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3. Serving through Education
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66 3 Serving through Education O N M O N DAY, D E C E M B E R , , most of the 1,668 students attending Chicago’s Our Lady of the Angels School were readjusting to classroom activities after the four-day Thanksgiving holiday. Their teachers, knowing how difficult it could be to return their students’ attention to school after a long weekend, had prepared a day centered on academic pursuits. Eighthgrade teachers Sisters Davidis and Mary “Hurricane” Helaine had a busy day planned for their 126 students, sixty-two and sixty-four in each class. Other sisters were thinking about Christmas, only twenty-four days away, and Sister Mary Clare Therese Champagne was getting ready to place new Christmas decorations around her fifth-grade classroom. All in all, it was a normal Monday at Our Lady of the Angels.1 After lunch, children returned to their classrooms for the last two hours of the school day. Around 2:30 p.m., custodian Jim Raymond saw smoke coming from the school’s northeast corner. Further investigation revealed that a fire had broken out on the basement level near a stairway. Raymond, along with others who observed smoke and flames emanating from the building, began to call frantically for help. Barbara Glowacki, the owner of a nearby candy store, ran to alert the fire department. Assured that help was on the way, she returned to the school, only to discover the flames had spread. Looking up at the second floor, she realized the windows were full of children screaming, “Get me out of here! Catch me!” Their teacher, Sister Mary Seraphica, screamed for her to call the fire department. Glowacki assured her help was on the way, and then asked why the teacher had not led her class out of the building. Sister Mary Seraphica answered, “We can’t. We’re trapped.”2 The Chicago newspapers reported the grim news to their readers the following day: many had escaped with no more than minor injuries, but eighty-seven children and three sisters were dead; ninety children and three sisters were injured.3 Some had been burned so badly it was difficult to identify them. Sister Mary Seraphica was identified by her cincture, a cord tied around her waist, which was numbered 2764, her number in the community , as well as by a lock of red hair that belonged to the student who had Serving through Education 67 been lying on top of her when they were found together in their classroom. The religious medal worn by Sister Mary St. Canice Lyng, who died along with twelve of her students, was used to determine her identity. Our Lady of the Angels principal, Sister St. Florence, survived, but could not stop reliving the events of the day. “I don’t think I’ll ever lose the picture of those children who jumped out the windows,” she told another sister.4 Monsignor William McManus praised the sisters during their funeral liturgy , referring to them as “professional women and experienced teachers,” but he did not remember them by name. They “would want to be remembered ,” McManus claimed, “simply as the BVM sisters who died with their pupils in the fire.”5 The deceased women were not only primarily identified by their membership in a religious community, but the survivors were not expected to speak out as individuals about their part in evacuating students from their classrooms. Sister Davidis, who survived the fire but suffered burns on her hands and face, did speak at a news conference on the day she was released from the hospital. After she discovered smoke spreading throughout the building, Sister Davidis instructed the boys to place their arithmetic books along the crack in the door to keep the smoke from seeping into the room, moved students closer to the windows, and prayed the rosary with them. As the students looked out the window, one boy decided he could jump from the window to a first-floor roof and then to the ground. Other students followed his lead until they were all out of the classroom. As Sister Davidis descended a ladder, she looked back. “With a voice broken in grief, she confessed, ‘That’s when I saw the little one, the one I missed.’”6 Beverly Ann Burda had been unable to escape from the classroom. Whether they publicly spoke about their experiences or sought solace in their religious community, the BVMs at Our Lady of the Angels carried the...