It was supposed to be a fun-filled weekend in Chicago for deserving students from the Illinois School for the Deaf in Jacksonville. The whirlwind schedule included a visit to a museum, a basketball game, and a stay in a luxury hotel.
Then it went horribly wrong.
Jan. 25 marked the 55th anniversary of the deaths of two ISD students, Bruce Kennedy and Donald Zanger, in a fire at the Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago, which rocked the school and still haunts the survivors today.
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“It’s something that happened, and there’s no getting around it,” said Zeke Beranek of Jacksonville, a former ISD teacher who accompanied the students to Chicago that weekend. “I have reservations in talking about it. But as bad as it was, it happened.”
The fire in the waking hours of Jan. 25, 1970, originated on the ninth floor of the Hilton, then the largest hotel in the world, and injured 39 people. The Jacksonville Daily Journal reported on Jan. 27 that 14 students were among them. The only two fatalities were the two ISD students.
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Tragedies are often instilled in the memories of the survivors. But as the ISD students set out for Chicago on Saturday, Jan. 24, they had no reason to believe the weekend would have such a bitter ending.
Forty-one students were on the trip, an annual event for ISD youngsters who demonstrated good classroom behavior and character.
“We didn’t just pick who went on their grades,” recalled Beranek. “We looked at how they did in the dormitories, and how they acted outside of class. If you got to go, it depended on how you behaved both in school and in the dorms.”
In past years, St. Louis was the usual destination for the trip, but plans changed with the evolution of pro sports.
“We’d always taken the kids to St. Louis to see a Hawks game, but then that team moved to Atlanta (in 1968),” said Beranek. “So, it became a Chicago Bulls game. It was really special for everyone, and the kids would present the national anthem in sign language at the games.”
A trip to the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry was also planned on Saturday, with a church service, complete with a sign-language interpreter, scheduled for Sunday morning. After seeing the Bulls game on Sunday afternoon, the students were to return to Jacksonville.
An additional treat was the overnight stay at the Conrad Hilton, a 31-story facility with 2,600 rooms on Michigan Avenue that was the world’s largest hotel at the time. Over half of the rooms were occupied that night. For students from rural areas and everyone else in the group, the night in the big city was plenty of cause for excitement.
The students were assigned four to a room on the ninth floor of the Hilton. Saturday’s events went largely as planned, and everyone eventually fell asleep late that evening, with more fun on Sunday on their minds.
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As the group was about to awaken the next morning, the fire alarms in the Hilton echoed through the halls. There is a discrepancy in the time of the alarms, but most agree it was sometime after 5 a.m.
Unlike today, hotels in the era were not required to have visual fire alarms. For the hearing-impaired students from Jacksonville, many had no way of knowing alarms were sounding unless someone else woke them up.
The Chicago Daily News ran a headline that said “Silent fright gripped [the ninth] floor.” The Chicago Tribune quoted a 14-year-old student who told of the “soundless terror.”
Some rooms on the ninth floor quickly filled with smoke, drastically reducing visibility and causing breathing issues. Students, many of them half-dressed, variously broke out windows, grabbed wet towels, and resorted to other means for safety. Many leaned out windows, screaming for help from firefighters and onlookers on the street below.
Others panicked and ran out of the rooms. One was Bruce Kennedy, who fled his room despite pleas from his roommates. Elsewhere was Donald Zanger who, after a roommate had awakened him, raced out into the hallway.
Firefighters moved to rescue students as quickly as possible, and Beranek vividly remembers the skill of the first responders.
“The Chicago Fire Department is one of the best, and they showed it,” he said. “We looked out the windows, and the firemen looked like ants down below.
“But they knew what to do from the start,” said Beranek. “They came to the doors, escorted us out the hallways and down the fire escapes, and got us out.”
Firefighters later spoke of the challenges in rescuing some of the students because they could not hear verbal instructions.
For those in that silent world, the specter of the inferno may have been their worst nightmare. On Jan. 26, the Tribune ran a headline topping an interview with a teacher, stating “Deaf Fear Fire Most.”
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At least one student took matters into his own hands. Charles Bright, a 17-year-old who had tried to keep Kennedy, a roommate, from fleeing, had tied three bedsheets together to try and drop himself out of his ninth-story window. Crying desperately, he eventually climbed out onto the ledge, lowered himself to the edge of the ledge, and hung on before letting go.
Beranek remembers it somewhat differently.
“He had tried to tie those sheets together, and he couldn’t do it,” he said. “He flipped and fell.”
Several media accounts verify Beranek’s version.
Bright, who was quoted in 2018 as saying “I can’t remember anything after my fingers left the ledge,” smashed onto a concrete terrace on the fifth floor, four stories below. He rose, took a few steps, and passed out.
He was later taken by firefighters to a fifth-floor room to await a trip to a hospital. Among his other injuries were a broken arm and facial bone. Bright’s dramatic escape remains a seminal moment in the event, over a half-century later.
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In Room 909, David Reynolds, a 16-year-old from near Kankakee, had tried crawling on the floor to avoid the smoke, unsuccessfully. After holding a pillow over his face on the floor, he rose, grabbed the curtain rod, and managed to smash a baseball-sized hole in the window before passing out.
As he was unconscious, a roommate had managed to knock the window open, and as Reynolds came to, he leaned outside. One of his three roommates had cerebral palsy, which presented another challenge, and all four were now covered in soot.
According to a 2018 blog account, one roommate exclaimed “I can feel footsteps” just before a firefighter entered the room. The boys were escorted down the hallway, now covered in water, hoses and debris, to a fire escape. The firefighter carried the boy with cerebral palsy.
Despite a hard cough, Reynolds declined an offer to go to the hospital but was later forced to accept as his condition worsened. At the hospital, he saw that he was coughing up soot, as his lungs were filled while his larynx was burned with smoke.
Reynolds had difficulty speaking and eating for days afterward. The 2018 account adds that Reynolds had blood in his lungs for years due to the inhalation, which also caused him to suffer nosebleeds.
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Beranek recalls that many survivors were taken to a lower floor.
“They took us to this room someplace on the first floor, and kept us sheltered there,” he said. “Then they’d go back up, and pull more people out of rooms.” Many credit Beranek for his efforts that night.
The shaken survivors were taken to the Palmer House Hotel, a landmark in Chicago for decades, which was also owned by the Hilton chain.
“They put us up there, and gave us a free meal,” said Beranek. Some remember the meal as being courtesy of Mayor Richard Daley.
Needless to say, the students were unable to attend the Bulls game. However, they were treated on Sunday evening to a concert by singer Connie Stevens, who was performing at the Palmer House that night.
Hearing of the tragedy, Stevens invited the students to attend her performance. Afterward, she talked to the students and posed for pictures.
Though the concert proved some respite, the students were traumatized by the events of the past 24 hours. In an interview for the 2018 account, Beranek noted that over three-fourths of the group left their lights on overnight at the Palmer House on Sunday. On Monday, the students returned to Jacksonville.
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Damage to the Conrad Hilton was estimated at $150,000, or around $1.2 million in today’s dollars. The Chicago Tribune reported “extensive smoke damage” to the upper stories, while “water damage was heavy in floors below the ninth.”
The origin of the fire was traced to the center of the ninth floor. Some accounts place it in an elevator shaft, while others cite a furniture storage area. Several papers, including the Chicago Sun-Times and Jacksonville Daily Journal, placed the origin in “furniture stored near the elevator shaft.” The ninth floor was undergoing a renovation at the time.
The Tribune reported that Chicago Fire Cmdr. Robert Quinn ordered an arson investigation, but the cause of the fire apparently was never determined. Ironically, there had also been a fire on the ninth floor of the Conrad Hilton two years and two days before the blaze that claimed the lives of the ISD boys.
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The two students lost at the Hilton remain the central part of the story. Kennedy, a 17-year-old from Morton Grove, was scheduled to graduate that year.
The Sun-Times reported that Kennedy’s death was an “entire neighborhood’s loss” as everyone in the surrounding area was mourning the loss, including his parents, who were partially deaf themselves.
Zanger, also 17, of rural Quincy was a guard on the ISD football team that went 9-0 the previous fall. It was ISD’s first undefeated season since 1928. His older sister, Rose Marie, was also an ISD student.
The bodies of both boys were found in a corridor on the north end of the ninth floor. A Chicago newspaper quoted Quinn saying that had the boys remained in their rooms, they likely would have survived the inferno.
“They were just two good kids,” Beranek said. “That’s all I can say.”
• Tom Emery is a freelance writer and historical researcher from Carlinville, Illinois. He may be reached at 217-710-8392 or ilcivilwar@yahoo.com.