Never Let Them See You Cry (17 page)

Yell “Help!” or scream “Rape!” and expect to be ignored. Yell “Fire!” and a crowd comes running. Fire kindles something deep and universal in the human soul. Fires are news.

Hair and clothes smelling of smoke, sinuses clogged, head pounding, I have covered hundreds of fires and had to run to escape or to rescue my car when the flames spread or explosions began. Paint factories and lumberyards catch fire a lot—so do failing businesses and old hotels. So do homes and high-rises.

It is healthy and advisable for reporters to view with suspicion warnings from most government officials, but it pays to listen to firefighters. At one burning paint factory, I argued with a fire department chaplain who insisted I retreat from the scene. He warned that explosions might occur inside the building and we could all be showered by dangerous debris. As I poohpoohed the hazard and refused to budge, an explosion rocked the building. Debris rocketed into the air and I ran for my life.

After that, I started wearing a hard hat at fires.

Until fire hoses were trained on me, I did not appreciate their effectiveness.

On my first newspaper job, at the Miami Beach
Daily Sun
, where I shot my own photographs, I always wore dresses and high heels to work. That was before I knew better.

Fire erupted at a major oil facility on the MacArthur Causeway. Fuel-fed flames towered over the bay, making it a photogenic blaze. I rushed about, shooting the inferno and the firefighters at work. A tall construction crane stood abandoned nearby. Better pictures could be shot from that vantage point, I thought, and in my miniskirt and heels, I clambered awkwardly up into the cab.

The view was ideal. The fire, unfortunately, seemed to be spreading fast—in my direction. “Better wet down that crane!” the fire chief shouted. Before I could protest, they did. All I could do was try to shield the camera as, from all directions, pounding streams of water pummeled me about inside the cab. A TV camera crew caught the whole thing, much to their delight.

Fire attracts all sorts of people. Stu Kaufman was a little boy when he was chased away from a fire and told to go stand behind a rope with the media. “This is not your business,” the man in charge sternly told him. Stu never forgot. He swore that someday it would be his business. He would run to fires, and they would tell him everything.

They did.

When he was a successful young businessman and reporter, he gave it all up to become public information officer for the Metro Fire Department. They gave him a beeper and the chance to do exactly what he had wanted to since childhood. He went to all the fires, disasters, plane crashes and major catastrophes and was told everything. He loved it. He went to bed at night afraid his beeper would
not
go off during the wee hours.

Relations between the press and Dade County's close-mouthed and sometimes sullen firefighters were traditionally poor. Stu taught them that they had nothing to hide. People love firemen. Stu thrived on excitement. He loved heroes and wanted to tell the world about them. When planes crashed, when a busload of migrant workers sank roof down in a deep canal, when an exploding cocaine lab shattered a quiet neighborhood, when rescue workers used the “jaws of life” to cut a dozen injured motorists out of a multi-car pile-up, Stu was always there.

Unlike many people designated to deal with the press, he had heart, compassion and sense enough to recognize a good story. He also knew that when the department was wrong it was far more effective damage control to tell the truth right up front, rather than to lie and have the scandal snowball into a far bigger story as the outraged press tracked down the truth. Stu loved firefighting and reporting, passions that made him the best at his job.

He was still a radio newsman when I first encountered him. A wealthy couple was kidnapped by a man named Thomas Otis Knight. He forced them to drive to their bank and withdraw money. The victim asked bank officials for help and they summoned the FBI. The victim took the money the kidnapper demanded and returned to his wife, held at gunpoint in the car. The kidnapper and his victims drove off with the FBI right behind them.

Everybody assumed that once the gunman got the money, the couple would go free. The agents decided a rescue attempt would risk the safety of the victims. They decided simply to trail the car until the couple was released, then swoop down on the kidnapper. Agents followed the car until they realized it was taking too long. It all went bad in a remote area, on a desolate road. Knight shot both victims in the head, executing them before the agents could make a move. The killer fled into the underbrush.

It was my day off, and I had friends in for lunch. They went hungry.

Every reporter in the world seemed to be at the crime scene. Frustrated cops, dogs and FBI agents combed the brush in an intense manhunt. Reporters, photographers, and TV news crews gathered to interview the local agent in charge of the FBI.

Suddenly a cop shouted, “I've got ‘im!” He had flushed out the killer, who had literally burrowed into the ground. Everybody ran, leaving the FBI chief standing alone, his mouth still open. Leading the stampede of running reporters was Stu, pounding after the cops and the guns and the dogs, tape-recorder mike clenched in his fist, breathlessly reporting as he ran. “They got ‘im! They got ‘im!” he shouted. He was not on the air live of course, but when it was broadcast later, his tape had the spellbinding urgency of news happening in your face. I loved it. Who
is
this guy? I thought.

I next saw him at a cargo-plane crash. Surly firefighters usually banned us from such scenes, but at this one, Stu seemed in charge. “Right this way,” he said and led me up to the wreck. Who
IS
this guy? Still a radio reporter, he had become friendly enough to convince fire officials that what they needed was a better attitude toward the press. Next thing I knew, he was working for them, and he certainly made a reporter's life easier. Always accessible, he would put us in touch with rescuers at the scene, with the fire captains in charge, with the hero who revived a baby with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. When he saw people in need of help, he made us aware of the story.

His energy and commitment were clear away from the fire scenes as well. He arranged funerals for fallen firefighters, friends and heroes. One fireman was driving his wife to a movie when he stopped to help a woman whose car had knocked down a power pole. He was electrocuted. A fire department paramedic drowned trying to save a girl trapped in a submerged car. A lieutenant died in a burning warehouse, another in the crash of his rescue truck while speeding to a false alarm. Stu cried every time.

When firemen told him how they hated to drive away after a house fire, leaving a burned-out family huddled on their front lawn at three
A.M
. with no place to go, he established a program called After the Burnout. Stu or a department chaplain would arrange to have the damaged property boarded up and coordinate with the Red Cross for shelter. Thanks to Stu, no burned-out family is left alone in the night.

After a teenage-arson epidemic, Stu set up Dade County's largest summer employment program for underprivileged youngsters. The kids wore shirts with official patches and went door to door, teaching their neighbors about smoke detectors, the importance of family escape plans and the dangers of children home alone. Stu knew that the best people to deal with neighborhood problems are neighborhood people. As important as the pay was the youngsters' sense of pride and self-worth. Many of them work for major corporations today.

Stu forgot no one. Every Sunday morning he and his children would visit headquarters to share a sack of bagels with the “unsung heroes”: the fire department dispatchers.

Stu's official code designation was Staff 10. He was driving his radio-equipped county car to an airport incident one day when he heard an injury call: “A small child fell through a television set.” The address that followed was his own.

He spun around on the highway median and raced toward home and family. Pedal to the floor, he heard a paramedic who had arrived at the scene. ‘Tell Staff 10 to slow down. It's just a small cut.”

Stu even issued beepers to reporters, so Dispatch could alert us to major blazes. News agencies gave him their private frequencies so he could guide their photographers and reporters around traffic and police roadblocks to reach fires and disasters the fastest. Metro-Dade was the first fire department to set up its own photo van and shoot its own video. News photographers and TV cameramen taught firefighters how to shoot the best pictures until they arrived. A fireman shot still photos and video, then shared his pictures with the media. The van was equipped with a video recorder so footage could be copied and distributed.

Stu gave firefighters' discarded bunker gear to news photographers. He knows the best pictures are shot heading into the flames, over the shoulder of a firefighter using a hose. The resulting camaraderie sometimes saw photographers put down their cameras to help drag hoses. Stu set up a daylong news-media fire college for reporters—so we could experience what it was like to be firefighters and understand the job better when we wrote about it. We wore firefighters' gear, climbed tall ladders and ran in and out of burning buildings wearing oxygen tanks.

Nobody ever said you had to be rational to do this job.

Stu Kaufman was the best thing that ever happened to fire-fighting in Dade County. Too bad good things never last. After ten years, Stu had swallowed enough smoke, seen enough excitement and lost enough sleep. He felt that he owed more of his time and earning power to his wife and children and left to make big bucks in the corporate world.

I never smell smoke without missing him.

In a world full of strange people, firebugs are among the strangest.

Take June Ann Olsen, a fresh-faced blonde who once burned down an entire Miami city block.

She would lure men, including a famous TV producer, into motel rooms. After they were undressed, she would slosh lighter fluid onto the bed and torch it. “You ought to see them run,” she told me. “It's pretty funny sometimes.” During the afterglow, she would telephone her favorite fire captain, Frank Fitzpatrick, for long chats. She would flirt, and he would try to talk her into surrendering. Sent off to an institution, she was later released. “I'm lonesome,” she said. “Maybe it's not too late to start a new life.” That was the last time we talked. Next time I saw her name, it was on a police report; she was dead.

Though many amateur arsonists die trapped by their own flames, June Ann Olsen did not.

She was struck and killed by a train.

Nothing about arson is funny—or harmless.

A flaming inferno, at three
A.M
. on a Friday the thirteenth, killed three people and severely burned six others at a small South Beach hotel. The death toll would have climbed far higher except for the efforts of the two heroic rookie cops who arrived first. One made a perfect catch of a baby dropped out a third-floor window surrounded by flames. Several other infants and small children were dropped by adults who leaped after them. Two men hurtled horizontally out third-floor windows across a five-foot alleyway and crashed through the third-floor windows of the hotel next door. One of them, a tractor-trailer driver, said he hesitated until he saw someone else escape through the window next to his.

“He put me to shame,” he told me later. “That little, skinny Latin guy flew across the alley like Superman, with flames shooting right behind him.” He followed, into the next hotel, dashed down three flights to the street and darted right back into the burning building. “I had to go back,” he said. “People were in there. I could hear them. They were my friends.”

Three policemen stopped him on a smoky second-floor landing. “You can't go up there,” they said.

“Somebody has to, you or me,” he told them. He could hear Rita, a neighbor, and Bessie, a senior citizen, screaming for help. He told the officers where the women were. Firemen in oxygen masks led the women to the stairwell a short time later, and he and the officers helped them to the street

Among the dead were a mother and her daughter, who was visiting from Cuba. They had not seen each other in thirteen years. Reunited at last, they died together, trapped in a blazing third-floor hallway. The wind-whipped blaze took a hundred firefighters hours to control. An entire block was evacuated as the flames threatened to spread. Sixty were left homeless, with nothing.

The deaths were murder. Two men ran from the hotel and sped away in a white car moments before fire erupted. Gasoline used to ignite the blaze had been siphoned from a car parked behind the building.

Some people set fires for revenge, some out of greed, some because it excites them sexually.

Others ignite the spark to cover up some other crime or sometimes to commit suicide. I have little sympathy for careless smokers, false-alarm setters, or thoughtless would-be suicides, like the man who torched the rooming house where he lived. He left his neighbors homeless and wound up in the hospital, along with three Miami firemen injured fighting the blaze.

Amateur arsonists agreed to burn a Miami Beach beauty salon for a thousand dollars. Beginning at the front, they poured fifteen gallons of gasoline throughout the shop, working their way toward the back. Drifting gas fumes reached the back door before they did, and a pilot light in a water heater near the door ignited them. A thirteen-year-old newsboy selling papers across the street heard the salon windows explode and saw the building tremble. The million-dollar fire destroyed a block-long row of stores: a florist, a pizza restaurant, a bar, a shoe repair, a barber shop, and a pet store full of animals, all of whom perished.

The first policeman to arrive found one of the arsonists slumped against a car, moaning, his clothes burned off. “I've seen people burned before,” Officer Kenneth Miller said. “But not like this. He had no ears, no nose, no fingers. He kept saying he couldn't breathe—because his nose was gone.” The young man reached out his hand to Officer Chuck Hayes, pleading for help. When Hayes took it, the man's skin came off in his hand.