Penny Werle huddled close to a borrowed radio as she listened to news of the fire that destroyed her home.
“Oh Jesus, all my friends were there,” she sobbed as she sat wrapped in a bedsheet at a nearby transient hotel. “Half of me wants to worry about myself, and half of me wants to scream about friends who have died.
“I know it didn’t look like much, but it was a community. . . . There has got to be a place for these people to go. These people have nothing.”
Tuesday’s early-morning fire at the Paxton Hotel left more than 100 working poor and welfare recipients with even bleaker lives than they had before.
Many lived on Social Security checks. Others held menial jobs as security guards and custodians. Some were drug addicts. Others were physically or mentally disabled or suffering illnesses. All were barely scraping by, and everything they had was stored in their small rooms.
For these people, numbered among the city’s forgotten, the meager furnishings of the Paxton Hotel were what they called home.
As firefighters probed the charred wreckage of that home, Werle and others tried to piece their lives back together with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
Werle, an amputee and a diabetic, had lived on the Paxton Hotel’s first floor near the laundry room for the last two years. The only things she was able to save from the blaze were her wheelchair and her cat, Booger, whom she stuffed in a pillowcase as she fled the burning building. She said the cat had been bought for her by some neighbors down her hall.
“Is there a God?” she asked a visitor. “Why did this happen to those people? God in heaven, to burn alive!”
Robert T. Berry, president of Merryman Hotel Corp., which is connected to the Paxton’s owners, referred many of those made homeless to other transient hotels also linked to Merryman.
Twenty-four people, including Werle, were sent to the Bel-Ray Hotel, 3150 N. Racine Ave. Nine went to the Elinor Hotel, at Belmont and Cicero Avenues, and five went to the Wilson Windsor Apartments, at 936 W. Wilson Ave.
Volunteer groups also stepped in to meet the crisis.
Twenty-five people were to be housed at the Lawson YMCA, 30 W. Chicago Ave. Roberta Seifer, executive assistant at Lawson, said the American Red Cross would provide food and pay for the rooms for at least the next two days.
Vicki Kastory, spokeswoman for the Chicago-area Red Cross office, said her organization had spoken with about 100 people from the hotel who needed emergency shelter, food and clothing. She said Red Cross volunteers also had spoken with survivors to see if some needed anything immediately.
“Prescriptions, dentures or clothing,” she said, “Things they need to have right away.”
And she said social workers were being brought in “to help people cope with the aftermath.” She said the Red Cross also would help people find housing and possibly help with rents.
Despite the help, survivors of the fire spent Tuesday in shock as they cataloged the loss of friends and belongings.
Robert Crowder, 61, had nothing left but a small pile of grime-covered clothes and a couple of dollars as he inhaled oxygen in the emergency room of Illinois Masonic Medical Center.
Crowder, a former staff announcer who used the professional name of Del Clark for WLS radio in the 1950s, said all of his business records and audio tapes were destroyed.
Crowder, who now announces radio commercials for a living, splits his time between a place in Holland, Mich., and the Paxton. He said his quiet life at the hotel was ruined when the billowing smoke came pouring into his room Tuesday.
Crowder said that though he had vague worries about his own safety, “it’s one of those things that you never think will happen to you. I sure as hell will check it out next time.”
Hillery Hayes, wearing his postal worker’s uniform, escaped by leaping from his fourth-floor window to a nearby tree, then sliding down to safety.
“I got real scared,” he said. “I knew it was a fire and I was on the fourth floor. Fortunately, there was a tree four or five feet from my window.”
Hayes, 38, said he left everything behind, including his television and VCR.
“I just got it out of the pawn shop last week,” he said grimacing. “Should have left it in there.”
Theodis Willrich, 34, who lives on Social Security, was awakened by the smoke. Living on the first floor, he was able to grab a gym bag of clothes and a jacket before heading out into the hall to bang on doors and wake his neighbors. Many rushed out in their underwear, he said.
William Payne, 45, living in Room 416, was among the unlucky ones who lost everything.
Payne, a custodian at the Ft. Dearborn post office, had just enough time to put on an old coat and shoes before he was forced to hang from the window, screaming for help.
“I waited there until I couldn’t stand the smoke anymore,” he said.
Dropping three floors, he landed on a garbage bin. After rolling off, he staggered to the street, leaving everything he owned, mostly clothes, behind.
Zack Carter, 36, a 6-foot, 6-inch tall security guard, said all of his specially tailored large clothes and size 16 shoes were destroyed.
“That stuff isn’t easy to replace,” he said.
Carter said he moved to the Paxton six months ago because it was a quiet building in a relatively safe neighborhood.
“I didn’t think that anything like that would happen there because of the elderly who lived there,” he said. “There were no young kids playing the radio all the time. It was quiet. It was safe.”
How to help victims
People wondering about relatives who had been living at the Paxton Hotel can call the American Red Cross at (312) 440-2000.
Anyone interested in making donations to the Red Cross fund for victims of fires can write to the American Red Cross, 43 E. Ohio St., Chicago, Ill. 60611-2794. The fund provides help for victims of any Chicago fire.
