Winecoff Reporter Honored

Winecoff fire eyewitness Celestine Sibley was added today to the roster of Georgia Women of Achievement in a ceremony at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia. The author of over 10,000 newspaper columns and nearly thirty books worked for The Atlanta Constitution from 1941 until her death in 1999.
She was called to the fire scene before dawn and then wrote about what she had seen. Like everyone else there, she carried the disturbing memories with her for the rest of her life. In 1993 she wrote The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's book review of The Winecoff Fire: The Untold Story of America's Deadliest Hotel Fire. Click here for that review.

Grady Hospital Interns Join the Fight

Two Grady Hospital doctors dug deep for courage as they joined the dangerous rescue efforts along the Winecoff Hotel's back side. Doctors Bithel Wall and Joseph Hooper were pictured in this Atlanta Constitution article published two days after the fire. Ladder rescues across the smoky alleyway were treacherous undertakings for these two interns and others like C. E. Burton (photo) who assisted dozens to safety. The interns' story is told beginning on page 113 of The Winecoff Fire.

Awestruck

Atlanta Journal photographer Bill Wilson captured this photo on Sunday December 8th, 1946 - one day after the fire. (Click on photo to enlarge it.)

Medical College of Georgia Magazine Article

The Medical College of Georgia has published in its quarterly magazine an article on the extraordinary life of Grady Hospital Nurse Betty Jean Tarrant including her vital role in the emergency response to the Winecoff fire. The article by Christine Hurley Deriso is here.

Sworn Statement Discovered

An original 1946 copy of a sworn statement given by Winecoff fire survivor Paul Lankford has been discovered. Lankford, 26, of Birmingham, Alabama was an Army Air Force veteran of World War II and was in Atlanta working for the Southern Natural Gas Co. He was asleep in room 324 of the hotel when the fire broke out and was one the first to discover it.
In the weeks that followed, he was one of many asked to give sworn statements to insurance investigators.
His son Wayne recently made the find: his dad's carbon copy of the statement. The statement is here. Paul Lankford's story is told beginning on page 21 of The Winecoff Fire.

Grady Hospital Nurse Faces Grim Duty

Winecoff Fire reader Rusty Tanton has discovered that his own great aunt played an important role in the emergency response to the Winecoff Hotel fire. Betty Jane Tarrant was a night supervisor at Atlanta's Grady Hospital when the alert was sounded, "be prepared - the Winecoff Hotel is on fire." She tells her story to Rusty in this explicit five minute video interview. Click here for the interview.

A Pulitzer Prize Winner Passes

Pulitzer Prize winning amateur photographer Arnold Hardy has died. He was the Georgia Tech student who brought the most memorable image of the Winecoff Hotel fire to the world.
Hardy passed away December 5th from complications following hip surgery. His funeral was held, fittingly, on December 7th, the sixty-first anniversary of the fire that brought him a Pulitzer Prize -- and a sense of consternation that it was earned in the midst of tragedy.

For more than forty years the woman in the famous photo remained unidentified and was presumed to have died from her fall. In 1993 the book The Winecoff Fire revealed that she was a badly injured survivor, Daisy McCumber.

Hardy was a mechanical engineer and founder of Hardy Manufacturing, which still makes medical X-Ray equipment.
He was proud of his photo. He was most proud, however, of the important role it played in shaping public opinion to improve fire safety codes worldwide. He was 85.
Arnold Hardy: A useful life - defined by a moment that mattered.

To read the Associated Press obituary click here

To Have And To Hold

The re-development of the old Winecoff Hotel necessitated the removal of some of the original bricks from the 1913 structure. Always alert, Atlanta Fire Department Captain Bill May managed to recover a few of them before they were removed from the re-construction site. He made sure one of them went to a very special person. Here is that man's thank you note to Captain May:

Captain Bill May,
Thank you for sharing a brick from the Winecoff Hotel. The Winecoff fire is that moment in history that totally turned my life. It was a powerful moment to hold a memento from the structure. I appreciate the effort you and Allen have given to make this happen.

In 1946 I was a three year old child and was staying with my parents in the Winecoff the night it burned. My parents did not survive but I was able to land on a fire net as I fell with my dad. An Atlanta fireman, Rick Roberts was one of the men holding the net. I have met and visited with Mr. Roberts a couple of times and it has been a rich experience. We were on the 10th floor and I understand that height meets or exceeds the fall distance that is compatible with survival.

I have no memory of the fire but have gathered many, many stories over the years. In the past few years even more details have come to light. We have photos, videos, the "Winecoff Fire" book, personal conversation and visits to the site. A brick from the structure is a tangible object. It is a powerful visual of a moment in history.

I have recently started to relate the story of the Winecoff to various groups in Kansas, including fire protection engineers and civic groups. It is amazing that people so far from Atlanta are so interested in an event that happened so long ago. The brick is a powerful image for the audience. Thank you again for this piece of history.

Please feel free to share this note and my appreciation with the Atlanta Fire Department.

Sincerely yours,
Robert Cox, M.D.

Captain Bill May is the host of Firefighter 411. http://www.firefighter411.com/

Another Unsung Hero of the Winecoff Hotel Fire Has Been Discovered!

John McKuhen, 80 years old and now living in Florida, was a 20-year-old military policeman stationed at Ft. McPherson in Atlanta when he and five other MPs were called to the Winecoff well before daybreak on Saturday December 7, 1946. They were assigned to recover victims from the still smoldering rooms of the hotel.
Working in pairs, McKuhen and the MPs made trip after trip up the winding stairway – at times, through knee deep water coming down the stairs. He recalls firefighters lining the stairway assisting people up and down the treacherous stairway.
“I guess we started from the third floor – they may have had the third floor cleared – from the fourth floor up, I remember,” he said.
“We’d go into a room ... of course we couldn’t go in until the firemen had put the fire out down that particular hallway, and as they would get the fire out and give us a signal, then we’d go in and start bringing the people out and that’s the way it worked all the way up.”
“I remember one instance, I think it was the tenth floor. I went up with a fireman on that trip. It was down the hall, I don’t remember what the room number was but I remember the room was on the right-hand side of the hall. We went into this room, and a man and his wife and two children, a boy and a girl, probably in their early teens, and the children were laying on the bed on their stomach with their heads laying toward their parents and had their hands in the position of prayer. The parents were knelt by the bed with their hands in the position of prayer. I assume that's the way that they perished,” said McKuhen.
“That's the one thing that really stood with me. It was an experience that you never forget.”
Following the Winecoff fire, building codes around the world were modernized and upgraded to enhance fire safety. Each victim recovered had a silent message for the world: "This needn't happen to you." Because there were so many of them, 119, their silent messages were at last heard: in Congress, State Legislatures and Parliaments.
John McKuhen was discharged from the Army ten days after the fire. He re-enlisted ten months later, again as a military policeman, and served another twenty years.
“Being in the military police, you see plane crashes and car crashes and so forth, but I've never seen nothing that would affect you like the Winecoff fire.”

After 60 Years: A New Eyewitness Steps Forward

Dear Mr. Goodwin,

I read your book on the Winecoff fire when it first came out and have wondered how to get in touch with you ever since. I was present on the street on that terrible night. I had been to a high school dance and afterward had driven downtown to meet some friends at an all-night restaurant for a late night breakfast. On my way home, as I drove up the street beside the hotel, I heard horrifying screams coming from the alley behind the hotel. A small crowd was gathering and I parked the car to see what was happening. At that moment I heard the sirens of the approaching fire trucks.

As the firefighters were getting organized it became apparent that they did not have the manpower to handle the nets and they asked for volunteers from bystanders. I was one who did volunteer and was there throughout the night and even assisted in carrying out bodies the next morning.

At sixty years removed my recollections are just a confused blur highlighted by a few snapshot memories. I cannot reconstruct a time line of where I was or how long I spent in any given activity or how much as just a spectator. I did identify several incidents in which I was actively involved, particularly the net jump of the man I now know was named Alvin Millman. I don't know how many men are supposed to man those nets but I do know we didn't have enough. The net did break Mr. Millman's fall but he hit the ground pretty hard. I was surprised and gratified that he got up and walked away apparently uninjured.

From my recollection your account of the events on the street was stunningly accurate, so much so that I almost wished I had not read your book. I found it most unsettling as you can imagine.

Reliving the events of that awful night is something that I approach reluctantly. As an eight year old child I was rescued from a house fire by a neighbor who caught me as I jumped from a second story window. That fire took the lives of my mother and my younger brother. I do believe that was the cause of my eagerness to give assistance when asked and of my staying through the night. I believe it also contributed to the deep depression that enveloped me for several days following the Winecoff tragedy. But, thanks be, the seventeen year old psyche is resilient.
Jonathan Phelps

Large Crowd Attends Winecoff Program

Allen B. Goodwin and Sam Heys gave a lecture on The Winecoff Fire: The Untold Story of America's Deadliest Hotel Fire on Sunday March 5, 2006 as part of a special program at the Margaret Mitchell House & Museum in Atlanta.


The event also included a book signing and began with a reception at 3 p.m. The lecture followed at 4.

The program was part of the Fourth Annual Phoenix Files: A Citywide Celebration of Living Landmarks, sponsored by the Atlanta Preservation Center and 19 Preservation Partners. The award-winning, weeklong event -- March 4-12 -- spotlighted Atlanta's historic sites with 56 events at 30 venues. The Winecoff Hotel building, built in 1913, still stands at the corner of Peachtree and Ellis streets in downtown Atlanta.

The Winecoff Fire: The Untold Story of America's Deadliest Hotel Fire, published in 1993 by Longstreet Press, was critically acclaimed by a dozen Southern newspapers and went into three printings. It is the story of the victims and survivors of the 1946 Winecoff Hotel fire and of the botched investigation that followed the fire, which remains the worst hotel fire in U.S. history with 119 deaths. In the aftermath of the fire, fire codes were changed throughout America.

The program drew a crowd of more than 140 people. Following the comments of the authors, those in attendance with a connection to the fire introduced themselves and spoke briefly..

Among those attending were two Pulitzer Prize winners: Arnold Hardy, who took the famous photo of a woman leaping from the burning hotel, and George Goodwin, an Atlanta Journal reporter who witnessed and covered the fire. Also on hand were two Winecoff survivors - Bob Cox of Hays, Kansas, and Bob Irvin of Atlanta.

Family members of the following Winecoff victims attended - Patsy Uphold, Christy Hinson, Mary Minor, Earnest Weatherly, Mary Stinespring, and Fleming and Grace Winecoff.

Family members of the following survivors were also in attendance - Dorothy Moen Cox, Nelson Thatch, Mildred Johnson, Reid and Cary Horne, and Michael Conners. The daughter of Winecoff firefighter Boots Pittman was present as well.

The program was videotaped and may soon be available at nominal cost from winecoff.org.