(WBBM NEWSRADIO) – Friday marked the 65th anniversary of the fire at a Chicago parochial school, Our Lady of Angels, in which 92 children and three Catholic nuns perished.
Survivor Ron Sarno, who was in fourth grade that day, remembers the event clearly.
“Suddenly, I heard a girl scream at the back of the class and I turned around. I’m looking. There was black smoke coming in,” he recalled to WBBM Newsradio.
Sarno says Sister Seraphica Kelley tried to calm the 57 children in his classroom. She went to the front of the class and directed them to pray.
“Some of the girls just ran up to the nun and clung on to her,” he said.
Chaos erupted in the room, as some students climbed on desks. Others, including Sarno, ran to the windows to try to escape the thick smoke that was choking them.
It was there he found himself next to his 9-year old sister, Jo Anne.
“I suggested that we might have to jump out of the second-story window, and she wasn’t exactly for that,” Sarno said.
They got separated. Sarno said he was either pushed or jumped out a window and dropped 25 feet to the ground.
His sister and 27 other classmates, along with Sister Seraphica, died. Sarno’s older brother, Billie, was in eighth grade and also died in the fire.
Outside, he said he saw that the roof had caved into the classroom he had just left.
He noticed students who were bloody and burned sitting outside a nearby candy store. He wanted to get away, Sarno said, and started to walk to his home a block away.
He had suffered a burn to his shin, possibly from a hot radiator in his classroom.
Years later, Sarno said he turned to drugs and alcohol as a way to cope with the event before joining AA and becoming sober 36 years ago.
“That was how I dealt with all this anger, fear, self-pity, guilt,” the 75-year-old Wheaton resident says.
He went to St. Patrick’s High School, Wright College and a business college before starting a clothing business and later a restaurant furniture business. He retired three years ago.
On Wednesday, he and about 10 other survivors from his Class of ’63 got together for lunch at Tom’s Steak House in Melrose Park.
Sarno says he will join others at Our Lady of the Angels Mission at noon Sunday for a memorial Mass.
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