House Fire in Burbank Takes 2 Lives : Emergency: The victims are believed to be elderly sisters. It’s the second blaze at the home in a week. Smoldering cigarettes are blamed.

In hindsight, neighbors say, the fire that sent Eleanor Zielinski to the hospital on Sunday with minor burns after her clothes caught fire while she was smoking should have been a warning.

Five days later, two women--presumed to have been Zielinski, 77, and her younger sister, Dorothy Jabbonowsky, 73--died in a smoldering blaze that fire officials say was again caused by careless smoking.

Firefighters called to the pink stucco house in the 2800 block of North Buena Vista Street by passing neighbors found one of the women dead and the other dying about 12:30 a.m. Friday.

Although details remain sketchy, and the coroner’s office said it will take until late next week to officially identify the badly burned bodies, neighbors said both women were chain smokers. Jabbonowsky, they said, often had cigarette burns on her clothes and skin.

“She always had burns on her pajamas. She had burns on her body--little ones,” next-door neighbor Dee Dee Sincomb said.

Asked about the burns, Jabbonowsky would just say, “Oh, those are from my cigarettes,” Sincomb said.

Zielinski had quit smoking once, but started again about two years ago at age 75. After all, she told Sincomb and another neighbor, Fanny Genova, Dorothy smoked all the time. She might as well, too.

“Eleanor just started back smoking two years ago. She just didn’t care any more,” Genova said. “All their lives, they always had something to contend with.”

The sisters both buried their husbands long ago and had since dealt with Parkinson’s disease and bouts with cancer. During the past year, they also had to cope with the deaths of two close relatives, their brother and their Aunt Lottie, neighbors said.

Most recently, Zielinski spent most of her time inside the house, neighbors said. She told neighbors she took sleeping pills to get through the long, restless nights.

Jabbonowsky, the widow of a Burbank firefighter who died about 15 years ago, was still spry. She wore her hair blond. Zielinski was heavier and grayer, according to the neighbors.

Both were beloved fixtures in the neighborhood where Zielinski had lived for 35 years.

“They were just wonderful people,” Genova said.

“They were very loved by all of us,” added Sincomb, who is involved in the area’s Neighborhood Watch. “They were just wonderful neighbors--sweet, loving, very concerned all the time with all of us.”

Jabbonowsky, in particular, loved the holidays. Until a couple of years ago, neighbors said, the house would be crowded at Christmas. Lately, though, the sisters told neighbors that having that much company was just too much for them.

But there were signs the sisters were anticipating the approaching holidays. On Friday, a small, slightly blackened gold foil wreath hung outside the house, between the boarded-up door and window.

The blaze caused $100,000 in damage to the home and $40,000 in damage to the contents, fire officials said.

Until the end, Jabbonowsky continued her daily rounds, which always included lunch at the Bob’s Big Boy restaurant around the corner on Glenoaks Boulevard.

There, she found friends and became a favorite with the waitresses. On the afternoon before she died, she delivered Christmas cards to everyone at the restaurant, “even the busboys,” manager Georgia Brown said.

“She was wonderful. She was just great to everybody,” Brown said. When she won a scratch-off lottery ticket, she’d bring it into the restaurant to celebrate. Sometimes, she’d spring for lunch.

Brown described Jabbonowsky as “always very up. You never saw her down.” She ordered a grilled cheese sandwich every day for lunch. When her doctor told her to cut down on cheese, she switched to chocolate milkshakes “no whipped cream, no cherry,” Brown said.

“She was wonderful. It’s kind of hard to accept.”