CHICAGO (AP) -- Seven-year-old Dan Taglia hoped students were getting ice cream when he heard the fire alarm from his basement classroom on Dec. 1, 1958.
It was too late for a fire drill, and the nuns wouldn't send the children out coatless on such a cold day.
"But what does a third-grader know?" recalled Taglia, now of Katy, Texas.
On the first floor at Our Lady of the Angels School, where Mary Ellen Hobik was taking an English test, the nun in charge of her fourth-grade class dismissed the alarm as a mistake.
"I was glad, because I knew I was doing well on the test," said Mary Ellen Reeves, now an elementary school principal in Addison, Ill.
But the alarm was real.
And tragically delayed.
Fire and toxic smoke engulfed the elementary and middle school on Chicago's West Side with terrifying swiftness. In the end, 92 students and three nuns died.
Some of the victims burned to death. Others died of smoke inhalation or were trampled. Still others were killed when they jumped or were pushed or thrown from windows.
The disaster threw the city into mourning. Messages of condolence came from around the world, including from Pope John XXIII and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. It forced an almost immediate reform of school building and safety codes in Chicago and around the nation.
And it left deep physical and emotional scars that remain 50 years later.
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By the time the alarm rang, heat was shattering the glass transoms over classroom doors, admitting a deadly mix of smoke and gas. The fire had invaded the shallow attic space above the second-floor rooms, sending burning ceiling tiles onto the students below.
Dense smoke and superheated air had made the second-floor hallways impassable.
For many, the only way out was through the windows -- 25 feet above the paved schoolyard. Horrified neighbors came running with ladders, but they were too short.
In Room 209, 13-year-old Gerry Andreoli followed the orders of Sister Mary Davidis Devine to stuff textbooks into the cracks around the door, but the air soon became unbreathable. Andreoli climbed to the windowsill and jumped to the top rung of a ladder two feet below. The skin had burned off his hands, so he skidded down on his back, catching the rungs with his heels.
"I don't know now how I did it," said Andreoli, now a chiropractor in Bloomingdale, Ill.
Across the hall, in Room 210, Irene Mordarski, 13, couldn't reach the ladder. An explosive blast of air knocked her off the windowsill, and she fell to the asphalt below, shattering her pelvis.
When someone ran to a small shop across the street to phone the Chicago Fire Department, they mistakenly gave the wrong address, losing precious minutes.
Once firefighters arrived with hoses and long ladders, they had no choice but to reach as far as they could into the burning classrooms, grab children and toss them down -- hoping someone below would catch them.
Kathleen Guisinger, of Mountain Home, Ark., says what she saw that afternoon in Chicago still haunts her. She and her sister and brother escaped safely, but two of their cousins died.
"Just think of it," said Guisinger, now 60. "You send your healthy child off to school and you never see them again. I can't comprehend that, and yet I saw it happen."
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In retrospect, conditions at the school appear to have been a disaster waiting to happen.
It was in the midst of the Baby Boom, when classroom overcrowding was the national norm, school construction was largely unregulated and safety features were primitive, at best.
The students at Our Lady of the Angels were returning from their Thanksgiving break that Monday morning. Some were absent because of colds and flu, but more than 1,400 filed into the main school building. Another 200 went to an annex for the youngest pupils.
OLA, as it was called by the students, had been built in stages beginning in 1904. By 1958, there were two large, two-story wings set over an aboveground English basement and connected by the annex. The ceilings were high, meaning that the second-floor windows were 25 feet above the surrounding pavement.
The school's exterior was brick, but the floors inside were of highly varnished wood. The narrow wooden stairs were covered with asphalt tile. The construction, which would be unthinkable today, was completely legal under grandfather clauses in Chicago's school building code of the time.
"Varnished wood with years worth of wax residue, wooden stairs with flammable tiles ... they may just as well have built it out of tinder and kindling wood," said one survivor, Lt. Michael Mason of the Downers Grove Fire Department, who was a 6-year-old first-grader at the time of the fire.
Investigators later learned that the fire began in a cardboard trash barrel near one end of the basement.
It smoldered for a half an hour or more and almost suffocated itself. But the day was cold, and heat from the barrel caused a nearby window to shatter. Fresh oxygen revived the fire, which quickly spread to the stairway.
The first-floor door kept it away from the classrooms there, but it spread unchecked into the second floor and the attic.
To make matters worse, there was just one steel fire escape but it was locked. The fire alarm was not connected to the Chicago Fire Department's system, and its switches were six feet off the floor -- too high for most students to reach.
Later, investigators said there were signs the fire had been set, either accidentally or deliberately, but city officials and the Archdiocese of Chicago tried hard to avoid assigning blame.
Three years later, police in suburban Cicero arrested a 13-year-old for a series of arson fires there, and discovered that he was a former OLA student. Under intensive questioning by a polygraph operator, he admitted setting the school fire, but later recanted. He was never charged, and has since died.
In the year after the fire, 16,500 older school buildings across the nation underwent various forms of fireproofing, and the National Fire Protection Association estimates that 68 percent of U.S. communities followed Chicago's lead in adopting new school fire codes.
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When the first 25 victims were buried at Queen of Heaven Cemetery in suburban Hillside four days after the fire, many of the injured were still in area hospitals.
Andreoli, who required 14 skin grafts, wasn't released from St. Anne's Hospital until March 1959. That's when he learned his girlfriend, Beverly Burda, had died.
"Those days were like the Dark Ages - they tried to keep you in the dark," he said.
"Nobody told you anything about the fire or what happened. And because my face was burned they wouldn't even let me have a mirror."
When Andreoli reported back to St. Anne's for physical therapy, his father heard that one girl from the fire was still there, and suggested visiting her. It was Irene Mordarski, whom Andreoli had not known before.
She spent 7 1/2 months in St. Anne's and had just undergone the first of a number of hip replacements. They became friends, and eventually dated - awkwardly at first, because fear forced them to sit only by doors and exits at restaurants and theaters. They married in 1967 at Our Lady of the Angels Church.
Other survivors complain about the policy of silence, and about the simplistic tone church officials took in consoling the families of the dead children.
Several remember a priest at a Christmas service saying, "Baby Jesus really wanted to have a great birthday party, so he gathered those special children around him."
"Saying that God took the good and innocent children is a wonderful way to make those who were grieving feel OK," said Taglia. "But it makes the kids who survived think, `What am I, (expletive)?'"
Taglia got out unscathed but said he felt years of guilt because he told a distraught neighbor he had seen his daughter safe on the school grounds.
"I didn't know that she had gone back inside for a sibling and had died in there," he said.
Taglia's two sisters also attended the school, and when his mother heard the mounting death toll on her car radio while returning home from work, she assumed at least one of her children had died.
"We were all safe and Danny was already sitting at the kitchen table having cocoa when she pulled up," recalled his older sister, Joanne Franzone, of Sheridan, Ill. "She locked herself in the car and kept yelling, `Which one?' We all had to come out on the porch and show we were safe before she would open the car door."
"We all felt awful for months," Franzone said. "There was so much guilt."
Guisinger said she understands how the fire and its aftermath could test -- even destroy -- the faith of survivors. But Guisinger said she kept her faith despite one more test.
Several weeks after the fire, the church distributed checks to reimburse the children for their destroyed coats and textbooks, and she went to the rectory with her father, Frank Galante, to pick up their check. In the car outside, he suffered a fatal heart attack. He was 54.
"I consoled myself by thinking that God needed a good man to keep some control over all those little angels," she said.
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