April 7, 2009 11:31 AM
Retired Chicago firefighter Richard Scheidt, a subject of one of the grimmest and most iconic newspaper photographs in Chicago history, has died. He was 81.
On Dec. 1, 1958, a helmeted Scheidt, his face drawn in sorrow, carried the wet, lifeless body of 10-year-old John Jajkowski Jr. from Our Lady of the Angels grade school on the West Side. The fire, one of the worst tragedies in Chicago annals, killed 92 children and three nuns.
Scheidt died Monday at his home in southwest suburban Oak Lawn, a day after he was brought home from the hospital following a minor stroke a month ago, according to relatives.
Scheidt, a member of Rescue Squad 1, carried the bodies of 20 children from the school. Jajkowski was the first.
Scheidt was forever haunted by the memory. In an interview with the Tribune in 1995, in the wake of the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in which another image of a firefighter cradling a dying child went around the world, Scheidt described the horror of the Our Lady of the Angels School conflagration.
"It just broke my heart all over again for those poor people, having to pick up those babies," Scheidt said at the time. "There's nothing that prepares you for that. Thirty-some years later, I'm not over it yet."
Scheidt had been a Chicago firefighter for eight years when all 13 of the city's rescue squads were dispatched to the school. The fire, he recalled, "was just roaring through the building."
Firefighters eventually broke a hole through a second-floor wall to find a smoky classroom full of unconscious pupils. Scheidt said he and his colleagues immediately tried to rescue as many as they could. He grabbed a boy and rushed out of the building.
But Scheidt said, with tears in his eyes, "He was dead. He didn't make it, like so many of the rest of them."
He then went back and brought out 19 more children, all dead.
Meanwhile, Chicago American photographer Steve Lasker, arrived at the scene and saw one firefighter -- Scheidt -- heading down an interior staircase with a child. Lasker aimed his camera and waited for the rescuer to emerge.
Scheidt said he never noticed the cameraman.
"It was just an accident that they took that photograph," Jack Gallapo, 82, an old friend of Scheidt's and fellow firefighter, said this morning. "He just came out and they took it."
The photograph not only appeared on the front page of the Chicago American, but in newspapers around the world. But in his home, the fire and the picture were rarely spoken of.
"He and all the men that he worked with -- that was their job, and they were brothers in that," his daughter, Nancy Coughlin of Tinley Park, recalled this morning. "He never thought he was any more of a hero than any of the men he worked with."
Scheidt, three of whose older brothers also were firefighters, said he almost quit the fire department after the school fire. "But I went on," he said.
"You just live with it," Scheidt said in the 1995 interview. "It happened. You were part of it. You might not have liked it, but you did your job. You might have liked to have done more, but you did as good as you could."
Frances, his wife of 32 years, said her husband was always gracious when people broached the subject of the fire with him, but it was not something he spoke freely about.
"He really didn't want to talk about it," she said. "It always broke his heart. It was a terrible thing."
Friends and relatives said that though the Our Lady of Angels fire was the one that made Scheidt well known, it was just one of many instances that showed the sort of "first in, last out" firefighter Scheidt was.
"He never asked anyone to do something he wouldn't do himself," said son Andy Scheidt. "His biggest thing was making sure all his guys got home to their families."
As a young firefighter working with Scheidt 35 years ago, Fire Department First Deputy Commissioner Bob Hoff remembered him as a "tough, tough man. I mean physically tough."
On one call in the early 1970s to a grocery store with a fire in the basement, Scheidt ordered his men not to go in because it was too treacherous. But he didn't listen to his own advice. He and one other firefighter went in with a hose and struck out the fire themselves.
"There was heavy smoke and this was before the use of masks [with breathing apparatus]," Hoff said. "He didn't want to get anyone hurt, but he had to put that fire out."
In his own quiet, hard-working way, he was a mentor, Hoff said.
"He affected a lot of lives. You'd get a thousand stories about him, all good. I'm only one," Hoff said. "It was an honor and a privilege to work for a guy like that."
Scheidt retired from the fire department in 1986 as a captain. He is survived by his wife, nine children, 28 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. Funeral services are pending.
From www.olafire.com
"A Great and Indescribable Tragedy"
Fireman Richard Scheidt carries the lifeless body of 10-year-old John Jajkowski out of the fire-ravaged school soon after the fire is brought under control. The heart-breaking job of removing the young victims has begun.
This photograph became the defining image of the Our Lady of the Angels fire, seen around the world, and made into a moving fire prevention poster.
John was an accomplished musician - he played the accordion and sang in the boy's choir. He planned to be a priest.
Photo ©1958, Life Magazine
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