The Night Before Christmas

Mom, Dad and I were sitting at the kitchen table. We had finished dinner. I had washed the dishes, Mom had put away any leftovers and now we were playing Canasta.

When the telephone rang, Dad got up to answer it. He had a strange look on his face when he came back to the table.

"That was the barn." he said. "There’s been a bad accident at 62^nd and State Street. They want anyone off duty who wants to volunteer to come out and help."

My father worked for the Chicago Transit Authority. At that time, it was called the Chicago Surface Line. He was one of the first black men ever hired to operate the streetcars in Chicago. The "barn" is what they called any of the stations where the streetcars were serviced and housed before being sent out on their routes.

Dad worked out of the Wentworth Barn and they were over 75% converted over to the Green Hornets. Green Hornet was the name everyone had given to the new, streamlined, green and cream colored streetcars.

These were great vehicles compared to the old Big Reds. The Big Reds were a box shaped, rough riding, loud machine. Almost all of them had wooden seats and the motormen who drove the streetcars, had to stand or rest on a floor stool. They also had big cow catchers, (Those fence like structures that were used to push unwanted animals off the tracks.) on each end because the rear of the streetcar became the front when it reached the end of the line. By moving the motorman’s controls to the other end of the streetcar, moving the backs of the seats for the new travel direction, raising the electrical pole on what was the front end, and lowering the pole on what was the rear, Big Red became bidirectional. Then the motorman would move the streetcar forward, through a switch track, to the return rail lines.

The Green Hornets were quiet compared to the Big Reds. The ride was smooth and the seats upholstered. They carried twice the number of passengers of the old Big Reds, and the motorman sat in an upholstered captain’s chair. Being a unidirectional streetcar, the Green Hornets needed a special turn-around place where the car could make a circle back to the return lines. These turn-arounds were located in various places along the streetcar route so that one could be turned around without going all the way to the end of the line.

If Dad’s barn had called, then it must have been an accident involving a Green Hornet. And how could a streetcar accident be so bad that they needed off duty people to help?

Mom asked, "Can we go with you?"

And Dad replied, "Sure. I don’t see why not."

If he only knew what was awaiting us he would have never agreed to take us along. I know that Mom was sorry afterwards that she had gone.

A bad accident is what we expected, what we found was a horror. If on a scale of one to ten and ten was the worst, I would put a bad accident at five or six. The accident my father was called out for was a 14 or 15!

The closest we could get was 60^th and State Street. Emergency vehicles and police cars had everything blocked, so we walked the rest of the way.

Huge flames were leaping into the air and every once in a while there was a dull BOOM! Then people ran for cover, ducking into doorways and even under cars! We didn’t know what the danger was or we would have been crawling under something too.

A southbound Green Hornet, coming from downtown and packed with people, had hit a switch track which had been left in the wrong position for continuing straight. The streetcar, traveling at 35 to 40 miles per hour, had suddenly been diverted eastward towards a turn-around yard.

It plowed through the northbound traffic and hit an 8,000 gallon gasoline tank truck, dead in the middle. The streetcar was derailed and pushed the gas truck into the ground floor of an apartment building.

This apartment building was about four or five stories high. The ground floor was made-up entirely of various stores. The one that the gas truck hit was a huge liquor store.

The gasoline engaged all the ground floor in fire. Burning gasoline from the tanker was running down the street gutters and into the sewers.

Every so often a section of sewer line would explode, sending manhole covers flying into the air like Frisbees. Now we knew why people had run for cover.

There were a few people inside the streetcar still alive when we got there. They were burning alive! I don’t remember how many people were quoted as being on the streetcar but I would give a very conservative guess of a minimum of 60. 33 people were reported to have died in the streetcar.

The emergency crew finally managed to hook chains to the streetcar. People, along with a big truck, pulled it out of the burning gasoline, and back onto the street. It wasn’t on fire just from the gasoline, but also from the people burning inside.

Those in the apartment building could not get out through the front doors because of the gasoline. And since the ground floor of this building was all stores, it didn’t take long for the fire to travel from front to rear, engulfing the whole bottom part of the building.

The rear exits for all the apartments of the building were porches, landings and stairs. With the fire at the bottom they did not last long as they were built entirely of wood. There were metal fire escapes but they were all on the front of the building, right over the gasoline fire.

Bottles of liquor in the package store were exploding from the heat. And when one of them blew it sent sprays of burning liquids in all directions. The firefighters could not get close and the water they were using was not putting out the gasoline fire. Gasoline floated on top of the water, still burning. Wherever the water flowed, it carried the burning gas with it. Soon, parked cars were catching on fire from the water/gasoline running beneath them.

Mom told Dad, "Get us out of here. There is nothing you can do. There’s already plenty of help. Take us home."

Mom cried all the way back home. Dad was quiet, never said a word.

I sat in the back of the car with new memories which would never go away. The smell of human flesh burning... the sounds of the screams from the people burning alive... the sight of people prying bricks from the street and throwing at the people still alive in the streetcar to knock them out... to kill them... to stop their screams piercing our ears... our minds. The sight of a woman standing behind one of the barred streetcar windows, her head aglow from the fire burning away her hair... the look on her face as she just stood there, looking at us, knowing we could not save her, making herself a target for a brick... and finally someone with a good arm and aim found the mark.

When reading about the "bad accident" in the papers, during the next couple of days, we noticed they did not publish the figures regarding total loss of life. There was no mention of the stoning... mercy kills.

Authorities estimated that over half of the lives lost in the apartment building were children. Latch key school kids they were called. Home alone, waiting for parents to come home from work.