Cornell Alumni News - eCommons@Cornell - Cornell University
Cornell Alumni News - eCommons@Cornell - Cornell University
Cornell Alumni News - eCommons@Cornell - Cornell University
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Fireman on ladder searches for victims in Res Club fire.<br />
Basement hallway provided exit. No one in cellar died.<br />
The <strong>University</strong><br />
• Eight students and an assistant professor<br />
died of asphyxiation in a pre-dawn<br />
fire April 5 at the university-owned <strong>Cornell</strong><br />
Heights Residential Club. Fire in<br />
the basement floor produced a stifling<br />
smoke that filled the building and caused<br />
the deaths. Several persons suffered<br />
burns. Four students were hospitalized,<br />
along with several neighbors and rescue<br />
personnel. Some sixty residents of the<br />
thirteen-year-old building escaped alive.<br />
The basement and first floors of the<br />
building were home for the Six-Year<br />
A Trasic Fire<br />
PhD program. Three of the dead and<br />
one of the injured were in the PhD program<br />
[NEWS, October 1966], as was the<br />
professor who died, John A. Finch, PhD<br />
'64, English, one of three resident faculty<br />
advisers. Upperclass and graduatestudent<br />
women occupied the top floor.<br />
The dead students are: Martha Beck<br />
'69; Meimei Cheng, Grad; Peter Cooch<br />
'69; Carol Lynn Kurtz, Grad; Anne Mc-<br />
Cormic '67; Jeffrey W. Smith '69; Jennie<br />
Zu-Wei Sun '68; and Johanna Christina<br />
Wallden, Grad.<br />
Professor Finch first reported the smell<br />
of smoke to the university Safety Division<br />
shortly after 4 a.m. Fire companies<br />
arrived on the scene within minutes from<br />
Ithaca and the Village of Cayuga<br />
Heights, in which the building is located,<br />
just off Triphammer Road across from<br />
the old Ithaca Country Club golf course.<br />
More than a week after the fire, there<br />
was still no clear picture of how or<br />
where the fire started, or how it came<br />
to produce the great volume of acrid<br />
smoke that was to prove fatal to nine<br />
persons. Some residents fled through<br />
hallways, but many made their way out<br />
of windows or were rescued through<br />
windows by firemen and others.<br />
Professor Finch, who was in charge<br />
of the Six-Year PhD group in the building,<br />
was one of several persons identified<br />
as heroes in rescue efforts. He<br />
went back into the building, was later<br />
overcome by smoke and died in the<br />
Broken windows allowed escape from the 13-year-old <strong>Cornell</strong> Heights Residential Club.—Ithaca Journal photos Ralph Baker