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This 1904 tale of heroism and danger above features a prosperous Louisville beer brewer
and derby horse breeder, Frank Fehr, at the scene of a historic theater fire.
Over one hundred twenty years later the 1903 fire at the Iroquois Theater
retains its status as the deadliest single-building fire in America's history.
The Fehr-Hecht theater party was made up of
thirty-three-year-old Frank Fehr, his thirty-year-old wife Pauline, and her
thirty-eight-year-old sister-in-law, Clarice
"Clare" Hecht. All three depended upon the brewing industry to provide a
lifestyle of wealth, travel and mansions.
Omitted from this January 4th version of the story was an important detail
about Fehr's situation at the Iroquois that had appeared in the
Courier's
January 1st story three days earlier: "They were in the parquette where few people were hurt."
Of the hundreds of deaths in the Iroquois disaster, fewer than a dozen
involved people seated on the first floor. The real life and death battles took place in the
balconies where nearly six hundred people were suffocated and/or cooked, or died after
jumping from fire escapes.
By Jan 4, stories of the horrific events in the balconies had been published in
hundreds of of newspapers. By comparison, an unembellished version of Fehr's
first-floor story would have been unremarkable and quickly growing less timely, thus the page-ten position. Had the hero been less
well known the story might have been shorter and received even poorer placement.
There is no way to know whether the newspaper or Fehr was responsible for inflating his
story. What I can say is that it was not unique; there were other first-floor survivors
who were portrayed as heroes in their hometown newspapers. Such was interest in
the fire that newspapers were eager to find and sometimes hype a hometown connection. Some
papers even made do with a
paragraph about a former resident who thought of attending the theater that
day but did not.
Note: There are five men named Frank in this story.
Three Frank Fehrs and two Frank Hechts.
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Frank Fehr jr (1870–1962)
Frank spent over fifty years managing the brewery founded by his father.
He and wife Pauline had two daughters at the time of the fire; a son, Frank Fehr Jr., was born six
months later.▼1
In 1887 Frank had been one of eleven players in the first ever Notre Dame football game, playing
against University of Michigan's team who came to Indiana to teach the game to Notre
Dame athletes. None of the eleven ND players had played
football before. Though he and his two siblings all attended Notre Dame, the family attended a Lutheran church in
his youth and he did not convert to Catholicism until 1958. Though nicknamed Colonel
he did not serve in the armed services; the moniker stemmed from the state guard offering
him a commission based on his work with a Masonic marching troop. He declined the commission
but kept the affectation.
In 1901 Frank spearheaded the consolidation of most Louisville brewers into the Central
Consumers Company, adding saloon ownership to its revenues.
According to his passport Frank was six feet tall with hazel eyes, a largish nose, round chin,
and dark hair.
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Pauline Hecht Fehr (1873–1940)
A native of Wisconsin, Pauline married Fehr
in 1895. She was the daughter of John and Rosina
Balcer Hecht. Her brother Frank
was married to Clara Kaestner (below).
Clarice "Clara" A. Kaestner Hecht (1865–1945)
Clarice married to Pauline Hecht Fehr's brother, Frank A. Hecht (1858–1920), in
1887.
Pauline and Frank Fehr had a daughter named Clarisse Fehr, born in 1897 that may have been a
namesake. Frank Hecht's obituary listed numerous banks for which he'd served as an
officer, as well as companies and organizations for which he'd been a director. Among those
was a company that manufactured milling machinery, brewing equipment and elevators,
reportedly equipping brewing plants around the country. Frank met and married Clara when
working for her father, Charles Kaestner. Clara's siblings were in Frank and Pauline
Fehr's wedding party. Clara and Frank Hecht had a son named Frank.
In the years after the fire
During Prohibition the Fehr Brewery sold near-beer and ice. He continued to work in the
brewery until the mid 1950s. The company failed later that decade.
After Pauline's death in 1940 Frank Fehr married another Wisconsin native, Almira H. Boehm (1898–1980).
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Discrepancies and addendum
1. Frank Pauline Fehr jr
would die of bronchial pneumonia at age thirty-five in 1939, a year before his mother.
Divorced from Anne L. Seaton, mother of his son, another Frank Fehr, he lived with his parents and
worked as a salesman for his father's
brewery. His parents then lived on Cherokee Rd, next door to Louis Seelbach, owner of
the Seelbach Hotel in Louisville.
(I stayed there a few times forty years ago, shortly after the 1982 renovation, and it was impressive.
Not a bit surprising that a visit in 1918 inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald to write his novel, The Great Gatsby.
My stays were soon after Thanksgiving when Stewarts Department store across the street was
decorated for Christmas the way I remembered The Marshall Field store in Chicago in my 1950s
childhood. Old time department stores were magical.)
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