Stop 32 – Major Fires of the Twentieth Century
THE MARCUS HOTEL FIRE
At half past two in the morning on January thirteenth, nineteen thirty-six, a guest at the Marcus Hotel reported a fire. The hotel and the Nelson Building next door stood at Sixth Street and Central Avenue. That was the very same corner where the great fire of eighteen sixty had started, a fire that destroyed forty-one buildings.
This fire seems to have begun in the basement of the Nelson Building, though its cause was never determined. The steam siren sounded four times, and shortly after the third blast, nearly every volunteer firefighter in town had arrived. By then, the hotel's thirty permanent and overnight guests had been evacuated. Some escaped with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
At its peak, flames shot fifty feet above the building, and a strong northeast wind carried embers for blocks. It was bitterly cold that night. Hose stands were set up so the volunteers wouldn't have to hold the lines as long, but they had to be moved again and again as new hot spots flared up. One firefighter, George Bader, suffered a concussion when a hose line whipped out of control.
The fire was under control by four-thirty that morning, but crews kept water on the ruins until five o'clock that evening. Between the bitter cold and the freezing spray, thirteen firemen, Bader among them, were approved by the city for workman's compensation for their illnesses and injuries.
In the photograph on this panel, three of the men who fought that fire, Charles Gude, Ralph Dillman, and Bill Utterback, stand in front of the hotel's ice-coated east door.
THE WESSEL CLOTHING STORE FIRE
At six thirty-two on the evening of August twenty-sixth, nineteen sixty-four, fire was discovered at the Wessel Clothing Store, at nine eleven Central Avenue. The heat was so fierce that the store's plate-glass front windows blew out before the fire department even arrived. Within forty minutes, the two-story building had collapsed into rubble, and the fire had spread to the Berthold Building next door.
Fire departments from thirteen neighboring towns came to help, and at the height of the fight, twenty-five hose lines were in use. The heat was so intense that even buildings across the street had their display windows shattered, letting smoke pour inside.
The damage was enormous for its day: three hundred thousand dollars at Wessel's, ninety-two thousand at Lima's Army Store, four thousand at the Hotel Grand, and five thousand at the Otoe County National Bank.
Among the men pictured fighting the fire are Whoopie Landis, Gaskill, Max Moyer, and Charles Gude. That's the same Charles Gude you saw standing in front of the Marcus Hotel twenty-eight years earlier. Another photo shows the aftermath, with Wessel's manager, Ron Gladstone.
THE 1961 SEAGRAVE PUMPER
In nineteen sixty-one, the City Council bought a new Seagrave pumper for twenty-four thousand, six hundred twenty-three dollars, replacing the department's nineteen thirty-eight Seagrave. This Model five thirty-one could pump a thousand gallons a minute, driven by a V-twelve engine rated at two hundred fifty-one horsepower.
It carried a three-hundred-gallon water tank and a great deal of hose: fifteen hundred feet of two-and-a-half-inch hose, four hundred feet of inch-and-a-half, and a hundred fifty feet of booster hose. On top of that were three ladders: a twenty-five-foot extension, a fourteen-foot roof ladder, and a ten-footer. It also carried nozzles, axes, pike poles, lanterns, and hand tools.
The photographs show Paid Drivers Ken Wiles and Ralph Dillman with Fire Chief Otto Berthold, and one shows this very pumper at work at the Wessel fire in nineteen sixty-four.