Word: effingham
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...echoing quiet of midnight had settled in the lighted corridors and the dim rooms and wards of St. Anthony's Hospital at Effingham, Ill. Outside, the town (pop. 8,000) and its surrounding farms slept. An operator-nun sat at the hospital switchboard, waiting for emergency calls. Out in the hall the elevator door banged open; a nun hurried from it to report that smoke was drifting in the hospital's upstairs corridors...
Flaming Silhouettes. Neighbors awakened by screams and the tinkling crash of breaking windows, ran out to stare into a nightmare. St. Anthony's a plain, white-trimmed brick building, had stood in Effingham for 73 years; it was the only hospital in the county and its white-garbed Franciscan nuns had tended generations of the aged and the injured, the newborn and the dying. Now flame flickered and glared from behind almost every window and silhouetted frantic figures-nuns, nurses, patients in hospital gowns...
Minutes passed before the Effingham volunteer fire department, awakened by the station-house siren, got from their beds to the firehouse; by the time the first engine had ended a screaming 70-mile-an-hour run, desperate patients were leaping out windows. Yelling firemen hurriedly began raising ladders. So did nearby householders. Other men & women dragged mattresses from their houses, tried to use them to break the fall of those who were poised to leap with the flames licking at them...
After that, hour after hour, day after day, men hunted in the wreckage for bodies. Effingham's business all but ceased. At the morgue, men & women moved with a stunned matter-of-factness-one woman, looking for her baby, stared at a small, charred body and said, "No, he was smaller" in the same tone she might have used if she were shopping. The funerals went on for days...
...into private jobs; plain citizens were jugged for protesting. When Fleming, disgusted with the local scene, opened up on the Crackers, even his friends told him he was crazy to stick his neck out. He wrote, he spoke, he agitated, he became a zealot. In 1943 he published Colonel Effingham's Raid, a Book-of-the-Month novel whose harsh kidding of the Cracker Party and its dirty devices was lost on that organization's nonreading leaders. Last year Fleming's sowing reaped a triumphant harvest: the voters of Augusta kicked out the Cracker Party, and voted...