The Fire at the Church
August 9, 2019

Firefighters attempt to extinguish the blazing roof of St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church in St. Louis on April 28, 1994. (Renyold Ferguson/Post-Dispatch)
ALAN writes:
When I learned that the roof of Notre Dame Cathedral had burned, it reminded me of two other events in south St. Louis from long, long ago.
Sometime in or around 1959, I was awakened by a thunderstorm in the middle of the night. All of us were asleep. Upon awakening, I glanced in the direction of our bathroom and saw that the light was on. That puzzled me because I knew no one could be in there. I awakened my mother and she got up to investigate. Indeed no one was there, but the ceiling light had come on and puffs of smoke were emerging from the light fixture. She immediately called the fire department and men arrived within a few minutes. One or more of them climbed onto the roof to assess the situation. They concluded that lightning struck the roof and caused the light to come on. They made sure that there was no potential for fire. In the middle of the night and during an intense thunderstorm, it all seemed rather scary to a 10-year-old boy. Of course we were extremely fortunate.
I was attending St. Anthony of Padua parochial school in those years. One of my classmates was a boy named Larry, whose family lived a few houses down from ours. We often played baseball at Marquette Park, two blocks away. I remember a day in October 1958 when Larry and I walked to school together and talked about a spooky TV program we had watched the night before, called “The House of Flying Objects”. (It should have been called “The House of Teenage Pranksters”.) Larry’s father was a firefighter.