I got a surprise Facebook message from Bill Ewinger in Burlington recently. He was in the same class at St. Paul’s as my older sister, Tracey, when we were growing up.
Bill told me that he had found a newspaper article about a fire that happened in the basement of Sutter Drug Co. on Oct. 9, 1939. I didn’t know about that fire, and Bill was kind enough to mail to me a copy of the article. (He came upon it when he and a friend were going through microfilm at the Burlington Public Library.)
The headline of the article is “BAD START ON BLAZE DRIVE,” which made me think it was talking about a street called “Blaze Drive.” But the subhead is “Prevention Week Opened with Five Alarms Including $1,000 Loss.”
So the headline writer was trying to be clever with “Blaze Drive” but it didn’t work. As someone who has had to write headlines in her career, I cringed.
But here’s the meat of the article:
Burlington made anything but an auspicious start for Fire Prevention week, with five weekend alarms answered — including one at the Sutter Drug Co. store at Third and Jefferson streets this morning. The loss at the drug store, where there was a basement fire at 2:40 a.m. today, may reach $1,000, Fire Chief R.P. Collatt said. Both he and Joseph Sutter of the drug company were at loss to establish definite cause of the fire. Most of the loss, however, was from water.
Fire In Basement
The blaze, apparently starting under the basement steps at the extreme north end of the store, set off the sprinkler system in spouting water automatically sent in a fire alarm.
Mr. Sutter said all basement rubbish is kept in metal containers with lids, and was of the opinion a can of wax or paint may have been responsible. Only slight fire damage to the basement or stock was reported. The loss was covered by insurance.
The article goes on to document some other small blazes that happened around Burlington; two dump fires, one grass fire, and a car fire.
This wasn’t the first fire that has happened to Sutter Drug while in the Tama Building. The most dramatic one that I know of happened in 1915 and you can read my post about it here.
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