A pair of sisters from Memphis were visiting relatives in Chicago during the 1903 New Year's holiday.  They were fifteen-year-old Kate H. Buddeke (1888–1981) and Blanche Buddeke (1887–1958).

On December 30, 1903, Kate and Blanche attended a birthday for a friend with a theater excursion to an afternoon matinee at the city's newest luxury playhouse, the Iroquois Theater on Randolph Street. When a stage fire spread to the auditorium and took the lives of nearly six hundred theatergoers, both girls escaped and survived although Kate received facial burns.  Mistakenly counted among the deceased initially, Kate's name appeared as a fatality in dozens of newspapers around the country. Her facial burns were not life-threatening and did not leave scars.*

Kate's Iroquois Theater fire recollections

Years later, Kate's recall of her experience at the Iroquois, as related to her children, then described in a book by a descendent (My Mother Before Me by Julie Kettle Gundlach) contained inaccuracies. Kate was fifteen at the time of the fire, lived to age ninety-three, and the published story was as remembered by her daughters then edited by the author. Under the circumstances, a few discrepancies are to be expected. Family legends sometimes take on a life of their own that strays from actual events. Sharing and nurturing the legend becomes more important than its details.  I'm compelled to correct those in the Gundlach book but am grateful to it for Kate's story because it provides more information than was published in 1903-4.

Kate recalled that fire started when a lamp fell, and an aerial dancer swung out over the stage. Didn't happen. No light fell, the aerial act had appeared prior to an intermission, and another aerial act was not scheduled until the completion of an octet performance that was in progress on the stage when the curtain caught fire that actually caused the disaster. The role of an aerialist guide wire was postulated in an early newspaper report and picked up on the AP wire but was soon dismissed by authorities as the vast majority of eyewitnesses, including members of the audience, stage workers and performers, said otherwise. 

Kate recalled that the fire escapes were not yet installed. Since her recollection makes no mention of her actually using fire escape stairs, I suspect she was seated on the first floor and reached that conclusion from early newspaper accounts. Subsequent trial testimony revealed that on one fire escape, door #31, stair sections were 24" too short to reach the door sills, causing people to stumble, in part because the crowd waiting inside the auditorium, terrified as the fire bore down upon them, became like a sausage machine, pushing those at the sill through the door and onto the landing before they had time to look about and see the two-foot drop. Sometimes they stumbled onto the landing and people from behind climbed atop their prone bodies then fell or jumped to the alley floor below.

One section of one stair leading from a second-floor fire escape to the ground was folded up to permit traffic ease in Couch Place alley and was temporarily ice frozen, but rescuers quickly succeeded in unfolding it into its proper position.

Kate described the fire escape doors as painted shut. They were not painted. The interior doors were stained wood and glass, and the metal exterior doors were frozen shut by a wet winter and sub-zero temperatures and from infrequent opening. (Theater manager Will J. Davis had reprimanded an usher, Willard Sayles, after obeying instructions from his supervisor and opening a door; thereafter, opening the fire escape doors became verboten among the ushers, thus strengthening the icy seal.) At the start of the fire, it sometimes took a strong man heaving a shoulder to open them. As the heat grew inside the structure, the ice thawed enough to open more easily.  When the fireball hurled through the theater and warmed the door seals, some of the fire escape doors flew open, and people who had been pressing against them inside the theater described being thrust out onto fire escape landings.

Kate recollected that she went home and was cared for by her father. The specificity of her recollections about the painful treatments on her facial burns suggests they are accurate, but she may not have returned to Memphis for at least ten days after the fire. A January 9, 1904 newspaper blurb (see accompanying image) reported that she was still recovering at the Walsh sisters' home in Chicago. Corroborating this is that other newspapers referred to her father, Ivo Washington Buddeke, as a resident of Memphis, and though there were no Buddekes listed in Chicago city directories in 1903, Memphis city directories for 1902 to 1904 reported Kate and her parents living there on Poplar St.

Kate recalled clambering over seatbacks to reach an exit and her alarm when a stranger started pushing her into a fence, only to learn that the back of her coat was on fire. She made it to a drugstore and wanted to call her mother to come to pick her up until someone at the drugstore told her she needed to first have her facial burns cared for. Whether her initial burn treatment began at a hospital or drugstore is not known. I suspect the drugstore because it seems likely Kate's recollection would have included mention of a hospital visit had there been one. Kate recalled that her mother came in a carriage and took her home. Since it is improbable that Blanche traveled through the night back to Memphis in a carriage with her injured child, "home" was probably the Walsh's at 4725 Lake Ave. I suspect her mother was in Chicago for the holiday, too, possibly also staying at the Walsh's. Safe to say, Kate did not remain at the drugstore while Blanche traveled to Chicago from Memphis by train or carriage.

Unfortunately, whatever Kate recollected about her theater companions and their escape from the theater has not appeared in print, leastwise I've not yet found it.

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