novelist Chester B. Himes; and William Sidney Porter, who would go on to become the acclaimed short-story writer O. Henry. While all of these temporary members of the prison demimonde have been the subjects of multiple books, no comprehensive examination of America’s worst prison disaster and its aftermath has been published until now.
One of the most perplexing questions this book addresses is “Why has it taken so long for the complete story to be told?” Central to any answer has to be the fact that the fire’s victims were convicts. They weren’t blameless immigrant women working in a sweatshop, nor innocent patrons at the theater or at a crowded nightspot. Nor were they families with children settling down to watch a circus show. The victims were killers, rapists, robbers, and society’s castoffs. But as what follows demonstrates, many were capable of heroic action when least expected.
Fire in the Big House, with the fire as its centerpiece, explores the lives of convicts, guards, and the warden, the rise of the big-house prison, political patronage, prison violence, as well as penal history and reform in Ohio and America. It is also about much more: about the fire’s causes and its human aftermath, about stories of lives put at risk because of tightfisted economic and political decisions. A reconsideration of this tragedy still resonates almost ninety years later, as the United States continues to lock up more people than any other country in the world. An article in the London Daily Telegraph published several months after the fire asserted in no uncertain terms that “the prison system of the United States is an unendurable disgrace to a civilized country” and that “while convicts are decreasing in other countries,” American citizens were “clamoring for bigger and better jails to accommodate criminals.” Sounds familiar. Today a prison disaster of this magnitude would instigate a fierce outcry in the press and beyond. But in 1930 the fire kept the attention of society for a relatively short time, as darkening world geopolitics and the most recent lurid events overshadowed the horror in Ohio.
In his account of a tragic blizzard on January 12, 1888, that suddenly left five hundred dead on the prairie across Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, author David Laskin wrote, “Chance is always a silent partner in disaster. Bad luck, bad timing, the wrong choice at a crucial moment, and the door is inexorably shut and barred.”6 The same could be said about the events of Easter Monday 1930, when everything that could go wrong did go wrong.
Layout of the Ohio Penitentiary in April 1930. Map by Sam Kužel.
1
FIRE IN THE BIG HOUSE
I hope I never go to Hell if it’s this hot!
—Inmate Charles Oliver, 4H, April 21, 1930
My God what is going to happen next?
—Warden Preston Thomas, April 21, 1930
Sundown on Easter Monday 1930. The nightly lockup at the Ohio State Penitentiary had just ended. Although it was April 21, it was unseasonably cold outside, and within the forbidding thirty-foot walls of the aging and overcrowded Ohio State Penitentiary it probably wasn’t much warmer. Located less than a mile from the Columbus state capitol complex, the gray edifice was the most crowded big house in America, bulging at the seams with triple the capacity it was designed for.
While there has always been some debate over the exact time the fire broke out, all agreed that it occurred sometime after the second dinner shift, which began at 4:20. Given barely twenty minutes to consume their prison victuals, the eight hundred inmates assigned to the aging G&H cellblocks were marched back to their cells and methodically locked up for the night, four to a cell, each cell locked separately. This was rarely accomplished before 4:45. It was then customary for a cellblock officer to telephone the stockade to affirm that the night count was spot-on (that is, that the same number that left their cells for dinner had been counted on their return).
None of the inmates in the G&H blocks could have predicted, as they contemplated their well-practiced routine of winding down for the long night ahead, that by 8 p.m. more than one-third of them would be dead. Whiling away their last hours, some read or wrote letters, others played chess and checkers, and others surely dwelled on upcoming court cases and parole dates.
Although estimates as to the exact time the fire began vary by only several minutes, those minutes were enough time to mean the difference between life and death. Some convicts testified smelling smoke in the cellblock as early as 5 p.m. However, most accounts suggest that the fire became obvious sometime after 5:20 pm. Inmate trustee Liston G. Schooley was covering Deputy Warden James C. Woodard’s office by himself, just east of G&H, some 500–750 feet across the prison yard, when he first noticed smoke at 5:20 coming from the direction of the New Hall cellhouse. He had just returned from the last dinner shift and was getting ready to sit down and read a newspaper when he looked west and saw “smoke emitting from the roof or the upper windows of the cell block,” but partly hidden from view behind the chapel.
Schooley would later recount that at virtually the same time he spotted the fire from the office window, an inmate nurse was exercising, walking back and forth on the walkway in front of the deputy warden’s office. He turned and caught Schooley’s attention at the window and yelled, “The G and H cell block is on fire.” In his testimony before the fire inquiry, convened the day after the fire, Schooley noted that he called the central station in the guardroom and alerted the operator, a friend of his, who responded, “I know it, I got it.” Schooley told the operator to notify the fire department. Later he expressed certainty that this had been done in a “most efficient manner.” Predicting they would be needed elsewhere, Schooley went out on the front steps of the deputy’s office and told the exercising nurses to go to the hospital at once. By this time the yard was filling up with smoke and he found breathing already “rather difficult.”1
Inside the cell-house building itself, survivors would mostly agree that someone screamed “Fire!” around 5:21 p.m., but certainly no later than 5:35. Many sources asserted that if it had been anyone else but the convict prankster Barry Sholkey who first raised the hue and cry inside the G&H blocks at 5:20, things might have turned out differently.2 Housed on the second tier of the doomed six-tier cellblock, inmate Leo Lyon later testified that Sholkey always played the “jester or joker.” Lyon was playing cards in the cell above when he heard the fire warning and recalled telling his cellmates, “Oh, he is full of shit.”3 When nearby guards heard Sholkey’s warning, they refused to take the bait as well and simply scoffed at the alarm. Not surprisingly, when the first signs of smoke were detected, most guards played down the potential peril. They were used to small fires being set by prisoners from time to time, mostly to get attention or out of boredom. Some thought it was probably a mattress fire, since that was about the only item in a cell that could burn, and it was not uncommon for convicts to burn parts of their mattresses to smoke out bedbugs.
Nonetheless, Leo Lyon was curious enough to check it out. Getting up from his card game, he “flashed the range,” common prison parlance for the technique of taking a small mirror and sticking it through the bars to get a better look. It also allowed him to look over the wall in the building. That was when he first spotted “sparks between the blocks.” He called to his partners and told them that there was indeed a fire. He too said that Sholkey was the “first man to give the alarm.”4
A few minutes later, flames and dense smoke convinced the convicts and prison keepers
