Bugle boy: Fire safety issue spurred unusual drill measures 100 years ago

ARE CONDITIONS SAFE IN BANGOR SCHOOLS? asked a bold headline in the Bangor Daily News a century ago this month. A terrible fire on March 4, 1908, had destroyed a school in Collinwood, Ohio, killing 172 students, two teachers and a rescuer. A wave of panic swept the nation.

The BDN sent out reporters to find out just how safe local schools were. They had their work cut out for them. Bangor had more than two dozen schools. They ranged in size from the solid brick Palm Street School, which had 20 classrooms and nearly 900 students, to several old two-story wooden buildings with a classroom on each floor.

The schools in the Queen City were basically safe, Building Inspector George Cluff told the newspaper for its report, published on March 11. “I believe that the danger of a repetition of the Collinwood horror is very slight indeed,” he said. School buildings were rapidly being equipped with hoses. Steam boilers for heating had safety valves so they wouldn’t explode. “Consider the other precautions which have been taken – broad stairways, fire drills throughout the city and doors opening outward – and I think you will agree that the lives of our children are most carefully guarded.”

Two schools in particular, however, were singled out as unsafe by the newspaper. One of them was the brick Union Square School on Union Street where a wide central hallway with a “broken staircase” with two turns on every floor ran up through the middle of the building from the basement to the third floor. That presented an invitation for an inferno. Children attending classes in “the attic” could easily be trapped.

The other unsafe school was Bangor High. The wooden structure was located in Abbott Square on Harlow Street, now the site of a parking lot across from the Bangor Public Library. The school enrolled 600 pupils in a building built for 400. Principal Henry White feared panic could be a major problem in a fire.

The inquisition for the high school wasn’t over with this newspaper report. A chilling line in the story caused a few people to sit up and take notice: “No fire drills have been held in the school this year and it would be a case of each pupil looking out for himself or herself,” the reporter wrote. In fact, it was left unclear to what extent fire drills were held at any of the city’s schools.

Two weeks later, on March 24, a delegation of public officials including Mayor John Woodman paid surprise visits to the Union Square and Palm Street schools and to Bangor High School. They wanted to see fire drills. At the two elementary schools, the students were out of the buildings in “an almost incredibly short space of time,” said the Bangor Daily Commercial. The examination of Bangor High, however, turned into something on the order “more or less of a burlesque,” noted the Bangor Daily News.

“Principal White appeared and was requested by Mayor Woodman to sound the gong for the fire drill. The city’s executive was greatly astonished to learn that the school had practically no fire drill,” reported the Daily News. “However, the principal explained that in case of fire the teachers would be notified and the students had instructions to follow the teacher.”

White stated that if the gong was rung, as Woodman requested, the students would confuse it with the recess bell. Besides it could not be heard in the basement or on the school’s top floor. No details about how the teachers were to be notified of a fire were revealed.

The Commercial added to its report of the incident, “It is true that there is no way of giving a signal for a fire drill … except to shout. … The gong in the lower hall is not much larger than a good-sized doorbell.”

Calling the system “a slim excuse for a fire drill,” the mayor asked White a second time to ring the gong. The principal refused, saying it would be “a useless demonstration,” according to the Daily News. Woodman then ordered Building Inspector Cluff to install proper gongs in the building. “Judging by the attitude of the mayor, fire drills will hereafter be held in the school,” said the newspaper.

Publicly humiliated in the press, Principal White rallied. The next morning, he summoned reporters to the high school to see what may have been the oddest fire drill in the city’s history. “I have made arrangements now to have the signal given by sounding a bugle, which can be heard anywhere in the building. The bugle is in the hands of two boys, one during the first part of the session and the other during the last and the teachers know where they can be found. They are to carry the bugle with them all the time and this arrangement will be used ’til we get the fire gong that has been promised,” White told a reporter for the Commercial.

The bugle sounded. The building was emptied in one minute and 45 seconds. Two days later, the delegation of public dignitaries paid another surprise visit to see for themselves the results of Principal White’s bugle alarm system, and the mayor expressed himself as well pleased with the exhibition.

A skeptical Bangor Daily News reporter, however, wanted to know if this unorthodox system would be “a case of ‘Button, button, who’s got the button?'” Or bugle. He noted dryly that written on nearly every blackboard on the morning of the staged demonstration were the words “Look out for the fire drill; the bugle will signal,” or something similar.

White took the city by surprise early in April by resigning after 16 years as principal of Bangor High. He had long been critical of the size of the building and the effect of social pressures such as football and fraternities that distracted from the school’s academic mission. His departure was much lamented.

Three years later, the high school was destroyed along with the nearby Prospect Street School in a blazing inferno that leveled much of downtown Bangor. No gongs clanged or bugles sounded. It was a Sunday and no students were in attendance. A new high school was erected across Harlow Street, an imposing brick structure that took care of the overcrowding problem, Principal White’s chief safety concern, as well as much of the fire concern.

wreilly@bangordailynews.net