Word: effingham
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...Effingham, Ill. (pop. 8,000), they will never forget the fire that, one April night in 1949, burned St. Anthony's Hospital to the ground, and took 75 lives. "Last week they were reminded of the tragedy by a fact as hopeful as a phoenix...
...committee, none of them Catholics. With the help of such groups as Rotary, Kiwanis, Lions and the American Legion, they launched an appeal for funds that reached out all over the U.S. They mined every possible source for prospects; anybody who had signed the register at Effingham's hotel for the past five or six years got a letter. More than 100,000 letters went...
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...