A Good Day

 

 

Thomas and I did a fair amount of interviews in the Fall of 2013 when Cleveland Area Disasters came out. By the time we got to Dee Perry's Sound of Applause on the local NPR station I was pretty tired of being asked why did we choose to write on a topic that was so morbid.

I had decided before hand to try and spin the question into talking about all the heroes of Northeast Ohio, which in all honesty I had though a lot about while writing the book.

One of the stories I told on Sound of Applause that day concerned the East Ohio Gas Explosion. Now for those of you unfamiliar with that story, on October 20, 1944 two of the fours tanks storing liquified natural gas, located on East 61^st, exploded and leveled a neighborhood. The two blasted killed over 130 people and left another 600 homeless.

So when Dee started asking me about the explosions I started talking about how after two tanks went up, killing many of the East Ohio Gas employes, a good number of the facilities employees stayed on the job all through the night protecting the other two tanks and preventing them from exploding and making the disaster even worse. I talked about the heroism of these guys, who weren’t first responders but guys who carried lunch buckets to work and had no go reason to risk their lives for that neighborhood other than it was the right thing to do.

Later than week we work during a book signing at Visible Voice Books in Tremont, which has sadly since closed, gentleman about 75-80 came up to me at the signing and told me he wanted to thank me for the interview I had done on NPR. He said his Dad was one of those men who stayed on the job protecting that neighborhood and he had been reading stories and books about that explosion for years and I was the first person who ever talked about how his dad, along with his friend and co-workers, was a hero. He drove to the bookstore, knowing I'd be there, to thank me.

That was a good day.