Dave Wood

I recently was impressed with a British film about the Nazi bombing of London, which scared the parents and provided a vicarious playground for their children, who excitedly waited for another air raid. You probably think kids would have better things to do, but looking back on my childhood, I think I understand….

Back in the 1940’s the gang I hung around with on Scranton Street experienced a conflagration that will go down in the annals of catastrophe right along with Nero’s fiddling while Rome burned, Mrs. O’Leary’s bovine that kicked over the lantern in Chicago; the Peshtigo fire and the great Cloquet (Minn.) fire: forest conflagrations that made Chicago’s fire look like a wiener roast.

That conflagration, of course, is Whitehall’s Great Tobacco Warehouse Fire of 1945.

The warehouse was a magnificent 3 ½ story red frame structure, located across Scranton Street from my grandparents’ big white house where I was residing. Located next to it were the huge Mobil Oil tanks full of gas and oil. Before World War II the warehouse had been used, logically, for the storage of leaf tobacco for the eventual manufacture of cigars. But when it burst into flames on that fateful day in 1945, we kids across the street had no idea of its highly flammable contents, but we were to find out soon enough.

Some said that careless kids had started the blaze, but the facts simply don’t support that thesis, because you see, none of us Scranton Street hoodlums had been smoking that Saturday—Grandpa Wood having caught Bergie, Bear-Puss, and me puffing up a Pack of Lucky Strikes in his garage the day before. Therefore, a moratorium on smoking had been declared, and we had spent the weekend whiling away our time trading comic books and fighting off what we figured was “the nicotine fits” Grandpa had been warning me about.

More than likely the fire was adult in origin.

Specifically, the fully-grown men who had boarded a steam locomotive in Green Bay, stoked it up, and engineered it past Whitehall, sparks flying, on its inevitable journey to Winona.

At any rate, as flames licked up the warehouse walls, we took our seats on Grandpa’s lawn, fresh with memories of seeing the RKO Pathe newsreel of the Galveston Bay oil fires the Sunday before at The Pix Theatre. As fire trucks from every town in the county arrived, our attention became riveted on the huge oil tanks next door and to the fact that the intrepid firemen were aiming their hoses at the dents in the tanks rather than the blaze itself. “WHY?”

“Because if those dents pop out, the tanks’ contents will explode, oil will wash over us and we’ll all be boiled alive,” said our paperboy Gordy Peterson, who knew EVERYTHING.

Grandma Wood wrung her hands. Probably wondered when last she had attended church. “Davey’s junior choir concert? but that wouldn’t count!” She wrung her hands some more. 

And none of us ruffians moved from the spot, for this was more exciting than last night’s showing of “Boston Blackie’s Mystery Rendezvous” starring Chester Morris at the Pix. Grandma told us that Blackie’s nemesis the inspector was played by her second cousin, Richard Lane. “His real name was Luther Johnson,” she confided.  

Fortunately, the firemen kept their cool as did the oil tanks. By the next week, all that remained of the warehouse was the stone and mortar foundation and the rubble. But what rubble! Rubble more precious than all the gold in King Solomon’s Mines.

Auto parts of all shapes and sizes! Perfect Circle piston rings and an honest-to-God airplane engine, bereft of wings and fuselage! Thus began the First Annual War Games of the Scranton St. Battalions (“We’re first! It’s our turn to get the engine...No you get the fuel tank fence...”)

See what I mean about the kids in London? The Limeys collected shrapnel from the Nazi Fokkers, and we collected slightly charred Perfect Circle piston rings and an occasional metal baling strap bale bereft of any tobacco. In case you’re still wondering, I want to repeat that we kids had nothing to do with the warehouse fire. As for the Great Icehouse Fire Behind the Feedmill, well that’s another story….