This article appeared in the Fall, 1993 edition of The Enterprise. ©1993, The Berea Area Historical Society. Berea Fire of 1943 OCTOBER 5, 1943 by Reynard G. Bradley In this, the 50th Anniversary of the Berea Fire of 1943, it seems appropriate that the clearest possible picture of what happened that Tuesday afternoon is presented. Most old-timers know what happened after the fire was discovered in the rear of Milady's Dress Shop. I'd like to present what happened before the fire was discovered. Physical Layout The physical layout of the river and the stores is important in understanding what occurred. Rocky River was channeled behind the stores on Front Street from Factory to Center. By that I mean the eastern bank, at least, was defined by a stone wall. As I remember the wall was about 4 to 6 feet up from the river bed. This wall and the basement walls of the buildings defined a narrow strip of land. I imagine during the spring rains, the river would overflow, but that October the river was a only a couple feet deep and the land was a foot or two above the river. Each of the stores along that section of the river had rear walls that at least came down to this strip of land or a few feet farther to the sandstone. Fisher's had a basement where the furnace and other facilities were that was above this level. I would estimate the river bank at this point was two stories below the street level. None of the stores had direct openings to the river bank. Many of the stores had back rooms that were cantilevered over the bank. The only ones I remember right now that had the back room extensions were Fishers, the Berea Fruit Market, and Gray's Candy Kitchen where we could make a nickel Pepsi last about an hour and a half. Fishers had a small back porch at the basement level. It was a narrow wooden structure attached to the back wall. It was a few feet wide and maybe half the width of the store. It was how we got down to the furnace and the facilities in the basement. It was about a story above the river bank. Milady's Dress Shop which was directly south of Fisher's had a solid cement back wall with a little, wooden trap door at the basement level. The door was intact and unburned after the fire. Access to the river bank was difficult. The only way I know of and the one I used was a steel ladder from the back room of the Fruit Market. I went down to the river bank on that ladder and came back up on it. At this point I think a list of the stores involved and their locations is in order. I got this list out of Holzworth's history of Berea. I think it is in order from south to north starting about Factory St. Roy's Market Deluxe Tailor Shop Berea Fruit Market Isaly's Milady's Dress Shop Fisher's Cash Market Art's Men Shop Dick's Oasis Holzworth says this is the list of stores either burned down or were severely damaged. The Problem That Started the Whole Thing Fisher's got its order from the Cleveland Warehouse on Monday afternoon. Those of us who worked there part time always got to work on Monday and Tuesday after school. Monday we hauled everything into the backroom and on Tuesday we opened the boxes and put the goods on the shelves. As we opened the boxes, we broke them down and put them in extra large boxes like the ones that toilet paper came in. Some of the large boxes were stored temporarily on the wooden back porch at the basement level. I can't remember whether we put them out on the curb Tuesday night, or whether the manager put them out Wednesday morning. The City picked them up on Wednesday morning. During the summer of '43, the regular manager's vacation replacement was a lady from the other Fisher store in town. It was a little place on the west side of Front Street by Hank's Pool Room, Neubrand's, and across from Beswick's. For some reason she didn't bother to break down the little boxes and put everything on the curb. I don't know why. May well be that one of the guys talked her into it. Regardless of who was responsible, two weeks of boxes ended up on the river bank. Come October of 1943, and Chief Neville is making one of his Fire Prevention Week checks. I thought he was going to have apoplexy when he saw those boxes. He had a couple of pieces of manager's hide before he left. I think we had a week or three days or some such to get rid of the boxes. The manager asked me how I was going to get rid of them. "Who, me?" He suggested we rent a truck and a rowboat. We'd park the truck behind the mill and ferry the boxes across. I thought that would take forever, and I wasn't sure a rowboat would float all the way across the river. With the hindsight that comes with 50 years of pondering this problem, I see now we should have broken the little boxes down, put them in the big ones, and only have had a few dozen big boxes to deal with. We finally decided that I would burn the boxes. He gave me a box of matches from the shelf. His parting words were, "For heaven's sake, be careful." The Event Itself I went south on Front Street to the Fruit Market and down their ladder to the river bank. Approaching the pile of boxes from the south, I was staggered by the size of the pile. It was all the way across the back of Fisher's and tapered from about 4 or 5 feet deep at the back by the wall to single boxes along the river. I cleared a place on the stone wall of the river about in the middle of the pile from north to south. Mistake #1. I should have started the fire at the corner nearest me. I broke down 3-4 boxes and lit them in the cleared space. As they burned I broke down others and threw them on. I was becoming rather nonchalant as I tossed the boxes on. Mistake #2. One of the boxes I casually tossed went across the fire and was touching the main pile on the north. It had to be removed before it caught the whole pile on fire. I chose to get over to that side of the fire by walking through the pile. Mistake #3. I should have gone in the river. I say it was a mistake, because as I walked through the pile, the whole thing slid down onto the fire. The one little box on the north side didn't mean a thing when the whole pile was in the fire. That was when I panicked. Mistake #4. At that point it was still possible to push all the burning stuff into the river. The ecological damage that might have occurred was considerably less that what later happened. I can remember being hysterical. I was laughing insanely. Mrs. S.H. Rennison, who Holzworth says lived over the Cash Market and saw me burning the trash, must have though I was nuts, and I guess at that point I probably was. So here I am on the north side of the fire after climbing through the pile. The fire is raging between me and the ladder at the Fruit Store. I'm stuck. At least I got to watch one of the biggest bon fires I ever saw. The flames from the fire were up against the bottom of the back room. Eventually, the boxes burned themselves out. When they were nearly out, Ron Garlick of the Berea Fire Department appeared on the back porch. Somehow, the porch had not caught fire. Ron had a water tank on his back and a squirter of some sort in his hands. I suppose it is what they used for grass fires. He stood there for quite a while doing absolutely nothing. There was nothing on fire that he could squirt. I believe that Ron in his later years told great stories of how he was fighting flames down there. The kindest way to put Ron's stories into perspective is to tell you of a message on a T-shirt I saw. "The older I get, the better I used to be." I had to stay there on the north side of the fire until it died down and the embers were cool enough to walk through. At this point I went back I walked through the ashes to the Fruit Store and back into Fisher's. Naturally, the place was smoky since the boxes were burned directly under it, but it was not on fire. Everyone was milling around. It was hard to conduct business in the smoke. About 10 or 15 minutes later, someone came in and said the rear of the Dress Shop next door was on fire. Very strange. That store had absolutely no contact with the fire I started on the river bank. They did not have a back room, and the solid cement wall with the wooden door was intact after the fire. How long was it from when I started my fire until the real fire started? The whole pile of trash burned; the trash fire went out; the embers cooled to where I could walk through them; and I was in Fisher's for at least 10 - 15 minutes before the fire started next door. I've never been absolutely certain I started that fire. Aftermath I hung around town for a while watching the firemen. Something thing that really bothered me was the sound that occurred when the firemen would break a plate glass window to get a fire inside. Some of the fire engines parked behind the mill across the river. They put their intakes in the river and covered the back sides of the buildings. In front they had to put pumpers in series. The hydrants along Front St. were all in use, so they went to Seminary St. and pumped from one pumper into another. At least one good thing came out of it. One of the V-12's allowed my cousin, Harold Lampman, to hold one of the hoses. He swears that was where he first got interested in the being in the Fire Department. Berea at least got a good Fire Captain out of the deal. The burned out buildings also contributed to the War Effort. Every time we had scrap metal drive, we'd pry something else loose from one of them. Fisher's had a big old cast iron furnace. I know we got all the doors off of it, but I don't remember if we ever did get the whole thing. A few months later I had to give a deposition to somebody from the State Fire Marshall's Dept and another lawyer. I didn't know who they were. I was a good kid, a senior in High School, and I'd been raised to be polite to people in authority. I told them this same story. The other guy, who turned out to be a lawyer from somebody's Insurance Co (that I wasn't even supposed to be talking to) asked about the wind that day. I said it was from the north. I went into the Army in July of '44. Sometime before the first of Jan. of 1945, I talked to Fisher's lawyer. He raised a big fuss that I had said the wind was from the north. The records at the airport indicated that there was absolutely no wind that day. We were both right. I remember walking home that night down Prospect Street. The heavy black smoke from the fire was going straight up. When it got so high it started to drift south. The edge of it stayed right over me as I walked home. I can't remember what I told my folks. I remember them being supportive, but nothing in particular. That night a couple friends came over. One was Lee Templeton who worked for the Enterprise. I told him this story and he had it printed in the next edition of the Enterprise. The last time I was in Berea, I looked up that issue of the Enterprise. What I said then was exactly as I remember it now. One small aside. A young friend of mine, Jim Carlson, started working in the Meat Department that day. With the confusion and all, he never got paid.