Red Sky at Morning

At 3:30 a.m., Night Clerk Comer Rowan sat in for his wife at the switchboard of Atlanta's Winecoff Hotel. It was a dull hour. Out of the front door, cold moonlight flooded deserted Peachtree Street. In his tenth-floor suite, white-thatched, 70-year-old W. Frank Winecoff, who built the hotel in 1913,* slept soundly.

So, apparently, did all but one of the 285 guests in the brown brick, 15-story, "fireproof" hotel. At 3:32, a switchboard light winked; a soldier in 510 wanted ice and ginger ale. Clerk Rowan sent Bellhop Bill Mobley up with it, and told the night engineer to go along for a routine building check. They had to wait in the hall about three minutes for the guest to finish his bath. They spent another three minutes in his room. When they opened the door again, the hall was ringed with fire.

Downstairs, Clerk Rowan phoned in the alarm. While he frantically roused the sleepers, flames and gas ballooned up the two elevator shafts and the two narrow stairways to the ventless roof. Stopped there, the seething mass backed up in search of outlets, shot down hallways with flamethrower force, began melting brass doorknobs, powdering plaster and licking at closed doors. Whenever a door was left open, death entered. At 3:50, when the 60-piece fire department started spindly ladders up along its scorching walls, the "fireproof," 33-year-old Winecoff, which, like most Atlanta hotels, has no outside fire escapes and no sprinkler system, was roaring like an open hearth.

"Don't Jump!" Then the people who desperately wanted to live began to die. While firemen yelled "Don't jump!" a *He sold it three years later, stayed on after that as a non-paying guest. woman appeared at a seventh-floor window, threw out her small son, her smaller daughter, then jumped herself. Another woman leaped feet first (as they all did), hit a fireman who was carrying a woman down a ladder and swept them with her to the street. The craze spread, and body after body hurtled down, hitting with dull, leaden sounds. As they fell, slowly it seemed, the jumpers trailed long, long cries.

When the crowds arrived, streets and alleyways were littered with dead, and there were more to come. A young girl wriggled out of one blazing window on a sheet rope, started, catlike, toward an aerial ladder two floors below. Suddenly she lost her footing on the wall, turned gropingly in the lurid light and let go. "I knew she'd hit that marquee," muttered a spectator. Another body hit a wire over; the marquee, spun and hung by the neck for a moment, then plopped down.

At a fifth-floor window, a man tossed out a sheet rope, stepped back into the room, and was not seen again. In another window stood a girl in a white nightgown which blazed up suddenly before she jumped. Above her, a man swayed in a panel of flame, rolling his head from side to side. Around him, guests huddled and crawled on ledges to escape deadly gas and smoke, dangled from sheet ropes over fire-belching windows, and leaped for safety nets. Some hit with such force that the nets were torn from firemen's hands. As a girl jumped from a seventh-floor window she gasped: "I hope I live! I hope I live!" Despite a broken hip, leg, and arm, she did.

Slow Death. As the blast began to settle into smaller, scavenger flames, firemen with blasting hoses moved into the narrow, unburned lobby and edged up into the fearful heat and stench of the upper floors.

In one bathroom, an asphyxiated father lay with his head in a shower while his wife sprawled nearby, a dead arm around two dead children. Farther on, a woman lay peacefully with her head on a window sill, her purse in one hand. In one room, an uncooked turkey lay in a pan; in another an abandoned canary sang; in dozens of others, unsinged bodies lay as though sleeping. Everywhere, except on the second, 14th and isth floors, which had been only slightly damaged, walls, floors and furniture were crisped, telephones melted into lumps, wash basins cracked. Toilet bowls, with the water heated to steam in their narrow necks, had exploded like flashcrackers.

By sunrise, hospitals were jammed with the injured and crazed. Some of the dead still lay in rooms or hallways, but most were in morgues. Many bodies were blackened, many without arms or legs. Most of those who had died by suffocation lay with distorted faces, lips bared over teeth. For them, death had come slowly.

As lines of relatives began their dazed hunt for telltale rings, scars, birthmarks or dental fillings, weary officials began gathering data. It was the worst U.S. hotel fire in history: 120 dead,* 5 missing, 89 injured. (Most of those saved had been rescued by ladder.) The fire, they reasoned, had started either on the third or fourth floors. How it had started, they did not know.

Back at the Winecoff, firemen still prowled through debris for victims. In the steamy, reeking tenth-floor hallway, they found the body of Frank Winecoff.

* Other major U.S. hotel fires: Newhall House fire in Milwaukee, 1883, 71 dead; La Salle Hotel fire in Chicago, June 5, 1946, 61 deads

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