"Don't Jump!"

The dangers of a great city, like those of the jungle, often leave little time for thought. When smoke boiled into her 1 1/2-room Brooklyn flat one morning last week, Mrs. Irma Randall did not hesitate. A kerosene stove had tipped over downstairs and flame was roaring up the stairway in solid sheets. After one look, she ran to the window.

Five of her nine children were safely in school. The 32-year-old mother helped her three little boys out to the narrow roof of a bay window, 30 feet above the street, picked up her blanket-wrapped baby, and climbed out herself. A yelling crowd was gathering in the street below. Mrs. Randall dropped the baby's blanket to three men and a woman on the sidewalk and called to them to hold it up. She dropped her children one by one. The first three landed without a scratch. But the fourth, James, who was eight, was heavy. He slipped from the blanket and hit the sidewalk--safe, but bruised and bawling.

As Mrs. Randall peered down, the crowd began yelling, "Don't jump! Don't jump!" She stood there in the increasing heat in a long cotton housecoat and a pair of men's shoes and hopped from one foot to the other, frightened, ludicrous and heroic at once. A neighbor rushed up with an extension ladder, got it against the side of the building and started up. Then thick smoke and flame burst out of the windows below the woman. It drove the man off the ladder and enveloped her. She sank to the ledge and lay still. She was dead when firemen arrived, 30 minutes after the blaze had begun.

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