Chicago Fire Week #5: Firemen in pajamas

I had planned to round out Chicago Fire Week with my story about the Paxton Hotel fire, but it somehow never made its way into Nexis, and this one is perhaps even better, because it's representative of a problem in the department. I've been talking about it when I give speeches to PR groups for the past 15 years, a perfect example of how a hostile media office can turn a generic puff piece—the fire department starting to issue pajamas—into something negative. 
     The Chicago Fire Department began issuing pajamas in 1999, because firehouses were increasingly coed and you couldn't ask fire fighters to sleep in clothing unless clothing was provided. But the fire department, stung by some video that a local television station had run about a beer party in a firehouse, didn't want to cooperate with this story. He said they would drop off a pair of pajamas, but wouldn't allow us to photograph a firefighter actually wearing a pair. So we had to pose a photographer in the pajamas, for illustrative purposes. Nor would they say enough to round out a brief news story. So I had to go looking for someone who would say something, in this case a pissed off union head, who explained why the money being wasted on sleepwear should have been spent on better protective clothing.  A textbook example of turning good press into bad by holding grudges, which should be saved for junior high school.  It's a vicious circle: the fire department, like cops, bungles opportunities for good press, so disproportionate amount of press about them is bad, which makes them more bitter and press averse, which leads to more bad press.  It's sad really. 

     The phrase "firefighter pajamas," conjures up images of cotton PJs, about a Size 3T, brightly decorated with hook and ladder trucks and red helmets and Dalmatian doggies.
     The reality is not quite so festive.
     The new standard issue Chicago Fire Department pajamas -- or "authorized sleeping attire" -- are dark blue shorts and V-neck T-shirts, each decorated with the Fire Department logo. They're a part of the uniform as of Wednesday.
     But in the troubled Fire Department, even an issue as initially simple and innocent as pajamas is fraught with controversy.
     "It's humiliating, absolutely," said Bill Kugelman, president of Firefighter's Local No. 2. "The money that they're using for this could be used for other purposes, like safety and health and equipment."
     Fire Department spokesman Will Knight said he had "no idea" what the pajamas cost.
     Kugelman said he had just returned from a union convention in Washington, D.C., where the pajamas were the cause of much merriment at Chicago's expense.
     "We were the laughingstock," he said. "It was the talk of the seminar."
     On the record, firefighters -- who tend to keep an eye toward department politics -- were uniformly positive about the change.
     "They're comfortable," said John Sullivan, a 20-year veteran at Engine Company No. 98, on Chicago Avenue just east of Michigan. "They fit."
     Off the record, they were more critical.
     "Some of the men think it's ridiculous," said a firefighter who didn't want his name used.
     Ridiculous enough that someone at the department created a parody of the general order establishing the sleepwear. The joke "general disorder" mandating "nightly jammie checks" offers this synopsis:
     "It is the policy of the Chicago Fire Department that the fully grown personnel of legal majority (otherwise known as adults) who comprise this department and who operate equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, make life and death decisions on a daily basis and manage to lead normal, healthy and productive lives are not capable of making a decision on how to dress for bed."
     After initially suggesting there was no particular reason for the new sleepwear, fire officials admitted the change had to do with the growing number of women in firehouses. Of the 4,200 Chicago firefighters, about 200 are women -- mostly paramedics -- and they share fire stations during 24-hour shifts.
     "More and more female firefighters are on the job, and that is only going to increase," department spokesman Kevin MacGregor said. "We'll eliminate any kind of problems that could occur. . . . That's what we hope to do with this thing."
     Kugelman said he imagined the move was done with sexual harrassment lawsuits in mind.
     "Why else would they do this?" he said. "No other department has them. People are wondering why in the hell we have jammies when we don't even have bunker gear (special protective clothing). New York City got bunker gear and cut their injury rate by 85 percent. They don't have jammies."
                    —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 2, 1999

Chicago Fire Week #4: "It got hot, dark and very intense"

 

Photo courtesy of bobanddawndavis.com

   This is the second part of my two part series on fighting a fire, the one that caused all the trouble. As the firefighters described going into the burning building, I asked what seemed a simple question: Why go inside? Why not fight the fire from outside? Wouldn't that be safer? That led to the "It's the Chicago way" quotes, which naturally upset every suburban fire department, and then upset the Chicago Fire Department, which blamed me. The question whether it was true was a side issue. It actually touched upon very sensitive issues of truck staffing—fires are  increasingly rare, and suburbs get by with far fewer firefighters than Chicago does. At one point during the controversy that followed the column's publication, one of the men I interviewed called me and asked if I couldn't just say I had made the quote up. That bothered me—I said no, I wouldn't say that, and had the quote on a high quality digital audio recording, and if they denied it was said, I'd put it online. The whole episode left a bad taste in my mouth, since my only goal had been to describe how a fire gets fought.

     Fighting a fire is part mental and part physical, part team effort and part individual achievement, somewhere between tearing down a house that's aflame and winning a football game where you risk dying if you're not careful and sometimes even if you are.
     On Friday, we followed Engine 106 to a fire at 3037 W. Belmont and met a few of the firefighters from Battalion 7, and if you missed it, you might find today's column more rewarding if you read Friday's first, perhaps through the miracle of Internet technology.
     As the column ended, a resident who had fled the building begged firefighter Rich Irwin to "Save my baby!" If you expected Irwin to immediately bolt up the stairs and snatch the tot, you've seen too many movies.
     Remember, Irwin was on the street -- there were a dozen guys in the building already, working a hose up the stairs to the burning third floor, cutting holes in the roof and feeling around in the smoky second floor with their hands. To be honest, news about the baby caused "a surge in adrenaline" and not much else. "Either way, we're going in for a primary search," said Irwin.
      A reminder that, more than even heroism, firefighting requires strategy. You might have wondered, for instance, with flames pouring out of the back staircase, why didn't the firefighters park themselves behind the building and hurl water on the fire directly from there? Why sneak up on it?
     "We always come from the unburnt part to the burning part, always," said Lt. Frank Isa.
     Fires are not so much extinguished as they are beaten back. Had Engine 106 come in from the rear, they would have merely pushed the fire into the rest of the structure and lost it.
     "In Chicago, we do what's called an 'interior attack,' " said Isa. "We go to the seat of the fire. A lot of suburbs will hit it from the outside."
     That's a point of pride among Chicago firefighters. They do not stand around pouring water on the roof of a building while it burns to the ground. They grab their axes, strap on their masks, and go in to fight a fire face-to-face.
     "It's all about being aggressive," said Scott Musil. "And pride. We're not in the suburbs."
     "[The suburbs] do an exterior attack," said one firefighter. "That's why they lose most of their buildings. If we stood back and put water on, we'd feel like we weren't doing anything."
    "It's the Chicago way," said Larry Langford, the Chicago Fire Department spokesman, and isn't it nice to see that "the Chicago Way" doesn't just refer to Rahm Emanuel cussing out clerks but also to the more aggressive, perilous and effective approach to fighting fires?
     So where were we? Tino Durovic kicked in the door on the third floor, a wave of heat and steam hit him, burning his face and ears, even under his mask and hood. He instinctively dived face first to the floor (General Fire Tip: It's safer on the floor; many people who died in a fire standing up would have lived crawling.)
     The heat melted the reflectors on Durovic's helmet -- not necessarily a bad thing; a firefighter wants his gear sooty and scarred. Firefighters will sometimes take a new turnout coat into the alley and drag it around a bit, to give it character and avoid showing up at a fire gleaming like a newborn babe.
     Durovic didn't stop advancing when he got burned, by the way. Nor when his low-air warning alarm went off. (Firefighters carry a bottle containing 30 minutes of compressed air -- regular old air, don't call it "oxygen," oxygen would be ignited by a spark at a fire and burn your face off. But that's 30 theoretical minutes of air; if you're working hard, breathing fast, with your adrenaline up because you're trying to save a baby, you can easily run out in 15).
     "It got hot, dark and very intense, but we had to hold that stairway," said Isa.
     "There was no time to get out," Durovic said. "We'd lose the whole thing. I yelled to Frank, 'Gimme more line!' "
     A brave thing for him to do?
     "Anybody else would have done the same thing," said Durovic. "Any other fireman."
     In fact, others did, when they finally pushed the fire back, the nozzle spraying 250 gallons a minute, Durovic, his air gone, handed the nozzle over to Eddie Lashley, who held until his air went, then handed it to others. Fighting a fire is far more complicated and requires far more firefighters than I can mention here.
     "We're in the third floor, thanks to everybody," says Isa. "Once we made the third floor, we beat it. It's simple as putting it out. Now we can attack it. We meet it face-to-face and say, 'You're done; it's over.' We call in [and say] 'Battalion 7 -- the fire's knocked.' "
     There's still work to do, and still danger -- knocking holes to drain hundreds of gallons of water to keep the floor from collapsing under you, for instance.
     Durovic, I should mention, when he finally went down to get more bottled air, collared the lady with the baby. Exactly where, he asked, had she left that baby?
     Oh, she said, her baby goes all over.
     Her baby was a cat.
     If you feel deceived, imagine how the firefighters felt.
     Actually, they took it in good humor. All part of the job.

                     —Originally published Dec. 6, 2009

Chicago Fire Week #3: "We knew it was a nasty fire"

Photo courtesy of Bill Savage

     This was only written because a firefighter liked something I wrote, and invited me to the fire house for lunch, and I know better than to turn down a meal at a firehouse. At lunch, conversation turned to a recent fire they had fought—nothing exceptional, just a burning two flat—and I said how I always wanted to write something about how a fire gets put out, what the firefighters actually DO in the process. I persuaded them to go over it with me, step-by-step, even taking a field trip, as a group, to the burned building to get a feel for the setting. 
     I found it so interesting, that I ran the story in two parts. This is the first part, and drew almost no reaction. The second part caused a huge controversy, ending up with an apology from the Chicago Fire Department, all over the answer to an innocent question. But we'll get to that tomorrow.

     Firefighters will refer to some fires as "good fires" while worrying that outsiders might think they are glad a building burned, when of course they aren't.
     What they are is grateful that, after days and weeks of waiting, when confronted by the need to do what they are trained to do, they did their duty.
     A firefighter invited me to lunch at his station house. We got to talking about a fire they fought last month. Firefighters are a self-effacing bunch. "Any other firefighter would have done exactly the same thing," said one, echoing a common team-effort sentiment. They were just doing their jobs, they said, but I convinced them that people are interested in those jobs, in how to fight a good fire.
     Dinner was pot roast and potatoes Friday, Nov. 6 at the Elston Avenue firehouse, home to Engine 106, Truck 13 and Ambulance 48.
     No calls came in -- they ate uninterrupted, with the usual jovial banter at the large wooden table with the seal of the Chicago Fire Department and its motto "We're There When You Need Us" emblazoned in gold.
     They scraped their oval platters and set them in the dishwasher and relaxed for a few minutes when, at 7:51 p.m., the speaker crackled a terse alarm: fire at 3037 W. Belmont.
     "Basically right down the street," said Lt. Frank Isa, the senior officer on duty.
     Usually, when fire trucks show up at a scene, whatever smokey frying pan caused somebody to call 911 has been dealt with. Modern construction has cut back on fires; on most calls, they never run out a foot of hose.
     This wasn't one of those calls.
     "We knew we had a fire," explained Isa. "We could see the smoke -- haze in the street. It was night, but you could see it in the streetlights. And you could smell it too."
     Engine 106 carries hundreds of feet of hose and five firefighters.
     "Everyone has their jobs," said Rich Irwin, whose job that night was to go to the rear of the building for what firefighters call "forcible entry" -- breaking down the door.
     Irwin carried a Halligan bar -- a steel tool with a crowbar at one end and a wedge and a spike at the other and used a sledgehammer to pound the wedge into the gap between the door and the frame.
     After prying the door open, Erwin saw that the back stairs were engulfed in flames -- nobody was going up that way.
     Meanwhile, Juan Lopez and Anthony Belke went to the roof, using the aerial ladder on Truck 13, which had pulled up to the three-story building, with a vacant beauty salon on the ground floor and apartments on the second and third.
     "We knew it was a nasty fire," said Lopez. "When we were going up the ladder, the smoke was traveling down the aerial ladder. Thick, heavy, black smoke. It was weird. I'd never seen it like that."
     To fight a fire, you have to release its heat. Lopez and Belke skidded along the peak of the roof, straddling it, and, positioning themselves with the wind at their backs, used their axes to hack holes through the roof. The fire "came out like a blowtorch."
     John DiSanti was the "heel man," helping stretch out the hose on the second floor -- if hose isn't laid out properly, it'll tangle, and someone trying to charge toward a fire will come up short like a dog racing to the end of a leash tied to a tree.
     "You want hose to reach every part of that building," said Isa.
     Enough hose isn't much good unless there's water coming out of it—Ed Lashley was "the hydrant man" whose job it was to find the nearest hydrant, open it up and attach the line from the pumper.
      Tino Durovic was "on the pipe," meaning he held the nozzle of the hose, going through the front door and up the stairs. Isa followed him.
     Soon there were 50 firefighters and paramedics on the scene -- sending a curtain of water between 3037 W. Belmont and the neighboring building, whose vinyl siding already had started to melt, conducting a "primary search" on the second floor, looking for victims using everything from their hands to a high-tech thermal-imaging camera.
     Others used pike poles to pull down the ceiling. They could see the flames moving inside the floor above, pulsing in waves, like a living thing.
     Durovic and Isa climbed the stairs toward the third floor, directing the hose straight up, onto the ceiling -- with no back stairs, they had to keep this staircase open.
     Durovic reached the door to the third floor and kicked it in. A wave of heat rolled out, steam so intense it burned his face and ears under his mask and protective hood.
     Downstairs, Irwin had circled around to the front, where he met a hysterical woman.
     "My baby's in there!" she shouted at him. "Save my baby!"
                                                                        —Continued Sunday

                     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 4, 2009

Chicago Fire Week #2: The floating firehouse

Photo by Chad Kainz, Chicago

     It took a bit of sweet-talking, but eight years ago I got myself aboard the city's only fireboat. She was replaced in 2011 with a newer fireboat, the Christopher Wheatley, but not before a final good deed: rescuing a coyote stranded on a tiny ice flow off Fullerton Avenue.

   Among the 97 firehouses in Chicago, Engine 58 is unique in several ways. Its living quarters are the smallest. Its rig is the oldest, with the last hand-rung brass bell in the department -- or so they claim. And it has, without doubt, the wettest basement -- the channel of water between the Jardine Water Treatment Plant and Navy Pier.
     Engine 58 is a fireboat, the Victor L. Schlaeger, the last fireboat operated by the Chicago Fire Department, and if you're not excited to carefully hop from the pier onto her 92-foot-long deck on a perfect September morning, then friend, check your pulse, because you're not alive.
     "It's a floating firehouse," says Relief Lt. Art Jansky, who suggests a look below decks with a very unnautical "You wanna see downstairs?"
     It has a crew quarters, with six beds -- five firefighters man it 24 hours a day, just like any other firehouse. It has a TV, an exercise bike, a kitchen, two toilets, a shower.
     "All the comforts of home," Jansky says.
SIX DEAN HILL FIRE PUMPS

     Well, a home that moves—another unique aspect. Engine 58 is the only company that takes its firehouse out on runs. Also a home with four water cannons— "deck guns" they're called—two fore, two aft. The Schlaeger's deck guns have any truck in the department beat— the best a hose from a rolling pumper can do is 400 gallons a minute, while each of the Schlaeger's guns spews forth about 1,200 jetting, hissing, foaming gallons per minute. They have to take care, fighting fires on smaller boats, that the force of the water doesn't sink them, or spin the Schlaeger around.
     "These things will move the boat," said Engineer Dwain Williams.
     They took the fireboat out by the breakwater, and invited me to operate the deck guns, turning the big chrome wheels that raise and lower the gun and sweep the horizon. They didn't have to ask twice—maybe you need to be a boy to truly appreciate the thrill of cranking up that 4-foot-long barrel and watching the powerful stream gush forward. All that was missing was a fresh snowbank to trace my name in.
GROSS WEIGHT: 209 TONS
     The Schlaeger was built in Sturgeon Bay, Wis., in 1949. She is by no means a beautiful vessel, riding low in the water, her smokestacks cut short, the better to go under low bridges. She can float in seven feet of water, and her eight engines will push her to 14 knots. With bow plates made of steel nearly two inches thick, she'll break through eight inches of ice. In the winter, bubblers keep the water ice-free 20 feet around her berth, in case the fireboat needs a running start.
     "It's a little old, a little tattered, but you know what -- this puppy is sound," Williams said. "It'll do the job."
     It's hard to find a job that the fireboat hasn't done over the years. It has fought fires, of course, on water and on land, including a massive 5-11 warehouse blaze on the Southwest Side 10 years ago. But it is also a platform for divers, and has rescued people from sinking boats and downed helicopters (including a Fire Department helicopter that crashed attempting a rescue). During heat waves it pours water on downtown bridges to keep them from swelling closed. In the parched summer of 2005 it watered riverside trees. On the Fourth of July, it parks next to the barge setting off the fireworks over the lake, just in case. And of course no festive waterside event is complete without the Schlaeger firing its cannons high into the air in watery salute. Talk about gushing.
     Nor is its range limited by the reach of its cannons—the Schlaeger has eight discharge outlets and a bellyful of hose, used to connect with land companies. The boat's six pumps can move 14,252 gallons per minute.
     "We become a fire hydrant and can supply 10 engines," Williams said.
     The first Chicago fireboat, the Geyser, was commissioned in 1886. At one time there were five fireboats protecting the grain elevators and factories along a Chicago River spanned by wooden bridges.
     The Schlaeger has been the only fireboat in Chicago for more than 10 years ever since its sister vessel, the Joseph Medill, was decommissioned and exiled to Wisconsin.
     A fireboat is one of those budget items that make cost-cutters' fingers itch—it doesn't make as many runs as a regular engine company, and has all the hole-in-the-water-you-fill-with-money drawbacks associated with any boat.
     But when you need a fireboat, you really need it, and I can't help but think that the increasing number of residents living along the riverfront must sleep a little better at night high above the city in their luxury condos knowing that there are five guys sleeping below decks on the Victor L. Schlaeger, ready to help at a moment's notice.

SO WHO IS HE?
     Nobody aboard Victor L. Schlaeger, the boat, had any idea who Victor L. Schlaeger, the man, might have been. I promised I would find out.
     Born in Chicago, a graduate of Bowen High School, Schlaeger became a powerful Cook County Democrat, known for his efficiency, who worked his way up through government -- to county treasurer and chief clerk of the Superior Court -- before being elected recorder of deeds, the position he held in 1949 when he collapsed and died during lunch at the Bismarck Hotel. The boat, commissioned a few months later, was named in his honor, perhaps because he served in the Navy in World War I.
                     —Origially published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 23, 2007

The Victor Schlaeger in 2021.

Who doesn't hate squirrels?

 

Photo courtesy of Janet Rausa Fuller

   On Tuesday, the Northbrook Village Board is considering whether to ban the practice of setting out food for wild animals. While that is the typical thumb-twiddling leaders here engage in rather than doing anything productive, I understand the concern. The idea that people would set food out for squirrels and skunks and such just baffles me. It's like planting weeds.

     On the other hand, unless they're going to ban bird feeders—and no politician could do that and hope to be elected, it would be like banning toddlers—the effort is futile, since squirrels so readily climb them and eat the poor hungry birds' lunch (though not in my backyard, since, after years of trying, I have finally baffled them, quite literally).

     Anyway, I would say table the vote and consider more important things. But the effort did bring to mind this column where I declared my feelings for squirrels. 

     Squirrels scare me.
     Squirrels have, on occasion, menaced and attacked me. I hate them. Which makes it doubly ironic that, in my new home in the deep forests of Northbrook, I am surrounded by squirrels. I can feel their small, hard, coal-black eyes upon me.
     Normally, I would be too embarrassed to mention this. You probably love squirrels. You probably collect little china squirrel figurines and keep them in a special cabinet. How nice.
    But I'm trying to make sense of the other day, which turned into my Big Squirrel Day.
    It began with my oldest boy, gazing out the bedroom window. Suddenly, he shouted, "Call the police! Call the police!" I ran to the window. "What?" I asked. "Squirrels!" the 4-year-old said. "On the garbage can!"
    Indeed, there were two big ones, boldly perched on the lid, planning their next crime.
    Not two hours later I was visiting my pal Judy at WGN. "I have something in my office for you," she said, during a commercial break. My mind reeled, pondering expensive presents. You know how they pay these radio people. Someone had given her a Harley-Davidson. She had no use for it . . .
    What she had was a press release from the Squirrel Lover's Club. This week is the first "Squirrel Awareness Week." Joy.
    Ever look closely at a squirrel? They twitch as if they're about to explode, or have some terrible disease. I glanced at the release, put out by a fanatic in Elmhurst, filled with cold-comfort trivia such as the number of teeth squirrels have (22), including "chisel-shaped incisors in the upper and lower jaws."
    Of course they do. A squirrel once tried to chew its way into our bedroom. I heard my wife shrieking and there was a tremendous gnawing and scratching at the plastic accordion section around the air conditioner. A peep through the window confirmed that it was a maddened squirrel, trying to get us. The next few moments were like something out of a horror movie. This was not an isolated episode. On vacation, my family was eating around a picnic table at White Pines State Park when a squirrel charged up and tried to strong-arm our food.
     The thing terrorized us, hissing and spitting. My poor boys were upset, and I had to manfully fend off a squirrel in front of them. I defended our meal, if I recall, with an unopened can of baked beans.
     After trying to read over the ballyhoo for Squirrel Awareness Week and despairing of the subject, I stood up to stretch and gather my thoughts.
     So many squirrel lovers and people who get all squishy at the mention of any animal. Not worth antagonizing them, I decided. And to what end? To score points against squirrels? It's not as if they're going to change their ways.
     I turned toward the City Desk, and looked at the TV monitors bolted to the ceiling. Squirrels, and lots of them. Various critters and poses, touting Squirrel Awareness Week.
     "Squirrels," I said. "I hate those - - - - - - - squirrels."
     One of the hard cases at the desk agreed. "Blanking squirrels," he said. So it isn't just me. There are at least two of us.
      Buoyed by this sign of solidarity, I returned to my desk, and read: "In some circles . . . squirrels spelled doom on a house."
     This dislodged the most disturbing squirrel memory of all. A few days after we bought the house, I was walking out front, along the hedge. Just as I turned the corner, into our yard, I saw a squirrel pulling itself toward the house with its front paws, back legs dragging uselessly behind it.
     I had never seen a paralyzed squirrel before, and couldn't imagine how it would happen -- a fall? A terrible illness; the things are silly with disease. It was a haunting sight.
     There is one consolation, however. Winter is coming. The miserable beasts sleep, right? They hibernate, don't they? Good Lord, I hope so.

   —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Oct. 5, 2000

Chicago Fire Week # 1: "I asked God to send the angels"

     I realized I haven't used any vacation in 2015, so took this week off at the paper. A break which will be undercut if I keep busy here. 
     But I didn't want to leave you folk with nothing. I was puzzling over what to do, on the elliptical at the Y, listening to Bonnie Tyler's 1980s chestnut, "Holding Out for a Hero." Heroes made me think of firefighters, and I realized I could run some columns about the Chicago Fire Department, which are by nature thrilling, and some of my favorite stories. 
     Plus they're so rare. Being actual heroes, fire fighters don't like to talk about their exploits. It strikes them as bragging. The column below would never have happened had the minister not forced the guys to talk. 
     There is also, I believe, paradoxically, a certain timidity at work too. Firefighters, like cops, work in close quarters, in an unfair, rigged hierarchy where personal initiative can be punished: you don't want to stick out. It's safer not to talk to a reporter, ever, about anything. 
     So five days of fire stories this week—I might jump in on an issue, but only if I feel inclined. Otherwise I'm reading in the hammock, gardening and, I imagine, doing various chores around the house.  I hope you like these, because if a reporter can't do something engaging about a fire, he's in the wrong business.
     The only downside is I don't have any good fire photographs. The one atop the blog is from Wikicommons, courtesy of Wesha. If you have a good one, send it to me, and if I use it as a header, I'll give you credit, and pay you 20 bucks.
     
     When a church burns, it's usually a goner.
     Old woodwork ignites like tinder. Cathedral ceilings hide spaces where fire spreads undetected. Plaster falls in heavy chunks, shattering oak pews. One beam goes and the whole ceiling pancakes down, walls collapsing outward.
     St. John United Church of Christ, a small, 90-year-old brick building on Moffat Street, its modest congregation bolstered by hundreds of recovering alcoholics, seemed doomed in the pre-dawn darkness last Jan. 20.
     When Engines 43 and 57 and Trucks 28 and 13 of the 6th Battalion arrived, fire had blown through the third-floor choir window, and flames were flapping out. Yellow-green smoke poured from the eaves.
     The vehicles were met by the pastor, the Rev. Charlotte Nold, standing before her burning church.
     "I live next door," she explained. "My phone rang, the doorbell rang desperately, and I heard the fire engines all at the same time. I stood in the snow, and I just prayed. I asked God to send the angels."
    Chief Walter Steinle wasn't optimistic about the church's chances. "Most of the time when we have a church fire, if it gets into the loft area, it's normally lost. It's nothing but a lumberyard up there."
     Through the smoke, the chief noticed the church's 20 beautiful German stained glass windows and hated to think they might be destroyed in the effort to save the church.
     "I told them, let's not break any windows," Steinle said.  

Windows at St. John United Church

     
     As hoses were run out, Engine 43 hit the fire with its deck gun, pouring 500 gallons from its reserve tank — "quick water" as firefighters call it — attempting to knock down the fire while the hydrants were opened.
     That took longer than usual. The first hydrant was frozen — it was 11 degrees that morning — so Ron Szatkowski hustled to find another.
     Other firefighters rushed to find the quickest way into the church.
     "Churches have got those big doors; there's no way to get in there," Lt. Anthony Rodriguez said. "We had to go in through the window that the fire was coming out of. We put up ladders, and guys went up the ladders. It was a real dangerous situation. Churches are notoriously treacherous. They are full of secret passages and lofts. Firemen get up there and get lost within the ceiling. A real dangerous situation."
     Particularly for firefighters Angelo Rodriguez and Joseph Kish, crawling on a board at the peak of the church, in the false section between the plaster ceiling and the roof, dragging a 1 3/4-inch hose.
     "I went up with a charged line, crept up through the scuttle hole into the cathedral ceiling," Rodriguez said. "I was over the cathedral ceiling, inside the crawl space. It was hot, where we hit the ridge of the church's roof, and downward toward the wall. One false step and I was through the dry wall and about 50 feet to the floor."
     Meanwhile, firefighters Brad Wilson and Ed Datz scrambled up the slate roof, icy and pitched at a dizzying angle.
     Clinging to a roofer's ladder, they broke holes in the slate with sledgehammers, then chopped through the roof with axes to let the smoke and heat out, probably preventing the roof from collapsing.
     Busting the windows would have helped, too, but Steinle had given an order.
     "He saved those windows," Lt. Rodriguez said. "In the heat of battle, firemen do what has to be done. But the chief said that bad things would happen to us if we broke those windows."
     The ceiling was a total loss. Smoke damage stopped precisely at the top of the windows. Restoration took nine months and cost about a million dollars.
     Last Sunday, the congregation rededicated its building. And despite the firefighters' reluctance to be honored for doing their job, members of the 6th Battalion were on hand.
     "The minister is pretty persuasive," Steinle said. "We don't normally do things like this. We don't normally bask in the light. We're happy to save any building. But being an edifice of God, it made us feel good."
     How did Nold persuade the humble firefighters to come to her church to be hugged and honored? She put it in a way they couldn't refuse.
     "I talked to Chief Steinle and told him I wanted them to come, to thank them, and give a presentation," she said. "I could see in their eyes they felt shy. I said, 'We're a small, inner-city church. We work round the clock dealing with poor people, tragedies, chaos and the homeless. We need you to come tell my congregation that you cared to save the church.' "
     The firefighters — who received a unit performance commendation from the department— credit teamwork for saving the church.
     Nold has a different idea. She never worried that the church would be destroyed.
     "No, and I'll tell you why," she said. "I could feel the angels. I could actually feel the angels. I knew the angels were inside the church. I didn't think the whole church would burn. I knew there were too many angels in there. Both real angels, and the firemen, acting like angels."

        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 14, 2000

     Postscript: I phoned the church to see if Rev. Nold is still there: she is, 27 years on the job. She did say that the facade of the church needs expensive repairs, and its future is uncertain. The plan now is to sell three of the four lots it sits on and use the money to build a new, smaller urban church on the fourth lot, of course transferring the German stained glass windows into the new building. 

The cock crowed three times

     "Did the bird come first?" she said, under circumstances I will not relate, except to say that while I immediately knew exactly what she was referring to, I set the question aside to consider at a more apt moment.
     Which is now.
     I have an interest in the divergent meanings of words, and whether those meanings have a connection.  "Turkey," for instance, is a country, but it's also a bird, the connection being ... wait for it ... that when European explorers first saw turkeys, they thought them exotic birds, and the home of exoticness at the time was the Ottoman Empire, the way fancy fried potatoes became "French fries" because sophisticated grub comes from France.
     In previous posts, I connect rocket, the spacecraft, with rocket, the plant, while finding waffle, the foodstuff, and waffle, the act of indecision, trace their origins independently to the Netherlands and Scotland, respectively.
     So to the matter at hand: "cock." The main two definitions of "cock" are highlighted in George Carlin's "Filthy Words" routine that went all the way up to the Supreme Court in FCC v. the Pacifica Foundation.*
     "The word cock is a half-way dirty word, 50% dirty—dirty half the time, depending on what you mean by it," Carlin says, in the transcript of the case offered into evidence by the FCC. "Remember when you first heard it, like in 6th grade, you used to giggle. 'And the cock crowed three times!' Heh (laughter) the cock -- three times. It's in the Bible, cock in the Bible. (laughter) And the first time you heard about a cock-fight, remember—What? Huh? Naw."
     So how did "cock" come to be used to describe a barnyard fowl and a very different kind of pecker? 
     The definition of "cock" in the Oxford English Dictionary covers two full pages and begins, "1. The male of the common domestic fowl, Gallus domesticus, the female being the HEN.)"
     That usage goes back some 1100 years, to 897, to King Alfred's translation of Pope Gregory I's Pastoral Care: "Donne graet se lareow swa swa kok on niht."
     The second definition—"Figuratively applied to men" seemed to be the expected skirting of the issue, listing usage denoting various ministers, leaders, watchmen.      
     I assumed the mighty Oxford would blanche, like an elephant startling at a mouse, since that edition has no entry for "fuck." I didn't expect the OED to touch "cock" either. 
     The 12th definition seemed to reveal a willful ignorance:
     "A spout or short pipe serving as a channel for passing liquids through, and having an appliance for regulating or stopping the flow; a tap." True enough, but the analysis afterward baldly admitted, "The origin of the name in this sense is not very clear. The resemblance of some stop-cocks to a cock's head with its comb, readily suggests itself."
     Uh-huh. Elizabethan tavern owners called beer spigots "cocks" because they looked like a rooster's head. Well, yeah, it could be that, or maybe you're ignoring the obvious, some other object through which liquids flow.
     Other meanings follow, part of a plow, the needle of a balance, a bracket in clock making ... I had no hope, but was just being thorough. You can't say a meaning is missing unless you've checked it all. "The mark at which curlers aim." 
     Then, quite unexpectedly, the Oxford just blurts it out:  "20 = Penis." tracing the word back to 1737 and Rabelais, and nodding at its popularity among the unwashed masses. "The current name among the people, but, pudoris causa,** not admissible in polite speech or literature, in scientific literature the Latin is used. In origin perhaps intimately connected with sense 12." 
     So the Oxford, at least in the faraway era of 1978, speculates that the sexual usage for "cock" must have been borrowed from keg taps, which got that meaning from the shape of rooster heads.
     That's weak. I would form a stronger, alternate theory: that "cock" was used for the male organ all along, and then applied to male birds and spouting taps, where it first slipped into the historical record.  It's easy enough to find earlier usages that somehow eluded the OED.
     Cocks certainly pop up all through Shakespeare's plays, in the three main senses of the word. As birds yes, "The early Village Cock Hath twice done salutation to the morne" (RIchard III) and as spigots, "When every room hath blaz'd with lights, and bray'd with minstrelsy, I have retir'd me to a wasteful cock, And set mine eyes at flow," in Timon refers to retiring to a tavern.  
     But Shakespeare also uses "cock" in a variety of obvious double entendres, whether in Hamlet, in the ramblings of mad Ophelia ("Alack, and fie for shame!/Young men will do't if they come to'it, By Cock, they are to blame.") or in Henry V ("Pistol's cock is up, and flashing fire's to follow.") In the first sense it's a stand in for "God," and in the second, a cock was also the hammer of a gun  (hence guns being "cocked") 
     Samuel Johnson's great 1755 dictionary hints at the connection between the two types of pecker, defining "to cock" as "to set erect, to hold bolt upright, as a cock holds his head," and when we think of the actual barnyard fowl, heads thrown back, combs at attention, it isn't difficult to suspect, as I do, that the two meanings go back a long time, a theory supported in the copious scholarship on the subject. 
    "The relation of cock and phallus is ancient" notes Gordon Williams, in his 1994 A Dictionary of Sexual Language in Shakespeare and Stuart Literature, beginning his entry on the word. 
    At which point we should probably let go of the subject, lest we be drawn into the vast online  discussion of the word, the most interesting aspect being that "cock" was polite English until Victorian times, and that American squeamishness even replaced its avian and plumbing uses with "rooster" and "faucet," as a sort of guilt by association. My interest sagged reading a lengthy debate over  a 2500-year-old Greek phallus-headed statue of a rooster that may, or may not, reside in the secret collection of the Vatican. But I think we've handled this sufficiently. I'm a little sorry I brought it up.

   
* On Oct. 30, 1973, at about 2 p.m., New York radio station WBAI played George Carlin's 12-minute routine. It was heard by a father driving with his young son, who complained to

the FCC, which found "Filthy Words" "patently offensive" and wrote the station a letter of reprimand, warning that it could affect renewal of its license. A lawsuit by the Pacifica Foundation, owners of the station, followed. Emphasizing the "narrowness" of its ruling, the Court, in a 5-4 decision, found that the government has an interest in regulating the content of material broadcast on the airwaves, because "broadcasting is uniquely accessible to children, even those too young to read." Writing for the majority, John Paul Stevens explained, "Of all forms of communication, broadcasting has the most limited First Amendment protection. Among the reasons for specially treating indecent broadcasting is the uniquely pervasive presence that medium of expression occupies in the lives of our people. Broadcasts extend into the privacy of the home and it is impossible completely to avoid."

 *"Pudoris causa is Latin for "because it is shameful."