50 Years Later: Our Lady of the Angels Remembered

Fire took lives of 92 children, 3 nuns

Updated 6:45 AM CST, Sun, Nov 30, 2008

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It is an anniversary that no one celebrates, but many remember. Fifty years ago on December 1, 1958, the Our Lady of the Angels School fire killed 92 children and three Sisters of Charity.

Seven-year-old Dan Taglia hoped students were getting ice cream when he heard the fire alarm from his basement classroom on Dec. 1, 1958. It was too late for a fire drill, and the nuns wouldn't send the children out coatless on such a cold day.

"But what does a third-grader know?" recalled Taglia, now of Katy, Texas.

On the first floor at Our Lady of the Angels School, where Mary Ellen Hobik was taking an English test, the nun in charge of her fourth-grade class dismissed the alarm as a mistake.

"I was glad, because I knew I was doing well on the test," said the current Mary Ellen Reeves, now an elementary school principal in Addison, Ill.

But the alarm was real. And tragically delayed. Fire and toxic smoke engulfed the elementary and middle school on Chicago's West Side with terrifying swiftness. In the end, 92 kds and three nuns died.

On Saturday, services were held at two area cemeteries where many of the victims are buried. Today, "A Day of Remembrance" and memorial Mass will be held at 2:30 p.m. at Holy Family Church, 1080 West Roosevelt Road.

Kathleen Guisinger, of Mountain Home, Ark., says what she saw that afternoon in Chicago still haunts her. She and her sister and brother escaped safely, but two of their cousins died.

"Just think of it," said Guisinger, now 60. "You send your healthy child off to school and you never see them again. I can't comprehend that, and yet I saw it happen.

When the first 25 victims were buried at Queen of Heaven Cemetery in suburban Hillside four days after the fire, many of the injured were still in area hospitals. Andreoli, who required 14 skin grafts, wasn't released from St. Anne's Hospital until March 1959. That's when he learned his girlfriend, Beverly Burda, had died.

"Those days were like the Dark Ages -- they tried to keep you in the dark," he said. "Nobody told you anything about the fire or what happened. And because my face was burned they wouldn't even let me have a mirror."

When Andreoli reported back to St. Anne's for physical therapy, his father heard that one girl from the fire was still there, and suggested visiting her. It was Irene Mordarski, whom Andreoli had not known before.

She spent 71/2 months in St. Anne's and had just undergone the first of a number of hip replacements. They became friends, and eventually dated -- awkwardly at first, because fear forced them to sit only by doors and exits at restaurants and theaters. They married in 1967 at Our Lady of the Angels Church.