Where There’s Smoke…

By “Bill”
Austin, Texas, USA

I opened the door to the back stairs from the kitchen of the house where I lived in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1975. I smelled smoke. This wasn’t your ordinary somebody’s-cooking-burgers-on-the-grill kind of smoke.

As a reporter, I’d stood across the street from enough house fires with my camera and notebook to know what I was smelling. There was a structural fire nearby, and maybe I was in it. I went down the stairs and opened the outside door. The smell got stronger, but the smoke wasn’t heavy enough to see and I couldn’t see anything near the house.

I went back upstairs and dialed the fire dispatcher. He put out a “still alarm,” which included the engine company, to a couple of blocks from where I guessed the fire was. I pulled out my camera in case I could get some pictures from my window.

My police scanner radio was on, and I heard the police dispatcher, Jimmy, send cars 1 and 4 from all the way downtown. This was 2 and 6 district, and I realized that the officer wouldn’t know about the construction that had been progressing down Russell Street. There was a BIG hole in the street — maybe 20 feet deep and that wide from curb to curb — where they had been replacing pipes.

Then I saw the blue and white police car crest the hill on Elm Street. He was moving! And going straight for the big pit. I dialed 9-1-1: “Don’t talk, just listen. Tell Jimmy to tell 1 and 4 not to go down Russell Street! There’s a BIG hole in the street!” 1 and 4 was now a half block away from the corner. It took about 80 feet for the message to get from his ears to his brain and then to his brake foot. Just as he was rounding the corner, he locked ’em up. He came to a stop about 15 feet from the barricades, and another couple of feet beyond that, the pit. He paused for a moment to look at his alternative fate, then backed up and went to the next cross street to get to the fire.

I took my notebook and hoofed it over to the fire, where the excitement was pretty much over. The fire was out. Somebody had lit trash on the back stairs of a wood-frame apartment building. I’d seen several of them lost due to fire; usually, by the time anybody noticed, they were fully involved. This time, due to the early report, it was knocked down right away, and there was a suspect in custody. Apparently, she was settling a grudge.

So if you lived on Blossom Street or were on the job in 1 and 4 that night, you may know part of this story. You probably never knew what great pictures I could have gotten from my window that night, but it never seemed to me like I had a choice.

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