‘I can still smell the flesh, the fire and the smoke’
By bob okon bokon@stmedianetwork.com February 18, 2012 4:58PM
Angel Wright Stevens places red roses at the grave of her six brothers and sisters at Calvary Cemetery in Lockport Friday, February 17, 2012. Her siblings were killed in a Romeoville house fire on February 17, 1958. | Brett Roseman~Sun-Times Media
Putting together the pieces
The Wright family home in Romeoville was pieced together from two semitrailers with an addition put on later.
They were a poor family with nine children. But why they lived where they did was the subject of a letter Desolina Belle Wright, the mother of the family, wrote to the old Joliet Spectator newspaper 11 months before the fire that killed six members of the family Feb. 17, 1958.
She wrote about how hard it was to find a house to rent.
“Why do we stay out here? Because some landlords judge people alike instead of trying to help correct children pleasantly and see the beauty part of them,” Wright wrote.
She pleaded for someone to help them find a house with water and electricity, neither of which they had.
Connie Piazza, a reference librarian at the Joliet Public Library, found a Spectator story about the letter while helping Angel (Wright) Stephens learn more about the tragic fire that took the lives of six of her brothers and sisters.
“I’ve been bombarding her with questions,” Stephens said.
Stephens has been grateful for the help provided by Piazza and many others since she began calling in December to learn more about what happened to her brothers and sisters.
“We didn’t even know where their bodies were buried,” she said.
Now, she is building a binder of information that includes a newspaper photograph of schoolchildren serving as pall bearers for the funeral.
Desolina Belle and Carl Wright moved their family to East St. Louis some time after the fire. Both have since passed away.
On Friday, Stephens and her two other surviving siblings from that fire — Carl Wright Jr. and Marilyn Sukovaty — came back to Romeoville for the first time. They visited the children’s graves at Calvary Cemetery in Lockport and met many of the people who helped them learn more about what happened back then.
They met in the Romeoville municipal building that houses a small museum run by the Romeoville Area Historical Society at 10 Montrose Drive.
Nancy Hackett said she had been recently organizing records and old newspaper articles about Romeoville fires.
“A week later, Angel called and said, ‘Do you have anything on that fire?’ ” Hackett said. “I said, ‘Oh yeah! I just saw it.’ ”
The family lost everything in the fire. The surviving children did not even have photographs of their lost brothers and sisters.
But now they have a photograph of Betty Lou, who was 16 when she died in the fire. The photograph is from the 1958 Lockport Township High School yearbook and was sent by Nancy Boeschel.
Boeschel, a classmate of Betty Lou’s, lived near the Wrights around the time of the fire. Her brother, Leonard Heeg of Lockport, urged Stephens to come back to town when he received a phone call from her.
Heeg had come to the house when firefighters were trying to put out the blaze. In 1993, he had told The Herald-News how he could not forget seeing the bodies of the children who died in the fire.
Stephens called Heeg after receiving the article.
“As soon as I said Angel Wright, he said. ‘I’ve got to meet you,’ ” Stephens said.
Stephens received more information from another of Heeg’s sisters, Lois Velemir, who remembers the night of the fire. She also received records from St. Dennis Catholic Church in Lockport, where Stephens and other children in the Wright family were baptized.
Piazza said she is still trying to find photographs of the family.
What happened was so long ago, and the survivors were so young that even their memory of where they went to school is not clear. But they believe the younger children were going to Valley View School, which was still new in Romeoville at the time.
Anyone with information is encouraged to call Hackett at the Romeoville Area Historical Society at 815-886-0273.
Article Extras
Updated: March 20, 2012 8:18AM
ROMEOVILLE — They lost six brothers and sisters in that horrible fire 54 years ago at their Romeoville house. But the surviving family members moved downstate, and they didn’t return.
Until Friday.
It was the anniversary of the Feb. 17, 1958, fire in the house near the Illinois & Michigan Canal, in an area of town now called Old Romeoville.
For the first time Friday, the three surviving Wright children visited the graves of their brothers and sisters, revisiting the haunting tragedy.
Unlike her siblings, Angel (Wright) Stephens of Collinsville hasn’t tried to forget. Since December, she has been making phone calls and compiling newspaper accounts. It was only through that effort that the three surviving children learned that their brothers and sisters were buried in Calvary Cemetery in Lockport.
Reading a Herald-News retrospective written 35 years after the fire, Angel learned that former neighbor Leonard Heeg is still troubled by memories of the fire, though he is now 75 and lives in Lockport.
Angel thought it would help them all to get together.
‘You never forget it’
Just a 6-week-old baby when the fire happened, Angel has heard the story of how she was carried out of the house by her father but has no memory of it.
“I’ve talked about the fire my whole life,” she said. “I don’t remember the fire. But I’ve lived it.”
Not remembering is probably a good thing.
Her brother, Carl Wright Jr., 65, of Pauline, Ohio, and sister, Marilyn Sukovaty, 60, of Glen Carbon, both have their own terrible memories of that night.
Carl does not remember much. What he does remember explains why he had to be urged by Angel to come back to Romeoville.
“I can still smell the flesh, the fire and the smoke,” he said. “That’s why I didn’t want to come up and relive it all again.”
Carl fell on the floor while trying to escape the flames. He was told his father, Carl Sr., got him out, and he remembers waking up outside by a tree.
He also has a vivid memory of his father driving them to Silver Cross Hospital. His father’s hands were still so hot from the fire that the flesh melted onto the steering wheel during the drive, he said. People at the hospital had to cut into his skin to pry his hands loose.
It wasn’t until recently that Marilyn could look at fire, even in a movie. She survived the blaze with only singed hair because her mother, Desolina Belle Wright, pushed her out of the house and away from the flames, protecting her with hands that had been burned in the blaze.
But Marilyn has her own terrible memory of watching her sister Margaret running back into the house.
“My mom said, ‘Don’t go.’ She said, ‘I have to go in for my sister.’ She was going back for Betty. They were buddies. As soon as she went in the door that’s when the house blew up,” she said Friday.
Two large propane tanks exploded that night, killing Margaret, who was 10, and sealing the fate for the other children still in the house: Betty, 16; James Michael, 15, Delores, 8; Catherine, 3; and Joseph, 16 months.
Both Marilyn and Carl could not hold back tears at times while visiting with Heeg and others at the Romeoville Area Historical Society.
Heeg had lived near the Wright home and would talk with the kids at times. The night of the fire, he came to see what was happening.
He was standing next to a firefighter spraying water on the building when a wall came down and a child came tumbling down to Heeg’s feet. It was 3-year-old Catherine. Four other children were lying dead in their beds.
“I couldn’t stand it,” Heeg said. “The smell of burnt flesh you don’t ever want to smell. That is the worst smell.”
“You never forget it,” Carl added.
‘You just learn to live with it’
Not all their memories of their time in Romeoville are terrible.
Carl remembers how he used to run off to the nearby canal “to catch the baby ducks.” He also has a long-ago memory of a kindergarten teacher. “I fell in love with her,” he said.
Marilyn remembers setting up a cot in the nearby woods and waiting for the wildlife to come see her for food.
“I would hold my hand out with a sandwich in it and feed the deer and rabbits, too,” she said. “I had a blast. I was a tomboy.”
The fire still hurts but it didn’t destroy their lives.
“You just learn to live with it. You don’t get over it,” Marilyn said.
But she has come to grips with her own fear of fire. She even put out a fire in a hog house when living on a farm several years ago.
“I have a fireplace now,” Marilyn said, “I light it twice a year — on Christmas and New Year’s.”
They all have had their own families. Marilyn and Angel even took in foster children and adopted.
Carl had a very troubled youth, but he straightened things out by the age of 20, got married, went to work at a General Motors foundry in Ohio, raised a family and retired from the company.
Showing Heeg that they all made it was one of the reasons for coming back to Romeoville, Angel said.
“I thought we needed to put some closure to this, and let him know we all came out of it, and we’re OK,” she said.
“I’ve enjoyed talking with these people,” Heeg said. “I really have.”
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