Sixty-four years ago this week, 92 children and three of their teachers died in the Our Lady of the Angels School fire on Chicago’s West Side. The anniversary of that tragedy takes me back to a fifth grade classroom in another Chicago Catholic school two miles to the south, the day after the fire.
The talk that day was about a boy named Frankie, who had transferred from our school to Our Lady of the Angels that fall. Was he among the victims? There was no internet back then, no source of instant information, so we waited and prayed that good news would work its way back to us through friends of our former classmate’s family.
