Little Boy’s Cheery Words to Woman as Both Lay Amid Dead and Dying -- Scenes and Incidents
The incidents connected with Saturday nights awful tragedy are very many, and some of them very interesting. Here is one: A woman and a little boy, unknown the one to the other, were wedged in the jam close to each other, and unable to help themselves to a better position. Both were suffering. The woman was moaning and crying when the little fellow reached his hand over and touched her face and said: “Don’t cry; cheer up; we are sure to get out after a little. Don’t give up. Help will come.” After a time the woman was gotten out, but in telling the story later she said she could not tell certainly whether the boy was rescued alive or not, but she certainly hoped he had. That boy was a hero.
“Little Tim”,” son of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Ingram, of Chartiers avenue, who has been ill from the shock caused by being mixed up in the Opera House horror is recovering. “Tim” was in the gallery when the panic started, and came down to the landing, and was going on out into the crush when he was caught by Chief of Police Swan and given a clout and prevented from going any farther. The family and friends are thankful to Chief of Police Swan for what he did. His act probably saved to boy’s life.
R. I. Grant was in Pittsburg yesterday. He met W. S. Arbothnot of the Arbothnot-Stevenson company, who r4emarked that he was at sea when the wireless brought news of the disaster at Canonsburg. Mr. Arbothnot was returning from a trip aboard, and his vessel was a day or two’s run from New York when the message of the disaster was flashed from one of the wireless stations along the Atlantic coast.
People, most of them strangers, still visit the scene of the disaster, inspecting the stairway where the people were killed. There is really nothing to see that would indicate the horrible tragedy enacted there; but the people have read and heard so much about it that they are anxious to see just where the disaster occurred.
Frank Richards, an employee of The Notes, returned to work today. He was caught in the human maelstrom just inside the door and suffers from bruises and two fractured ribs. He was able to help get out the Notes extra Sunday, but later he suffered much pain and consulted a physician, when it was found that two of his ribs had been fractured. He was almost suffocated at one time, but succeeded in reaching the transom over the doors leading into the hallway at the foot of the stairs.
F, C, Dunlevy is operator at the Idle Hour theater, located a few doors east of the Opera House. It is located on the ground floor. Mr. Dunlevy said today: “The people got out of the Idle Hour in nice shape. There were nearly 400 people in the room when the Opera House panic occurred, but in thirty seconds everyone was out, and, so far as I have been able to learn, no one was injured. I was threading a film, when some one said the Opera House was afire. The people at once began to leave. I turned on the lights and in just half a minute by the watch that hung in front of me the hall was empty.” Later the Idle Hour became a temporary morgue instead of a place of amusement, some of the bodies being carried into it. The Idle Hour has been closed since, but will reopen tonight.
A Chartiers township man who was in the opera house Saturday night said he crawled under a seat when the rush began, and there he stayed until the panic was over. He concluded that one might just as well be burned as to be trampled to death by the crowd.
Rev. J. C. Kistler of the Houston United Methodist church in his sermon last Sabbath morning on Canonsburg’s Saturday night calamity, called attention to the fact that such catastrophes call out the best that is in men and women in the ways of sympathy. Mr. Kistler said that while he was on the streets of Canonsburg Saturday night, he came across a woman weeping bitterly. Going up to her he inquired whether she had lost some near and dear one. “No, “ she answered, “I have lost no one; I am crying for those who have.”