When his ruse failed, he tried another plan. He signed the name of a prominent Columbus newspaper editor to gain entry and managed to make it as far as the prison yard just as casualties were being brought out from the cellblocks. However, he was soon mistaken for a convict and forced into a cell, as the fire was still blazing and a riot was on the verge of breaking out. He was kept behind bars for two hours until he could be properly identified.95
The Ohio Penitentiary fire was the first major American disaster to be covered instantaneously by sound motion picture crews, radio stations, and newspaper reporters, the three major arms of the mainstream media. After Fox Movietone covered Lindbergh taking off for his solo flight to Paris in May 1927, audiences had to wait several days to watch it in person, and only those in New York would have been able to see and hear the airplane take off, since the “sound equipment was still confined to” movie palaces in the Big Apple. Nonetheless, audiences would thrill to the hum of the iconic monoplane Spirit of St. Louis taking off and then “ris[ing] above Roosevelt Field.”96 Within a few years and by 1930, “sound news-reels” were issued twice weekly by Fox, Pathé, and Paramount and shown on almost twelve thousand screens across the United States.
Airplanes played a significant role in transporting news to the free world. During the first hours of the unfolding disaster, photographs and news articles were rushed to their home offices by plane. In fact, that evening airplanes were warmed up and on standby at the local Norton and Sullivan Fields, in case they were needed to transport photographs or other tasks.97 The Dallas Morning News reported its photographers transmitting photos “by telephoto” over regular phone lines to Chicago. From there the photos were flown to Dallas.98 Thanks to advances in newspaper technology, the world of news was rapidly changing, and editors wanted to tell stories in pictures whenever possible.
The penitentiary fire had burned itself out after about two hours, but by three o’clock the next afternoon, only twenty-one hours after the first alarm, theater patrons in moving-picture houses on Broadway, some six hundred miles away, “not only [saw] the harrowing sights; they also heard the shrieking of the prison siren, the hissing as water hits the flames, the howling of desperate prisoners, the crackling of burning logs, the thud of falling beams, the commands of Army officials and jail officials.”99 The short clips were accompanied by a “brief talkie lecture by an expert on prison conditions, explaining the causes of the tragedy and suggesting means of preventing its occurrence.” One leading popular science journal declared that this should be “considered a world’s record in the speedy gathering and presentation of audible photographic news.” Except for a few photos transmitted by special wire, “the pictorial story was in the theaters before the New York dailies had their pictures in print.” The 300 feet of Pathé film played in about two and a half minutes. The “sound newsreel” had come into its own in April 1930 as a “talking newspaper.”100
It is worth noting that the sound men who were on their way to cover the fire “narrowly escaped death” when their “camion” or sound truck was hit “by a high tension electric wire during a wild night drive through a storm to the scene of the disaster.” Beating their competition to record the fire in Columbus was made possible by the fact that they were already in Cleveland, 126 miles away, reporting the opening of the American League baseball season when the disaster took place.101
Every form of communication was utilized during the course of the disaster. Ohio State Journal staff reporter Ray Coon, besides contributing print coverage, also broadcast the details of the fire over WLW Cincinnati. He somehow managed to set up an emergency broadcasting station in the Department of Education building in the statehouse annex. From there he stayed in touch with his newspaper in order to offer descriptive details of the scene inside the prison.102
Also on the spot Easter Monday was Columbus station WAIU. It had its own remote-controlled equipment already inside the prison walls, making it possible to broadcast directly from the scene of the disaster. So, as the reporters for the city newspapers were sitting down for dinner, the conflagration was simultaneously broadcast by radio. It would be another several hours before all of the newspapers were fully staffed.103
The Ohio Penitentiary was so inundated with phone calls from Ohio and beyond that special telephones and switchboards had to be placed in its lobby.104 Magnifying the confusion were an estimated five hundred telegrams sent from the penitentiary to the families of the deceased at midnight on Easter Monday, alerting them to the tragedies that had befallen their loved ones as well as where they could reclaim the bodies.105 The telegrams and news dispatches about the fire challenged the “physical and human capacity” of the employees of the Western Union Telegraph Company and the Postal Telegraph Company. By the following morning Western Union had handled two hundred thousand words in seventy-five hundred different messages, while the Postal Telegraph Company had handled more than thirty-five thousand words during one six-hour period ending Tuesday at 1 a.m. Messages sent included special correspondent reports to their newspapers as well as convict messages to relatives and agencies involved in identifying the dead and the survivors.106 (Prisoners had to pay for their own messages to be sent.)107 More than one thousand telegrams had inundated the prison from the relatives of convicts from throughout the country. The entire workforce from the outer office, augmented by volunteers, worked to check prison records on individual inmates.
One of the few feel-good stories to be had in the direct aftermath of the prison catastrophe was that of Convict 46812, better known as Otto W. “Deacon” Gardner, a graduate of the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago, whose actions on Easter Monday earned him national acclaim. The thirty-five-year-old Pennsylvanian, who had entered the Ohio Penitentiary in 1917, was doing life for the murder of his wife and another woman in Youngstown, Ohio. According to the African American newspaper the Chicago Defender, Gardner was one of the most popular and best-known inmates. The night of the fire he delivered “one of the epoch events in radio broadcasting.”108 As he vividly chronicled the fire on station WAIU, the prison radio station, “his voice was carried into thousands of homes throughout America over the Columbia Broadcasting System.” (The prison radio station was a unit of the Columbia system.) CBS president William S. Paley rewarded him with a check for $500 (over $7,000 in 2017). “At a time when the entire country was anxiously awaiting news of the worst catastrophe in American prison history,” Paley told him, “you willingly, in the face of great danger, gave a sympathetic and accurate word picture of the holocaust.” From 7 to 12 p.m., Gardner, who was “only 30 feet from the blaze at the time,” reached out for doctors, nurses, and “narcotics.”109
Between 8 and 9 p.m. the fire might have been under control, but the prison yard was seething with anarchy as thousands of prisoners freely milled about, screaming, shouting, and menacing firefighters. Fire chiefs threatened to let the whole prison burn down unless guaranteed protection. The first reporters on the scene often embellished and exaggerated what they saw or heard, mostly the latter. Firefighters and guards may have testified seeing convicts drop in their tracks, but reporters’ claims that they saw prisoners “literally burned alive before our eyes” is rather farfetched considering the totality of evidence and accounts of the fire. But it did sell papers. These reports would be dispelled in the days to come as the morticians and coroners did their jobs, finding that the overwhelming majority died from smoke inhalation, and that most burns had been postmortem. All the prisoners on the sixth tier, all but thirteen on the fifth tier, and a number on the fourth range were dead. Now it was up to a Board of Inquiry to begin the truth-seeking process.
2
THE FAIRGROUNDS
