On December 30, 1903 during a performance of Mr. Bluebeard at Chicago's new Iroquois Theater, a stage fire spread to the auditorium and killed nearly six hundred people. Among the eleven hundred survivors was a native of Hamilton, Ontario. Thirty-year-old William Charleton Gordon (1873–1942) suffered a broken left arm and facial burns. His location in the theater and identity of his theater companions was not revealed but his wife of seven months is the most likely.

The sole newspaper stories that reported William's presence at the theater appeared in a Toronto newspaper and also highlighted another Hamiltonian, W. J. Hallisy, son of a police constable. It was not suggested that Gordon and Hallisy were theater companions.^▼1

Hometown: Hamilton, Ontario

Gordon was born in Canada to Thomas and Janet Sloan Gordon. They were Scottish immigrants who settled in Toronto. He was a brother of artist, J. S. Gordon. He had married Charlotte Erickson seven month before the Iroquois disaster. She too was from Canada. There was an actress working in Chicago around 1914 named Charlotte Gordon but I failed to learn if it was William's wife. Their only child died in infancy. He was named Kenmore Sloan Gordon and lived for two months. They lived on Kenmore Avenue at the time. Sad to imagine their lark when choosing their son's name, so soon replaced by grief

In the years after the fire

Gordon spent most of his adult years in Chicago working in as an accountant and in real estate but retained ties to Hamilton, Ontario, returning to Canada during the last years of his life.  He was buried in Lawnridge Cemetery in Rochelle, Illinois near their son.  Charlotte followed sixteen years later.

Discrepancies and addendum

1. William Patrick James Hallisey (1899–1977) of Hamilton, Toronto was the son of a James C. and Mary Hallisy Hallisey (yes, a Hallisy married a Hallisey). His father was a Hamilton policeman. He had two siblings, married Marion Aline Bartlett, worked as an excavation estimator, lost a legal fight over his father's will and lived to age seventy-eight. He might have suffered two broken legs and a fractured skull in a 1919 train wreck in Bakersfield, California.  Other than the reference that appeared in the Hamilton newspaper (above) I found nothing else about W.J. Hallisey being at the Iroquois Theater. I did find him on Find-A-Grave so can report that Hallisy, not Hallisey is the correct name spelling, and that he was only four years old in 1903 so was in company with an adult at the Iroquois.

Story 1141