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Slow Death. As the blast began to settle into smaller, scavenger flames, firemen with blasting hoses moved into the narrow, unburned lobby and edged up into the fearful heat and stench of the upper floors.
In one bathroom, an asphyxiated father lay with his head in a shower while his wife sprawled nearby, a dead arm around two dead children. Farther on, a woman lay peacefully with her head on a window sill, her purse in one hand. In one room, an uncooked turkey lay in a pan; in another an abandoned canary sang; in dozens of others, unsinged bodies lay as though sleeping. Everywhere, except on the second, 14th and isth floors, which had been only slightly damaged, walls, floors and furniture were crisped, telephones melted into lumps, wash basins cracked. Toilet bowls, with the water heated to steam in their narrow necks, had exploded like flashcrackers.
By sunrise, hospitals were jammed with the injured and crazed. Some of the dead still lay in rooms or hallways, but most were in morgues. Many bodies were blackened, many without arms or legs. Most of those who had died by suffocation lay with distorted faces, lips bared over teeth. For them, death had come slowly.
As lines of relatives began their dazed hunt for telltale rings, scars, birthmarks or dental fillings, weary officials began gathering data. It was the worst U.S. hotel fire in history: 120 dead,* 5 missing, 89 injured. (Most of those saved had been rescued by ladder.) The fire, they reasoned, had started either on the third or fourth floors. How it had started, they did not know.
Back at the Winecoff, firemen still prowled through debris for victims. In the steamy, reeking tenth-floor hallway, they found the body of Frank Winecoff.
* Other major U.S. hotel fires: Newhall House fire in Milwaukee, 1883, 71 dead; La Salle Hotel fire in Chicago, June 5, 1946, 61 deads