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Memories of the Heights FireJohn Knight I was only three years old when the Heights burnt down and my brother Dan was all of four. Being good Baptists it had already been thoroughly drilled into us that the world was going to end in fire, so when pieces of scorched religious looking books began to fall into our back yard on East Second Street we ran into the house to tell our Mom that the world was ending.
When I was going to the Heights in the early 1970s
I had the chance to sit down with a group of fellow students and see a home
movie that was made while the original Heights building was on fire. Sister
St. John was with us watching the old grainy silent black and white film. In
the film, as I remember it, fire was coming out of some of the upper story
windows, but most of the building looked to be untouched - at least at that
moment. In it you could see firemen, police, a row of sisters kneeling on the
lawn in front of the burning building praying and one young sister running in
and out of the building caring armloads of music and instruments or throwing
things out of the windows.
Suddenly the sister who was trying to save all the
things that could be saved stopped dead in her tracks in the middle of the
lawn, turned, ran over to the kneeling sisters and said something to them. She
was obviously very angry. Then she turned quickly and went back into the
burning building.
I wondered out loud, "I wonder what she said to
them?"
Sister St. John spoke up quickly, "I told them
that they could pray while they were working." The sister who was racing in
and out of the fire had been Sister St. John. She went on to say, "We could
have saved so much more if they had worked."
Sister St. John went on to say that not a single
instrument had come through the fire completely intact, but she had used the
parts from irreparable instruments to repair the ones that could be
repaired. When I was there she still had a large cardboard box full of
useable bridges, strings, pegs, and I don't know what else that she had
salvaged from the fire in the back of her studio and it wasn't unusual for a
student to have a scorched piece of music on their music stand.
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