The Times

What I Learned From

A best-selling author covers his own fire for the benefit of LAST CHRISTMAS EVE just before suppertime I lit a fire in the living-room fireplace of our frame house in New Canaan, Conn., in order to take a chill off the room. As Virginia, my wife, served us supper buffet-style, her mother Ann sat wrapped in a blanket. Ann was recovering from a bout of pneumonia. The bundles of dry brush I had used as kindling plus some discarded outer gift wrappings and small logs made an intense blaze. In fact, there was soon such a roar that I commented uneasily that I had never heard such a sound before. I wondered if it was related to the fact that a few days earlier we had had the chimney vacuumed for the first time in nearly a decade. Perhaps this had widened the opening and greatly increased the draft. With a poker I spread the wood to try to reduce the intensity of the flame. About 15 minutes later our son Vance, then 17, went out the back door to go to a Christmas Eve party. He came running back in, shouting that the roof of our house was on fire. I dashed out to see. Great flames were lashing upward at least 8 feet high near the chimney. To this day we do not know if this fire started on top of the wood-shingle roof or below it in the attic. Later investigation, however, established that the chimney itself was not defective. Consternation gripped us all. I raced to the phone. Someone had mislaid the phone book, so I dialed the operator and said, "This is an emergency. Ring the fire department." It seemed a full minute before the connection was made. Meanwhile, our son Vance had seized the red, 18-inch-tall fire extinguisher by our kitchen and had lugged it up to the second-floor doorway to the attic stairway. He opened the door. Flames poured out. The stairway—and most of the attic—were a mass of flames. The stairway fire was aggravated by the fact that we had temporarily hung several hangers of suits and other clothing inside the door. By the time I arrived with a big kitchen kettle, Vance had the stairway flames under some control. I began hauling water in my kettle from the nearby bathroom and threw it up the stairway to try to douse the remaining flames and dampen down the general area with water. My throat was terribly dry. I assumed it was from panic, but it apparently also was due to the fact that fire sucks oxygen from the air, and such a deoxygenized atmosphere can fell you if you are not careful. EXPERTS on fire control suggest that we may have aggravated the fire in the attic by opening the atticway door. This action had let fresh air in to feed the flames. That may be, but I believe the fire would have got down into the main part of the house if Vance had not stopped it at that attic doorway. Flames already were licking through the panels of the door. (And the panels later crumpled under our touch.) Virginia, meanwhile, joined me in throwing water up the stairway. As fire trucks began arriving, Vance again had more presence of mind than the rest of us. He ran down and told the first driver where the nearest fire hydrant was, along the road at the lower side of our property. Many dozens of cars filled with people who had heard the fire siren or seen the sky light up began jamming this roadway and abandoning their cars. As a result, a good many minutes passed—in fact it seemed like hours—before a really solid stream of water was hitting the flames. Now we Packards had begun wondering what we could save in case everything was lost. What do you try to save first in case of a fire? When the fire first was shouted to our attention, our 11-year-old daughter Cindy raced for our parakeet and dog. A few moments later Virginia remembered to call a neighbor to come take Mother to a safe, warm spot. After the firemen arrived I thought of the documentation and other working papers for the book, "The Waste Makers," which I was then writing. Where to put them? There was a 3-inch layer of snow outside. I grabbed a blanket and an armful of my folders of research material and ran out into the woods. Then in quick succession I made three more trips, carrying out armfuls of folders and dumping them onto the blanket. It took four hours to get the fire fully under coi trol; and more than 40 volunteer firemen were kept from their families on the one night above all that families like to be together. Two of these gallant firemen were temporarily overcome by fumes while trying to work their way up into the attic. The miracle is that the fire never got below the attic level (but one fireman fell through a weakened section of the attic floor and landed in our master bedroom on our second floor.) Fireme and dozens of wonderful neighbors and well-wishers carried all our movable belongings not already water-soaked out of the house to safety. What we had in the attic was destroyed, but otherwise, although many strangers came into our house that night and moved our possessions about, the only thing we found missing after the fire was a pair of my shoes, which we assume may have been appropriated by some neighbor whose ow" shoes had become water-soaked on that freezir.. night. Most of us had soaked shoes before we were through. Friends took our children for the night. At 2:30 A.M. Virginia and I finally retired in a bed over our detached garage. A sympathetic doctor whom we knew only casually came by around midnight and handed us some sleeping pills—a wonderfully thoughtful gesture. At 3 A.M.—despite the sleeping pill I had taken—I remembered the pile oi manuscript material I had left in the woods and went out and retrieved all the folders. It was four months before we were able to move back into our renovated home. Fortunately, we had not only fire-insurance protection but also the homeowner's policy which covered our living expenses during the four months we had to live outside our house. FRANKLY, I didn't even know we had this coverage of emergency living costs. It had been agreed upon between Virginia and our insurance broker, John Bathrick, whom we depend upon to watch over our best interests without overloading us with insurance. He came by, after I called, while the fire was still smoldering, to offer us emergency counsel on steps we should take. One step, which hadn't occurred to us, was that we should get son.. kind of temporary covering over the roof in the morning—even though it was Christmas—to prevent further damage by rain and snow. From the ordeal of the fire and its aftermath

"It's just that deaf old Mrs. Peterson, upstairs." SUBURBIA TODAY

8 Suburbia Today, January 1961