Terror at the Fair

Chapter Forty-One

As we approached Whiting on Indianapolis Boulevard, the skies grew ever darker until day turned to almost total night, although it was not yet noon. We felt the heat from the fires, turning an already hot day into a hellish one.

“Looks like this will be about it,” Doherty announced as we came to an intersection in a residential neighborhood where a police barricade had been put up. We parked on the street in front of an aged clapboard bungalow and got out, walking in the direction of the smoke and the now-visible flames, a few blocks away.

“Sorry, but nobody’s allowed any closer than this,” a uniformed Whiting cop on foot told us. He looked to be about nineteen.

“Reporters, Chicago Tribune,” Doherty said as we both whipped out our press cards. The young patrolman seemed uncertain at first, then nodded soberly and waved us through.

“All right, but be plenty careful, though,” he said. “There are still a lot of explosions poppin’ off all over the place.”

“We should split up now,” Doherty told me. “I’m going to meet Thomis at the Salvation Army tent—it’s supposed to be at the corner of 119th and Indianapolis Boulevard. You’ll be able to get coffee and doughnuts there. I guess you’ll be doing the feature stuff, right?”

“That’s the word I got from Murray, and when he barks, I listen.”

“Okay, let’s see... it’s 11:05 now,” he said, looking at his wristwatch. “How about we meet back here at the car at 3:30?”

“Fine by me,” I told him, marching off down a street of bungalows in this resolutely working-class town, notebook in hand. I had looked at a street map of Whiting in Doherty’s car as we drove down, so I had a pretty good sense of the small burg’s layout.

Sirens wailed from all directions, and the heat blistered the paint on the houses. A black Pontiac sedan rumbled down the street with four loudspeakers mounted on the roof blaring. “Attention, attention please, everyone keep away from all manhole covers... gasoline has entered into the sewer system... there’s a danger of explosions in the sewers... attention... attention…”

The closer I got to the big Standard refinery, the more I was reminded of the bombed-out streets of Berlin just after the surrender in the spring and summer of 1945, when I briefly served as a foreign correspondent for the Trib. I passed a frame bungalow with its screened front porch blown off and lying in splintered ruins in the street. A few doors down, another house had been lifted completely off of its concrete foundation and set back down at a crazy angle, with part of the basement now exposed and most of the windows shattered. God knows what shape the interior was in.

In the next block, an automobile, a thirties-vintage brown De Soto, lay upside-down like a dead animal on the wooden rubble of what until a few hours ago had been a garage.

I came upon a lanky man in a dirty white T-shirt and Levi’s standing in the street gaping at another house, which had lost most of its porch and chunks of its shingled roofing. He looked at me blankly and shook his head. “Lord above,” he said repeatedly.

“Your place?”

“Yeah, such as it is.”

I flashed my press card. “I’m a Chicago Tribune reporter. Is everybody okay?”

“Come down from the big city, eh? Yeah, we’re okay, only by the grace of God,” he said in a quaver. “The wife and I were still in bed this morning when the big blast hit. My first thought was it must be an atomic bomb, like the ones we dropped on Japan to finish them off back in ’45. I served on Okinawa at the time those babies hit. When I came home from the war, I thought I was through with explosions forever.”

“So, your family…?”

“My wife and little one—she’s just four—are okay, again by our Lord’s grace. They’re with my sister across the state line over in Homewood right now.” He jerked his thumb in a westerly direction.

“The National Guard came around and forced us to leave, said there’s a chance the blasts aren’t done yet, that they could go on for days, what with all the gasoline around. I snuck back to take a look at the place. Other than the porch, I think we’ll be okay.”

If there aren’t more explosions, I thought, taking down his name and address.

Farther along, I met another man standing on the sidewalk, hands on hips and head down. He turned out to be a local cab driver, whose own bungalow had been somehow spared.

“Tribune man, huh? Yeah, you might say I dodged a bullet, but my next-door neighbor Marty wasn’t so lucky—a big chunk of steel pipe flying through the air ripped open one whole side of his house,” the cabbie said, gesturing toward a yellow frame cottage whose dining room lay open to the air, its table and several chairs shattered by the pipe, which was imbedded in the far wall. “Fortunately, nobody got hit by the pipe.”

“Where were you when it all started?” I scribbled notes.

“Just getting up to begin my shift behind the wheel. At first I thought it must have been an earthquake, and so did my wife. I can tell you the whole house rattled. Right then and there, we both thought we were done for.”

“Is your wife all right?”

“Yeah. She’s in a Red Cross shelter, pretty shaken but otherwise okay. The soldiers let me come back to see if the cab’s drivable. It’s got a flat tire and one cracked window, but at least the engine turns over. Not that I’m going to do any driving today, or anytime soon.” His laugh had no mirth behind it.

I passed three uniformed, armed National Guardsmen, probably on the lookout for looters. They gave me questioning looks until I showed my press card, finally putting it under the brim of my hat where it should have been in the first place.

“Chicago Trib, huh? I would be real careful if I were you, sir,” one of the soldiers said respectfully, taking off his helmet and wiping his grimy brow with an equally grimy handkerchief. “We were just talking to a manager from the oil company, who told us they’re all real worried right now that a giant tank of naphtha, three million gallons’ worth, could blow at any time. The flames keep getting closer to it.”

“Thanks for the warning,” I replied, and no more than fifteen seconds later, an explosion shook the ground, sending a ball of flames rocketing skyward and staggering all four of us with a blast of heat that felt like a giant oven had suddenly been thrown open.

“It’s the naphtha tank!” One of the guardsmen pointed toward the fireball streaking across the dark sky like some spaceship in a Buck Rogers comic strip. “Oh Lord, I hope those oil workers left there when we did.” Squaring their shoulders, he and his helmeted comrades turned and bravely jogged in the direction of the latest horror.

I spent the next several hours walking the debris-littered streets of Whiting interviewing others who had stories to tell: the woman out at sunup hanging out laundry on a backyard clothesline when the first blast hit, its impact knocking her and all the clothes to the ground... the grocer on Indianapolis Boulevard who had gone into his store early to restock his shelves and was there when an explosion blew in both of his display windows... the Standard Oil maintenance man who loudly cursed his company’s safety measures as he picked up chunks of wood and slices of asbestos roofing that had blown into his scruffy front yard from neighboring houses... and the eighty-six-year-old pensioner sitting on his front porch who refused to leave his house and told me he “always knew something like this would happen with all that damnable gasoline around.”

I wanted to ask the old fellow why in heaven’s name he had chosen to stay in Whiting, what with all of that damnable gasoline he mentioned, but I figured given the current miserable situation here, the last thing he needed was some wise-guy Chicago reporter asking such a question.

At 3:30, I waited next to Doherty’s soot-covered car when he came up, face blackened by the heat and smoke. “You look like somebody who’s ready to do a vaudeville act in blackface,” he japed.

“If you could see yourself, you wouldn’t laugh,” I fired back.

“Oh… Geez, yeah,” he said as he slid behind the wheel and looked at himself in the rearview mirror. “Well, they can’t say we didn’t see combat. You phoned anything in yet?”

“Nope, never came anywhere near a pay phone that worked. I found one on a street corner, blown over and with a dead instrument inside.”

“Well, I managed to call in about ten graphs using a phone hookup at the Salvation Army. You want to stop someplace on the way back and phone the desk?”

I said I did, and we pulled up to the curb at a Rexall drugstore along South Chicago Avenue back in the city, our smudged faces drawing stares from the customers sitting on stools at the soda fountain. I slid into a phone booth at the rear of the store, dropped in my nickel, dialed the paper, and talked first to Murray, then dictated a piece to the rewrite desk, which took almost a half hour.

“I suppose you’re ready to call it a day?” Doherty asked when we were back on the road heading northward.

“No, you had better drop me off at the fair. I’ve got some unfinished business.”

“Well, I’ll be damned, this man is a genuine hero,” he said, taking both hands off the wheel briefly to clap. “After surviving the fiery furnaces of hell, he plunges right back into his beat. Are you angling for a bonus, Snap?”

“That will be the day.” I laughed. “Truth to tell, I’m not exactly in love with this fair posting, but maybe if I keep the higher-ups happy, they’ll let me go back to playing police reporter again, along with all the big boys like yourself.”

“Well, not that my word means anything in the halls of power, but it’s just where you belong, Snap, not writing fluff at some railroad exposition. Although I’ve got to say, the assignment there has ended up being a lot more interesting than you probably figured. If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect you bumped all these people off yourself, just to remind the boys on the news desk that you haven’t lost your touch as a crime reporter. Kill ’em, then write about ’em.”

“I’m not quite that desperate to get my old job back,” I answered with a laugh.

“Well, whatever happens, good luck,” Doherty said, as he dropped me at the front gate of the fair and rumbled off.