen other small volunteer fire departments in that losing battle.

The fire was one the 1,900 residents of New London would never forget--and one the rest of the grieving country would never remember.

Usually boisterous Gramma barely spoke as we came from the back porch into the kitchen late that Saturday afternoon. She was fixing a sandwich for Grampa, keeping an ear tuned in to the TV in the living room. We each received a quick kiss and quietly went in to watch, except Mom, who offered her a hand.

Dad, who was a volunteer firefighter, plunked himself down on one end of the couch to watch the TV. Propped up by pillows at the other end was weary Grampa, sharing the world’s catastrophe for a few minutes before returning to the more personal one that was still smoldering just across the Vermilion River.

Shortly before 5 that morning, a Pennsylvania truck driver stopped at the nursing home after he saw sparks on the north end of the roof coming from arcing electric wires that sagged through the pines in the front lawn. He collared a member of the staff who had been preparing breakfast for the 84 patients, and the two of them discovered the home’s phone was dead. They ran for a neighboring house to summon help.

“Even though we were there in about 8 minutes,” Grampa recalled later, “it was too late to do anything to save the lives. The place was a blazing inferno and it just burned to the ground.”

Other truckers stopped to rescue three employees and 21 patients, all of whom were taken 14 miles away to Fisher-Titus Hospital in the county seat of Norwalk. About two-thirds of the survivors were invalids. Some suffered burns and from the smoke but their condition generally was good.

Thirty-five of the home’s 36 mental patients died, many of them burned beyond recognition. Identification in many cases was determined by the beds the bodies were found in.

Widespread Panic

Some of the patients had been transferred to the privately owned home only a year before from the Cleveland State Hospital, about 60 miles away. Owner Robert W. Pollack of Cleveland said that many more might have been saved from the 10-year-old cinder-block structure if they had not panicked: “Instead of going out the doors, they ran back to their beds.”

Bodies pulled from the ruins of the L-shaped, one-story building Saturday and Sunday were taken across U.S. 250 to the elementary school where a makeshift morgue was set up in the gymnasium. A white sheet was hung from a clothesline stretched across the room at the foul line. TV crews covered press briefings in front of it, while relatives claimed bodies wrapped in green plastic bags behind it. Twenty-two unclaimed bodies were eventually buried in a mass ceremony in Norwalk.

Grampa made trip after trip out to the school and the ruins that long weekend. Gov. James A. Rhodes inspected the site with him on Saturday and Sunday, and pledged the state’s assistance in the investigation. The home--with no sprinklers, no fire-retardant carpet nor regular electrical inspections--was in compliance with the law, regulations that the state promptly revised. Inspectors later blamed a heating table near the kitchen, a scenario Grampa never quite went along with because of the first trucker’s testimony.

Mourning Period

Like the rest of the grieving nation, New London mourned Kennedy’s passing: Flags were everywhere--and everywhere at half-staff. Men and women cried. Churches filled. Schools canceled Monday classes. Weekend basketball games were called off. Stores closed. The town’s sole traffic light dutifully turned green, yellow and red for the nearly empty streets below.

Yet almost alone, this tiny farm community ached over that other tragedy. Kin and friends had died. Family members and neighbors dealt with the gruesome aftermath. And volunteers brought sandwiches and coffee to the crews day after day.

In all his 32 years as chief, Grampa never fought a greater blaze--yet it was the one he rarely talked about. Only when the Kennedy assassination was mentioned would he say, “That was the weekend the rest home burned down at Fitchville.”

And that would be all.

“Those are the kind of things you don’t like to remember,” he once said, “but will never forget.”