Our Lady of the Angels fire.

If you have a longstanding Chicago background, you've probably heard of this one.

On Dec. 1, 1958, a helmeted (firefighter Richard) Scheidt, his face drawn in sorrow, carried the wet, lifeless body of 10-year-old John Jajkowski Jr. from Our Lady of the Angels grade school on the West Side. The fire, one of the worst tragedies in Chicago annals, killed 92 children and three nuns.

Scheidt died Monday at his home in southwest suburban Oak Lawn, a day after he was brought home from the hospital following a minor stroke a month ago, according to relatives.

Scheidt, a member of Rescue Squad 1, carried the bodies of 20 children from the school. Jajkowski was the first.

Scheidt was forever haunted by the memory. In an interview with the Tribune in 1995, in the wake of the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in which another image of a firefighter cradling a dying child went around the world, Scheidt described the horror of the Our Lady of the Angels School conflagration.

"It just broke my heart all over again for those poor people, having to pick up those babies," Scheidt said at the time. "There's nothing that prepares you for that. Thirty-some years later, I'm not over it yet."

We hear so much talk these days of studying the psychology of killers, so we can understand what made them tick in the hopes of preventing further tragedies.

I wonder if it's time we started studying the makeup of men like Richard Scheidt. Surely there's something there we can learn about survival, and keeping on until the job is done?

Scheidt had been a Chicago firefighter for eight years when all 13 of the city's rescue squads were dispatched to the school. The fire, he recalled, "was just roaring through the building."

Firefighters eventually broke a hole through a second-floor wall to find a smoky classroom full of unconscious pupils. Scheidt said he and his colleagues immediately tried to rescue as many as they could. He grabbed a boy and rushed out of the building.

But Scheidt said, with tears in his eyes, "He was dead. He didn't make it, like so many of the rest of them."

He then went back and brought out 19 more children, all dead.

Meanwhile, Chicago American photographer Steve Lasker, arrived at the scene and saw one firefighter -- Scheidt -- heading down an interior staircase with a child. Lasker aimed his camera and waited for the rescuer to emerge.

Scheidt said he never noticed the cameraman.

"It was just an accident that they took that photograph," Jack Gallapo, 82, an old friend of Scheidt's and fellow firefighter, said this morning. "He just came out and they took it."

The photograph not only appeared on the front page of the Chicago American, but in newspapers around the world. But in his home, the fire and the picture were rarely spoken of.

"He and all the men that he worked with -- that was their job, and they were brothers in that," his daughter, Nancy Coughlin of Tinley Park, recalled this morning. "He never thought he was any more of a hero than any of the men he worked with."

Scheidt, three of whose older brothers also were firefighters, said he almost quit the fire department after the school fire. "But I went on," he said.

"You just live with it," Scheidt said in the 1995 interview. "It happened. You were part of it. You might not have liked it, but you did your job. You might have liked to have done more, but you did as good as you could."
...
"He never asked anyone to do something he wouldn't do himself," said son Andy Scheidt. "His biggest thing was making sure all his guys got home to their families."

Rest in peace.

------------
ADDED: The Jajkowski family pays their respects.

In the days following the deadly fire at Our Lady of the Angels grade school, John Jajkowski's anguish over the death of his eldest son, John Jr., was made worse by the questions about his son's last moments. Was he still alive when rescuers found him? Was he afraid? Did he have any last words?

His need for a measure of resolution was so great he sought out the firefighter he saw in a newspaper photograph carrying his son's body from the flaming building. He found the man in the photo, Richard Scheidt, and though Scheidt usually avoided talking to victims' families because it was too distressing, he agreed to come to the Jajkowski's West Side home.

"He told my dad, 'I'll come and talk to you, but I have one condition,' " said Steve Jajkowski, John Jajkowski Sr.'s second son. "Your wife can't be in the room."

Tonight, the Scheidts and Jajkowskis met again in Oak Lawn, at the visitation service for Scheidt. Steve Jajkowski stood by his mother, Josephine, with tears in her eyes, as she embraced one of Scheidts' daughters, Nancy Coughlin, near her father's casket.