Remembrances of the Angels by John Kuenster

“Careful where you walk,” a firefighter told Leffingwell. Shielded by the grass were countless horrors. And where was the plane? Where the hell was the plane? The huge field was scorched and smoking, but there was no wreckage.” All the police and fire radios had completely calmed down. “None of the fire crews or ambulance teams were running. “I couldn’t make any sense of what was there,” he said. The DC-10 crashed after takeoff from O’Hare International Airport. Not so much the scenes of horror, but the awful fact that some parents had a harder time identifying their badly burned children because their jewelry had been stolen from their bodies between the scene and the morgue.Īn aerial view of the scene where American Airlines Flight 191 crashed on May 25, 1979.

“These things have come back to me,” agreed Remsberg, now 87, retired and living in Wilmette. “I think of the fire quite often,” she wrote in Kuenster’s book. Wille, who died in 2019 after a distinguished career in Chicago journalism, including a stint as editorial page editor at the Sun-Times, remembered being “embarrassed and ashamed” to quiz the dead girl’s parents, but also noted how much they wanted to talk about their child. “It was the first story of such tragic proportions that I had worked on.” “It was a traumatic experience,” wrote Lois Wille, in John Kuenster’s “Remembrances of the Angels,” recalling how she was a young Chicago Daily News reporter sent to interview a couple whose daughter died earlier that day in the fire. Covering such stories can take a toll on reporters.

Ninety-two children and three nuns died in the fire. Men were holding them back, but they were screaming, ‘Where are they? Where are they?’” Women in the crowd were hysterical, their faces twisted and wet with tears. After getting a good overall picture of the scene, I headed for the phone.

Police were struggling to keep a huge crowd of adults and children back of the fire lines. At the back of the wing, flames still were leaping up. Smoke was pouring out of every window, casting a light fog over the ground area and a dense pall above. “The north side of the building looked like a cereal box in an incinerator. “I ran around to the front of the school,” Remsberg wrote to his parents the next day. 1 when his desk told him to hurry over to Humboldt Park, to Our Lady of the Angels School. In 1958, the Sun-Times and Chicago’s three other major daily newspapers were supplied with spot news by the famed City News Bureau, whose Charles Remsberg - a 22-year-old intern who’d graduated from Medill that June - was at Traffic Court on the afternoon of Dec.

Remembrances of the Angels by John Kuenster