Office Fire

As one of the hurricanes approached, one blogger asked if you knew your house was about to be destroyed what items would you save.

That reminded me that while I never experienced what my mother-in-law suffered in the 1936 tornado or what the folks on the coast and in New Orleans endured from Katrina, my office was destroyed in a fire in March of 1998.

On the Friday of spring break in 1998, term papers in my class were due in by 2 p.m.; one of my students arrived right at the hour, but by the time he put the paper in a folder and asked me numerous questions, I realized I was late for a three o'clock appointment off campus, so for one of the first times in my thirty year teaching career, I took nothing home, not a paper nor a book nor my briefcase, planning to return to the office on Monday or Tuesday during the break to pick up what I needed.

On Saturday night, with the campus deserted except for one campus policemen, lightening struck the west end of Cain Hall which housed a fairly large auditorium. My office was on the second floor on the east end.

On Sunday morning, rising at my usual time, around six, I walked outside and picked up the paper; a large headline caught my attention: Historical Building Burns on Hinds Campus. I woke Carole up and we drove the six miles to the campus, hoping to save something. Nothing was left but four walls and the elevator shaft which burned for several days as did the large white columns on the front and on the rear.

Unfortunately, I had that year moved into an office which adjoined what had been the reading department, leaving me with lots of space for books and other items. I had taken my father's old typewriter, a sofa and over a thousand books.

Everything was lost. The only thing salvaged from Cain Hall was the frame of one of my colleague's bike and she had to bribe the workers to search for it.

If I could have saved one thing from my office, it would have been my father’s old typewriter. If I could save a second thing, it would have been the rare edition of one of Shakespeare's plays.