Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 41, Number 16, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 November 1908 — Delaney Martin in Burning Building [ARTICLE]

Delaney Martin in Burning Building

Delaney Martin, formerly a Rensselaer boy, but for some years a resident of Indianapolis, where he is the | president of tbe Halmar Coal Co., was caught with hundreds of others occu- j pying offices in the 11 Story Neave building at Cincinnati Wednesday in a fire trap. Delaney’s offices are on the 9th floor of that building and a fire was started on tbe 6th floor by an explosion of chemicals and it raged with great fury for a time, and all those above the sixth floor rushed up ! the stairways to the 11th floor and there hung out of the windows. Many of the occupants, especially the girls employed as type writers, were quite badly burned, and Delaney secured considerable notoriety by taking his young lady type writer around tbe waist and making their escape by means of a fire escape ladder. Delaney’s mother, Mrs. C. D. Martin, is visiting in Rensselaer, having been here for several weeks. Another of her sons, Robert L. Martin, is tbe freight agent of the M. K. & T. railroad at Cincinnati, and he wrote his mother of the fire, also sending a eopy of the Cincinnati, Times-Star, with an illustrated and extended front page description of the fire. Fortunately the flames were extinguished before serious damage was done to the property of the coal company, in their haste to reach a place of safety they had left their books and accounts out of the safe and had the building been destroyed it would have been a serious loss to both of the Martin boys, as together they hold |IO,OOO of the stock of the Halmar Coal Co.