People didn’t used to talk about the effect on survivors of the tragic Cleveland Hill School fire 70 years ago Sunday.
“I just think things were dealt with differently in the ’50s,” Superintendent Jon MacSwan said. “The tragedy, the pain, the hurt that maybe people wanted to discuss and bring forward, I don’t think it was dealt with in a way that we deal with tragedy now.”
That has changed.
Wednesday, the district will commemorate the 70th anniversary of the fire that killed 15.
More than 300 have signed up to attend the remembrance, including Barbara Blackburn, of Williamsville, who only 10 minutes before the blaze broke out had been in the music room where it did most of its damage.
“It’s an incredible story of loss and tragedy and strength and resilience,” MacSwan said of the fire and its aftermath.
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Blackburn passed her friends going into the ill-fated classroom as they entered and she and her classmates exited.
The 15 sixth graders who died were among about 38 students in the music class when fire swept through the wooden annex building on the Mapleview Drive campus in Cheektowaga.
Ten were found huddled by the windows, where they tried to get out. Another five died in the hospital. At least 19 were injured.
Hundreds more in the school had invisible scars.
“We didn’t really talk about it that much,” Blackburn told The Buffalo News last week. “I don’t know why.”
Student teacher June Mahany narrowly escaped inferno after helping
The fire started at 11:22 a.m. Wednesday, March 31, 1954, the day after Cleveland Hill and other schools had been closed in the region because of an early spring snowstorm.
Music teacher Melba Seibold stood in the front of the annex room, instructing her students on the proper use of rhythm sticks.
A student teacher sat at the piano. A choir gown salesman unboxed new gowns in the back of the room.
“Then all of a sudden in the hall, floor to ceiling, this red fire came by, with black specs in it,” Seibold told The News in 2004.
With the hallway blocked by fire, the windows were the only other option, but they would not open. Terrified children and adults started breaking the window panes with their hands and a chair.
Not everyone got out.
Survivors are in their early 80s now, but the memories have not dimmed.
Blackburn remembers the gong of the fire alarm.
“We hadn’t noticed any smoke when we came back or even when we were sitting there, and this gong went out,” she said.
They left the classroom and encountered smoke.
“We had to go down three flights of stairs and it’s getting pretty smoky at that time,” she said.
Students went to the front of the high school, and were taken to the auditorium to wait. The principal, his voice breaking, told them fire had erupted.
Several hours later, coats were brought to the students. Blackburn remembers walking home in the snow without her boots, which were still in her classroom.
Some children had trouble sleeping after the fire. Others got more clingy with their parents. Blackburn was afraid to light a match for years.
“The thought of fire really bothered me,” she said. “You know, I worried about fires a lot.”
She didn’t light a match until she and her husband, who was in the Air Force, were living in Germany, and the old range in their first apartment had to be started that way.
“That was the first time I lit a match, I think, since the fire, and I had to get used to it,” she said.
Blackburn also remembers going back to school within a couple of days of the fire.
“We opened up school back in the ’50s shortly after the fire and tried to keep going forward like nothing had ever happened,” MacSwan said.
That changed as years went by.
A small plaque marked the 40th anniversary, and the district erected a stone memorial for the 50th in 2004. School officials at the time said they wanted to remember the tragedy and the heroism, without offending those who wanted to forget.
After MacSwan joined the district nearly 14 years ago, he started getting questions about why the district had not done more to mark the calamity.
The stone memorial was moved to a more accessible location outside the district office for the 60th anniversary. The following year, the district installed a permanent interactive remembrance wall in a well-trafficked spot where most students pass daily. Teachers use it as a learning tool.
The fire that swallowed up the simple, wooden annex sandwiched between Cleveland Hill’s elementary and high schools is thought to be the deadliest school fire in the history of the
A grand jury convened after the fire determined it started either by spontaneous combustion in the lavatories or a closet, or in the outer chambers or duct work of the school’s coal-fueled boiler. Under that theory, coal dust in the loft ignited.
Building codes and emergency response improved after the blaze, and no child has since died in a school fire in New York State, according to state Education Department files.
Today, state regulations require rescue windows in classrooms to have a minimum 6-square-foot opening. Fire extinguishers, fire alarms, frequent drills and sprinkler systems are required.
On the day of the fire, calls went to police, who notified the fire department. Today, automatic audible fire alarms inside schools are directly connected to police and fire departments.
Those are some of the things eighth grade social studies teacher Betty Haynes tells her students.
She talks about the history of the Cedar Grove community within the school district, where housing was put up in the early 1940s for the workers in the Curtiss Wright factory who built planes during World War II.
Because of the tremendous growth in population, wooden annexes were built to accommodate all the children in school.
“Then we talk about what happened that day,” she said.
They discuss the heroic acts of students pushing one another out the windows, other teachers rushing to see what they could do, and of the elementary teacher who carried two students to safety, knowing that her daughter was trapped in the building.
While she is teaching them about the fire and its aftermath, they are learning valuable history lessons and research skills, Haynes said.
“You talk about the event, but it’s not the focus,” she said. “The people are always the focus.”