Thursday night the fire alarm in our condo went off about ten minutes after we went to bed and four seconds before I would have been fast asleep. I was out of it just enough to wonder where the alarm was coming from. My first thought was my cell phone, but the more conscious I became, the more I realized it was our bedroom alarm. I quickly determined there was no fire, but rather, the battery had failed. The standard “cheep-cheep” of a failed battery would have been nice. But no, we got a full-blown alarm. It consisted of three sets of three shrieking blasts.
We have a ten-foot trayed ceiling in our bedroom, so the replacement took a bit of work. I went to the garage, and retrieved our tallest stepladder, while Ruth searched for a new battery. Fortunately, we had both.
As I was climbing the ladder, the alarm in the guest bedroom yelled “FIRE! FIRE!” It was a woman’s voice I’ve never heard before. It appears the system is tied together so if one alarm goes off, the others yell out to other parts of the house.
The battery change took about fifteen minutes.
As I dozed off again, I had a dream about two alarms that went off during my eighth-grade year at Clara Barton Junior High. They were flashbacks to actual events. The first was what I initially thought was a standard drill. My classroom was on the top floor, and I happened to be the first student down the stairs. As I made the final turn to the exit door, I discovered it was blocked by a stack of furniture, and the assistant principal waving his hands and saying, “There’s no exit here. There’s a fire.”
I had to determine what happened next, retreat or carry forward. I immediately turned left, went down a few more steps, and led the group towards the shop area. The next exit was in the bowels of the building. We hit it at the center of the building, turned right, and I led the group back up a few steps, towards the main entrance, where we merged with another group of exiting students. We continued out and stopped on Main Street.
If it would have been an actual fire, the headlines of the Daily Tribune that day would have read, “Eighth Grade Student Leads Hundreds to Safety”. The article would have explained how I saved the day. It was a drill, so it never made the papers.
There was a real fire at Clara Barton later that year. The alarm went off like it had numerous times before. Everyone thought it was another drill until we looked across the parking lot adjacent to the gymnasium. We saw about three dozen boys exiting the locker room clad only in parts of their gym uniforms or wrapped in towels. The gym instructor pushed boy after boy out the door, throwing towels to several pantless guys. A dozen naked boys huddled behind parked cars.
Following the alarm everyone was sent home for the day. We learned later that an electrical fire had broken out in the ceiling of the boy’s locker room. Several guys were in the shower when the fire started. The quick-thinking instructor pulled the alarm and forced reluctant boys outside. Fortunately, no one was injured, but the school closed for the remainder of the day so a thorough examination, and the necessary repairs, could be made.
Both junior high alarms remain locked in my memory after sixty plus years.