Kankakee Valley Post, Volume 8, Number 18, DeMotte, Jasper County, 31 March 1938 — Floyd Gibbons [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Floyd Gibbons

ADVENTURERS’ CLUB

HEADLINES FROM THE LIVES OF PEOPLE LIKE YOURSELF!

“The Door of Death' 9

By FLOYD GIBBONS

Famous Headline Hunter

Hello everybody: Well, boys and girls, this is the pay-off. A bird who had an adventure—in church. I’ve always known that Old Lady Adventure was no respecter of persons. Now it seems that she doesn’t respect the cloth either. Henry B. Willson of New York city is the lad who found adventure down at the end of the old sawdust trail. “As a boy,” Henry says, “I had more than my share of particular escapes, but one in particular has left such a scar on my memory as time w'ill never efface. Anything even today, that represents confinement—anything from a small room to a tight collar —throws me into a panic.” Well, there’s a curious reaction. The minute I started reading Hank Willson’s letter—the minute I hit that opening paragraph of his. I wanted to know what sort of a scare it was that would make a man go nuts over a tight collar. And I guess you boys and girls will want to know, too. So here’s the story. Hank Used Kerosene to Start the Fire. Hank was raised—as they say down South—in aAittle village in Georgia that went by the name of Cedartown. And like most kids did in small towns in those days, he worked around at Various odd jobs to earn his spending money. Hank’s dad was the pastor of a church in town, and one winter Hank had the job of taking care of the church furnace. Now there are probably a million ways of starting a fire, but. Hank’s plan was to throw’ a bunch of paper in the furnace, chuck a lot of wood in on top of that, and then saturate the, whole business with kerosene. It’s a darned good w’ay tp get a blaze going quickly, but some horrible things have happened to people who used kerosene too freely in plates where it was never meant to be used. In fact, a very horrible thing DID happen—to Hank. Hank built fires in the old church perhaps two dozen times—always

in that one particular way of his. And then he built one that brought Old Lady Adventure down on him like a ton of bricks. Early one Sunday morning, Hank got up., put on an old sweater, and started out to do his job. He tossed in an armful of crumpled newspapers, and follow’ed that with a couple armfuls of W’ood. He poured the kerosene on, giving the furnace an exceptionally liberal dose. Then, with a box of matches ip one hand, he stuck his head and shoulders in through the furnace door to arrange the w r ood so that it would be sure to take fire quickly. | Caught in a Blazing Trap. So far, everything was all right. But it was the matches that did the damage. You know, when you’ve got a box of matches in your hand, it’s the most natural thing in the world to light one. You do it automatically—absent-mindedly. Well—Hank doesn’t know what got into him, or wTiere his wits were at the moment, but before he knew what he was doing, he had lit a match and—WITH HIS: HEAD AND SHOULDERS STILL STICKING HALFWAY THROUGH (THE FURNACE DOOR—applied that match to the kerosene-soaked wopd and paper. , The fire blazed up in an instant. Hank’s first reaction was to jerk his head and shoulders; back -out of the furnace door. He tried to do jufct that—but it didn’t Hvork. His sweater had caught on the catch of the furnace door, and though he fought like mad to draw back out of this way of the spreading flames, he couldn't work himself free. Hank screamed. But his screams were so muffled by the furnace that no one in the street! heard him. Meanwhile the fire was getting hots, tdr—and closer. Hank’s fpce was beginning to cook. His sweatSy caught fire and broke, into a blaze. Death was leering at- him through tliie flames that licked and lapped at his body. . i “It was the most horrible fate I could imagine,” Hank says. “And it was happening to me.” Fox Terrier Gave the Alarm. About that time, though, Hank became conscious that there was some Sort of commotion going on behind him. A little fox terrier had come Wandering in through the open cellar door, and the dog seemed to know that something was wrong. He started to yelp and whine, and run back and forth between the furnace and the cellar door. Early on a Sunday morning, when no one was about, that yelping little dog might easily have gone unnoticed. But fate had decreed otherwise, it seems, and down the street came an old negro. The old fellow was curious to see what strange happenings would make a dog act so at a time when most dogs are asleep, and he stuck his head in the cellar door. • That old fellow’ got the shock of his life. For what he saw w r as a furnace burning merrily, and a half portion of an eight-year-old boy sticking put of the door. He grabbed Hank by the legs, yanked him out, and slapped out the fire that w’as consuming his sweater. Hank’s hair was all burned off, and his face and hands were in a well-cooked condition. Two minutes more, and it wouldn’t have been any use bothering with him. That’s why he doesn’t like confinement. Even a tight collar reminds him of that furnace door. Copyright.—WNU Service.

The Fire Blazed Up on the Instant.