NEWS

Roosevelt Hotel Fire: 22 people died in blaze, but heroes prevented that total from being even higher

Matt Soergel
The Times-Union Joan Sloan, the wife of Florida basketball coach Norm Sloan, and her children, Mike and Leslie, hang out of their 12th-floor room waiting to be rescued.

The phone in Miss America's hotel suite rang and rang that morning, but the 21-year-old beauty stayed in bed. It could wait.

She figured it was the operator with a wake-up call, and after a big Gator Bowl game the day before, she wanted to sleep as long as she could.

Then she heard sirens. Then she smelled smoke.

There would be no more sleeping in, not at the Roosevelt Hotel that morning.

Survivor Michael Sloan's first-person account of the fire.

On Dec. 29, 1963, fire broke out in the ballroom of the 13-story Roosevelt, one of downtown Jacksonville's most grand hotels, on Adams Street just west of Main.

The blaze never made it above the second floor, and no one ever figured out what caused it. But smoke and toxic fumes rushed up air shafts, choked hotel hallways and crept under doorways.

They were killers.

In the minutes to follow, hotel guests died in their beds, unable to draw breath. A woman plunged to her death in a desperate effort to escape her room on knotted-together bedsheets. Assistant Fire Chief James R. Romedy, 49, was among the firefighters who charged headlong into the smoke and worked their way up as far as the roof; he collapsed and died of a heart attack while rescuing guests on an upper floor.

On the street below, those who gathered could see a dead man, draped over an 11th-floor windowsill. They could see frantic guests, trapped in their rooms, leaning out of upper-story windows, towels over their faces.

People knocked out window screens and threw bedsheets from windows, stretching toward fire department ladders that could not reach them; some threw mattresses to the ground, ready to jump.

Woodrow Pruitt, a county patrol officer, drove his police car onto the sidewalk and pleaded through his microphone: Don't jump. "The firemen," he said, over and over, "are coming to get you."

Navy helicopters hovered just above the Roosevelt, taking to safety those who had made it through the thick smoke to the roof.

In the confusion, Donna Axum, Miss America 1964, woke up her 39-year-old chaperone and went to their 10th-floor window. Fresh air. They needed fresh air.

The smoke grew thicker. The chaperone tried to find another window to open, but stumbled back toward Axum. "I can't see," she said. "I can't see."

Overcome, she slipped down from the windowsill. Miss America tried to hold her up, but couldn't. She could feel her chaperone breathing, but for how long?

Huddled there at the window, Axum thought of the president, shot dead in Dallas a few weeks earlier. She thought of the Titanic, sinking in the icy Atlantic. And she thought: "We're not going to get out of here alive."

A FATAL PLUNGE

On this cold, clear morning 50 years ago, the Roosevelt Hotel had 20 permanent residents and 479 guests, most of them in town for the Gator Bowl weekend.

North Carolina's football team walked all over Air Force 35-0 the day before, and there had been basketball games leading up to it as well. Prosperous businesspeople, journalists, sports writers, coaches, athletes and Miss America were staying at the Roosevelt.

The first alarm sounded at 7:45 a.m., while many were still sleeping off a long night of celebration.

In all, 22 people died - 20 from asphyxiation and carbon-monoxide poisoning. Also dead were Romedy, the firefighter, and Marion Curry, 43, identified as being from Greensboro, N.C., though lately living in Santiago, Chile.

She was the woman who slipped from her makeshift rope of bedsheets. She had been on the 11th floor, and many saw her fatal fall.

Carroll S. Barco, a Winter Park attorney, was one of those who witnessed it. As smoke grew, he knew he had to get his family out, out from their fifth floor room to the safety of a garage roof two floors below.

He linked together sheets from three beds. His youngest daughter, 7, was too terrified to move, so Barco tied the sheet around her and lowered her to safety. His two other children and his wife went next, before he tied the sheets to the bed and went out the window himself.

Once safe, he tried to discourage others higher up from doing what he'd done; he had seen what had happened to Curry.

"I'm sure thankful we were on the fifth floor," he told the press later that day.

STILL HOLDING HANDS

Murray Sherman was 78 and lived with his wife, Jean, on the 10th floor of the hotel. He'd run cocktail lounges and restaurants in New York, Chicago and Jacksonville. As a young man, he'd been a typesetter at newspapers in New York City; he was proud of that, and in retirement kept himself busy at the Jacksonville News Club, serving - as the Jacksonville Journal called him - as "custodian, caretaker, bartender and father confessor" for the ink-stained journalists there.

As smoke filled the Shermans' room, the couple leaned out the window, gasping for air. Hotel guest Jack Mohr, from Lumberton, N.C., could see them getting weaker.

Murray and Jean died there at the window. They were, the Journal noted, holding hands when they went.

DOWN THE DRAINPIPE

As choking black smoke filled his ninth-floor room, Gene Moon - a football fan from Graham, N.C., who'd celebrated his Tar Heels' victory into the early morning - looked out the window and saw firefighters hoisting extension ladders up the side of the hotel. They stopped short of his floor.

"We're really in trouble," Moon told his roommate, Tyson Johnson.

Looking for an escape route, he spotted it - a terra cotta drain pipe about three feet from his window. Johnson went down first - all the way to the ground. He was short, just 5-5, so Moon held Johnson's belt twisted around his wrist, so his friend wouldn't fall while reaching for the foot-wide pipe.

When it was Moon's turn, he slid down so fast that the friction wore a hole in his trousers. He landed in a narrow service alley.

He was safe. But his nightmare wasn't over: He could see his brother, his brother's wife and friends leaning out windows, gasping for air. From the ground, he could do nothing.

HEROES AND HELP

As word of the fire spread, survivors, many still in nightclothes, made it into the chilly streets. And Jacksonville went into action.

Churches took people in. Other hotels opened their rooms, no registration needed. Citizens lined up to give blood. People brought food and clothes.

And there were heroes working right at the hotel.

Robert Sherman, at his job in the hotel garage, heard a bellboy warning of a fire. Instead of fleeing, Sherman worked his way up stairways to the seventh floor, knocking on doors and warning dozens of guests. Smoke finally turned him back.

Bellboy William R. Hambry roused the guests on the third floor and held the elevator open until as many as possible could cram in. A thankful guest later sent him $1,000 and called him a hero.

A hotel maid - no one got her name - went from door to door, leading guests to a service elevator. As the doors opened to safety, the maid collapsed.

'LIKE SLEEPING BEAUTY'

Firefighter Robert C. Sorenson saw too much death that day. He saw dead people in bed, on the floor, or by a window. He saw a gigantic man in the hallway who'd passed out and died in the smoke. He saw firefighters lined up to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to their fallen comrade, Assistant Chief Romedy. And he saw a doctor pull out a pocketknife and cut a quick slit in Romedy's neck, an emergency tracheotomy.

Minutes later, the doctor pronounced him dead.

And Sorenson saw a young woman, in powder-blue pajamas, dead in her hotel room. Years later, he remembered: "She looked like she was Sleeping Beauty waiting for the prince to come to kiss her and wake her up. I stood there and just stared at her. And finally I left and went to another room."

OUT THE WINDOW

Owen Duncan of Pageland, S.C., was using his electric razor in the bathroom of his 12th floor room when he saw smoke pouring from the electrical outlet. He rushed to the hotel hallway, but black, acrid smoke turned him back. So he tied his wife to a blanket and lowered her to the window below, where two guests in that room hauled her in.

He followed, and soon all four of them swung down yet another floor lower, looking for someplace safer.

In the black smoke on the sixth floor, University of Florida basketball player Tom Baxley was separated from his teammates. Somehow, in the confusion, he ended up one flight higher, huddled in a room with strangers, a married couple.

He was struck by something odd: The husband and wife were nervous and, while waiting for firefighters, sitting there in the smoke, they lit up cigarettes and puffed away.

'A FINE BUNCH'

Though firefighters' ladders wouldn't reach high enough for all guests, that didn't stop Jimmy Dukes. The enterprising firefighter climbed up one of the 100-foot ladders, carrying another ladder with him, and put the two together.

Several people were able to scurry down the double ladders to safety.

"Talk about daring," said Battalion Chief Miles Bowers, now 87 and retired nine years. "Everybody thought he was crazy, but it worked."

Though Frank C. Kelly had retired as fire chief, he had been one of the first at the hotel after the alarms. He watched the men working, charging into the smoke, climbing all the way to the roof.

A reporter approached him that day and asked him how his men were doing. He approved. "They're a fine bunch," he said.

Hard to argue with that.

UP ON THE ROOF

Lt. Ural King's helicopter bounced and bucked in the updraft created by waves of heat rising off the Roosevelt. He hovered just a few feet above the roof, worried it wouldn't bear the weight of his copter if he touched down.

Mayor Haydon Burns had pleaded with the Navy to help, placing a call to Cecil Field at 8:15 a.m. Five minutes later, helicopters were in the air, from Cecil, from Jacksonville Naval Air Station and from Mayport.

King made four trips between the roof and a parking lot where ambulances waited. On top of the hotel, firefighters passed victims up to his helicopter. The first was unconscious. The last - Assistant Chief Romedy - was dead.

It was, King said later that day, "the hairiest spot I'd ever been in."

STAY AND PRAY

Joan Sloan leaned through the smoke coursing out of her 12th floor window. "Send us a ladder!" she cried. "Send us a ladder!"

The ladders couldn't reach, so the Sloans - Joan; her husband Norm, the University of Florida basketball coach; and their children, Mike, 10, and Leslie, 8 - stayed. And they prayed.

Just in case, they began making a rope out of sheets and blankets, wetting the knots to make them stronger. If they had to, they would try to make it down the side of the building, down to the ladders reaching toward them.

Twice the family tried to leave the room, but each time the suffocating smoke in the hallways turned them back.

Coughing, almost blinded, at one point Mike turned to his father, the coach. "Is this," he said, "what it feels like to die?"

HELP ARRIVES

A hard knock came on the door of the Sloans' suite. Norm Sloan opened the door. There was a firefighter, with a bright flashlight beam cutting through the black smoke.

Hold your breath as long as you can, he said, as Mike took his hand, the first link in a chain of hands that took in the whole Sloan family.

Down the stairs they went, finally making it to the lobby - where a fully decorated Christmas tree stood, untouched - and then into the street. As the mayor hugged her, Joan Sloan broke down in tears.

Saved, too, were the Duncans, who'd swung down two floors. Saved was Baxley, the UF basketball player, who was reunited with his teammates. Saved were the friends and family of Moon, the man who had slid down the drainpipe: They all escaped, though three were treated for smoke inhalation.

Moon wasn't hurt, but there were emotional scars: After the Roosevelt, while traveling extensively for AT&T, he insisted on first- or second-floor hotel rooms. And he always mapped out an escape route. Just in case.

A HERO IN THE SMOKE

A 19-year-old hero, just out of the Navy, gained the distinction of saving Miss America. Bill Fielden, the son of a Miami public-relations man traveling with the beauty queen's entourage, stumbled into her room and threw a wet towel over her head.

Then he led Axum and her chaperone across the hall, back to his family's room, where wet towels and blankets placed across the bottom of the door had kept most of the smoke out.

They sat tight and were eventually led out by firefighters. Axum, wearing a beaver coat, pajamas and slippers, salvaged just two pocketbooks and her Miss America crown.

Seven hours later, at a news conference at Baptist Memorial Hospital, Miss America told her harrowing story. She wore a white hospital gown and a plastic identification bracelet. She smiled as Fielden, her rescuer, leaned over and planted a kiss on her right cheek. She looked no worse for wear, and soon went to her next stop: Miami, and the Orange Bowl Parade on New Year's Day.

But the Roosevelt Hotel was not yet through with Miss America. On New Year's Eve, Miami doctors confined her to bed and ruled her out of all Orange Bowl activities. She had burns in her throat and nose. She still had to heal.

She is now Donna Axum Whitworth, 71, living in Fort Worth, Texas. She said that wherever she traveled as Miss America 1964, sounds of fire trucks outside her window left her shaking and petrified.

It took a long time for that morning at the Roosevelt to leave her.

"It will forever leave an indelible print on my mind," she said.

Matt Soergel: (904) 359-4082

Times-Union writer Sandy Strickland contributed to this report.