Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 35, Number 146, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 January 1904 — More About the Great Calamity. [ARTICLE]

More About the Great Calamity.

From little Selma Leopold, the only one of her party of five who •scaped with their lives, it is learned that Mrs. Wolf and her party of four children were in what shou'd J>,ave been about the most favorable part of the building to escape. They were in the very last row of ■eats on the lowest or ground floor, and consequently only a little ways fr m the outer entrance. When the fire first started, Eddie Foy, the chief actor in the play I came to the front of the stage, and asked the people to be calm and deliberate, assuring them that there was no danger. Ordinarily this would have been a wise action, for the usual danger in such cases is from a sudden panic rather than from the fire. But in this case, owing to the great wave of flame and smoke and suffocating gas which swept across the theater a few seconds later, the advice to be calm and deliberate perhaps ’■ cost more lives than it saved. It ■eems to have been fatal to Mrs. Wolf and three of her charges, in any case. For as soon as Foy ■poke, instead of hurrying out, as ■he might have done, she stayed to put on her own and the children’s wraps. Selma, however.wbo sat in the seat next to the aisle, declared she would go at once, and without waiting for hat or wraps, made a start. She was thus pretty

nearly in front of the crowd already rushing for the door. Mrs. Wolf started soon after, but pretty soon Selma saw her tripped or pushed down, and that was the last she ever saw of her or the other children alive. Selma herself fell once, but luoki’y it was near a stair railing and by catching hold of the railing she got on her feet, and almost before she knew " it she was pushed through the doors and out into street. She < soon asked a stranger to show her the way to the Palais Royal glove store on State st., where her cousin * Belle Smith works, and this he did. She did not learn of the fate of her companions until the next morning.

Mrs. Wo'f’s body, and that of little Alice Kaufman, were found by Mr. Wolf’s brother at St Luke’s ‘ hospital. The statement that she was not dead when first found,-and died at the hospital, seems to have been a mistake, based probably on the fact that she was found at the hospital. But all the hospital near the center were turned into morgues, and' many bodies carried to them. . Pauline Moosler’s body was found about noon Thursday, at an undertaker’s far out on Wabash avenue, near 39th street, by Moses Leopold and A. R. Hopkins. The several parties who were looking for her had divided and part looked in one part of the city and part in another. Every undertaking establishment and hospital within two of three miles of the theater had been brought into use to accommodate the nearly 600 dead bodies, hence the search, for any particular one, was a great undertaking. Most of the bodies were badly burned, some of them so much so as to be totally unrecognizable; but in the esse with Mrs Wolf and her charges, the marks of fire are totally absent. This was no doubt due to their nearness to the outer doors. When the panic started they no doubt were thrown down and so many others fell upon them that they were protected from the fire, and killed by crushing and suffocation, the latter be ing the principal cause. .