On Dec. 1, 1958, a fire consumed Our Lady of the Angels grade school on the West Side of Chicago, killing 92 children and three nuns.



A wire story from that day captured a fragment of the desperation:



"Max Stachura stood outside the burning building, begging his little boy, Mark, 9, to jump into his arms. Children were falling all about the father and he caught or stopped the fall of 12 of them. But little Mark was too frightened or he didn't understand his father. Mark didn't jump."



Fifty years later, Mark's mother has the day in crisp focus, and adds a missing detail.



As Mark stood at that second-floor window, fire to his back, he held a small statue in his hand and waved it proudly through the black smoke, hoping his father would notice. Mark had won the statue that day — a figure of an infant Jesus — for being first to answer a quiz question.



"I guess he was just so proud of that prize," said Mary Stachura, now in a retirement home in Bartlett. "I don't think he really understood what was happening."



Few of the children trapped in the school could have grasped the enormity of the danger they faced, and few of the panicky adults on the ground — parents and neighbors and firefighters — had time to reflect. They acted, grabbing ladders of all lengths from garages, reaching through broken windows to haul small, waterlogged bodies from the flames.



Max Stachura watched as other children pushed his son back, away from the window and into the flames. The boy was later identified by a homework sheet crumpled in his pocket.



Max rarely spoke of that day. He died suddenly of a heart attack at 52.



"He was much too young," said Mary, now 85. "That fire. It changed everything."



The fire at Our Lady of the Angels remains one of the worst tragedies in Chicago's history, a ghastly few hours on a cold, sunny afternoon that shattered families and knocked a hopeful, growing community forever off its path.



The cause of the fire was never officially determined, and no one was held accountable. Some parents who lost a child--or children-- found ways to blame each other and wound up divorced. Others sold their tidy two flats and moved away, hastening the flight of the middle class from the city's West Side.



"It seems as though people just couldn't get far enough away," said Jill Grannan, a curator at the Chicago History Museum. "That school and that parish is one that had a lot of people. It had a growing population. There was such a boom, and then people really just had to leave.



"I don't think the community ever really came back."



Few in the neighborhood now would recall the blaze. But for parents and firefighters, journalists and now-grown schoolchildren, the memories remain etched in intricate detail.



Steve Lasker, then a photographer for The Chicago American newspaper, was driving along Grand Avenue, heading to his newsroom after an assignment in Elmwood Park. He heard a call come over a radio tuned to the police frequency: "They're jumping out the windows!"



"But I didn't know where it was," Lasker said. A fire engine cut in front of him and he quickly turned to follow. He parked on Iowa Street and headed toward the smoke, stopping abruptly when he saw the school on Avers Avenue in flames.



"I froze for a few seconds, or maybe it was minutes, I don't know, I couldn't tell," said Lasker, now 78. "Oh my God, there's still kids in there. Mayhem was going on and they started pulling kids out of there left and right."



From atop a fire truck, Lasker shot one of the most iconic photos of the day. It showed a helmeted firefighter, his face drawn in sorrow, carrying the soaking wet, lifeless body of 10-year-old John Jajkowski Jr. from the building.



Just 28 and the father of a 6-month-old girl, Lasker felt his stomach churn as he watched the rescue through the lens of his camera. The cold wind froze tracks of tears on his face. Though many photos were published, 20 years would pass before he would voluntarily show them to anyone.



"I didn't want to re-live it," he said. "To this day I still have dreams about that horrible scene."



He held close to his family through the years, and was, perhaps, over-protective of his kids: "Tragedy hits home. Everybody's home."



Grace Riley never saw the fire, but she faced its aftermath in the worst of ways. She was 23 at the time, an emergency room nurse and a newlywed.



The first ambulance arrived without warning at St. Anne's Hospital that afternoon, carrying six boys from the 7th and 8th grades, and one 1st-grade girl. The doctors and nurses didn't know what had happened but immediately set to work, Riley caring for the little girl.



"I was cutting her clothes off and I hear her say, 'Oh nurse, my face hurts so bad.' And I looked up and her face was totally burned."



As more children were carted in, the acrid smell of burnt flesh became overwhelming — it sticks with Riley to this day. She helped place bodies of the dead on the floor so gurneys were available for the living.



"Ambulance by ambulance by ambulance, they just kept coming," Riley said. "It was just earth-shattering to look into a room and see all those little bodies, and to see the parents screaming, 'Where is my child? Where is my child?'"



Riley left emergency room nursing shortly after the fire. She just couldn't do it anymore.



Now 73 and a hospice nurse in Arizona, she recalled the day of the fire and how instead of assisting doctors with the injured she focused on cataloging the children who were dead on arrival. She carries guilt over that decision.



"I just couldn't bring myself to go up to pediatrics to help out. I just couldn't do it," Riley said. "As a nurse you're supposed to put your own feelings aside. But I could not handle the smell of burnt skin and the pain that these kids were going through."



Long after any wounds from the fire healed, after the bodies of the dead were honored in mass funeral services and schools across Chicago and the nation embraced new standards for fire safety, the pain lingers.



Ken Leonard was only 9 at the time, a 4th grader in room 210. He wound up on the window ledge, too afraid to jump, too scared to realize flames were burning the backs of his legs.



A fireman made it up a ladder and hoisted him to safety. He spent 10 days in the hospital with 2nd-degree burns -– his two brothers escaped the school unharmed.



The three Leonard boys would all go on to serve in Vietnam. Again, they all made it out alive. Ken wound up a firefighter in Oak Lawn, rising to become chief before he retired in 2001.



Throughout his career, he kept memories of the Our Lady of the Angels fire to himself, and he still struggles to speak of that day.



"When I first got in the job, I was trying to tell my co-workers the story, but I just couldn't do it," Leonard said, voice cracking. "I assumed as time went on, it would get easier. But it never does."



Some say they were able to put the tragedy behind them, though they speak in an uncertain tone of moving on. Others lament the lack of counseling in the wake of the tragedy, saying the custom of the time — to bottle up emotions and go on living — never allowed them to come to terms with their feelings.



And some still search for answers.



Robert Chiappetta, who survived the fire but lost his sister, Joan Anne, has spent the past 15 years obsessively researching a book about what happened at Our Lady of the Angels. Though no investigation ever found fault with the Catholic church, which ran the school, or with city fire inspectors, Chiappetta believes there was a widespread coverup.



"They had created a fire trap in there," he said, surrounded by court documents at his kitchen table in Elmwood Park. "People will see this was the crime of the century."



Chiappetta's parents, after searching several hospitals the night of the fire, found his sister's body near midnight in the Cook County morgue. She could only be identified by a gold chain around her neck, one her uncle had brought her from Italy.



In the weeks after the fire, after Mary and Max Stachura had buried their son, a nun from the school explained the statue Mark had been waving at his father. She gave Mary a similar one as a keepsake. Mary still has that statue. It's kept in a trunk in her apartment — like memories of that day, it's always nearby, just not in plain sight.



Sitting recently with her younger son, John, who was in a building at the school that didn't burn that day, Mary showed a cherished, sepia-toned class picture of Mark. She still has the shirt and tie he wore in the picture.



"I told John that when I die, bury that shirt and that tie with me," she said. "My little boy will always be with me."



rhuppke@tribune.com