Two old friends in their early thirties, Mabel and Electa, took Mabel's eleven-year-old daughter, Ruth Irle, and her fifteen-year-old friend, Helen Ainslie, to see the hit play of the season in Chicago, Mr. Bluebeard.  The matinee performance was at Chicago's newest luxury playhouse, the Iroquois Theater on Randolph Street.

The children survived, but Mabel and Electa did not.

When the fire appeared on stage, Helen asked Mabel to leave, but Mabel thought they should wait in their seats on the third-floor balcony.  Ruth and Helen waited for a few minutes but finally ran for the exit and escaped.  Mabel and Electa did not make it out of the Iroquois.

Jan, 1914 Literary Digest

A SLEUTH WITH A CAMERA EYE

A keen eye and a good memory are no doubt useful to book-agents, congressmen, drummers, postmasters, and some others we might name, but they are particularly handy in chasing crooks and the detective who can glance at a criminal and remember his looks for years is usually the one who wins rapid promotion.

It was so in the eye of Andrew Irle, who, before his death in Chicago the other day at the age of forty-six, was nationally famous for his ability to remember faces, names and handwriting. Something about his work is told editorially by the Inter Ocean newspaper of Chicago>

' Most of us frequently experience more or less embarrassment from the inability to associate faces with names. Our memories of the face and the name are stored, as it were, in separate mental compartments, and we can not quickly bring them together. In Andrew Irle's brain, they seemed to be stored in the same compartment and always, apparently, came out together.

'Many public men have owed much of their popularity to their ability at once to call a man by name when they see his face. The average man is pleased to be thus instantly and accurately remembered. Andrew Irle's faculty went much further. His eyes, like the photographic camera, seemed to record all details of appearance, and his brain put under the same index all things seen or heard about any person in whom his business interested him.

'He seemed to have for men whom he had met what may be called a "complete" memory. When he saw the face again, or a picture of it, he recalled at once the name, the time, and place where seen before, the circumstances and the companions. Scores of stories are told about his wonderful identifying memory, out of which one must suffice here.
One day there came into the Pinkerton agency, with which Irle was connected, a photograph from the police of Portland, Ore., of a man under arrest in connection with a bank robbery. The direct evidence against him was not strong and he was not at all known as a criminal to the Pacific coast police. as soon as Irle saw the picture he declared it to be that of a man arrested and convicted for a similar offence at Binghamton, N.Y. about ten years before, giving the exact date, circumstances, and the names of accomplices. And so it was.
On his release from prison, after about four years, the convict had either turned to honest ways or at least had kept out of sight of the police. He had simply disappeared from his old haunts in the East. Either he had failed to make a success of honest industry or had thought it safe, in a distant part of the country and after a lapse of nearly ten years, to resume a criminal career.
Mr. Irle had the same complete memory for handwriting. Only a few weeks ago he was shown a portion of a letter. He at once named the writer, tho more than ten years had passed since he had last seen any writing by the same hand, and then only a short note. By Andrew Irle's death, society has lost a member whose special faculties and peculiar powers made him remarkably useful and efficient in its protection against its predatory elements.' "

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