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When the testimony of James Strong and
fireman
Michael Roche is added to McMullen's, a rather
amazing picture forms. No other person made a
bigger effort to save victims at the Iroquois than
did William McMullen. They should have been
hanging medals on him. But for one problem: though there was nothing he could have done differently to prevent or stop the fire, he
was the man operating the lamp that started it all.
Detailed account of William McMullen's heroic efforts to save James
Strong family at the Iroquois Theater.
Could the nation's worst theater disaster have been prevented by a seamstress?
In other testimony McMullen described the curtain that first caught fire as
having had a ragged edge with frayed strings dangling down.
It had not fit properly and the excess length had been cut off and not hemmed. Had it been cut off to address the problem of being too close
to the arc lamp? Was it not cut off enough? Would another few inches have prevented the Iroquois Theater disaster? Would hemming
have removed the fragile frayed strings and made it less flammable? Seems very possible.
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Though only an arc lamp operator for four months,
McMullen testified that he had been employed as a theater stage worker for two years, first at the
Garrick Theater under the tutelage of
Thomas J. Cleland, then at the
Illinois Theater, another Chicago theater owned by the
syndicate and managed by Iroquois manager,
Will J. Davis.
I've failed to learn what became of William "Holt" McMullen
after the fire. There was an electrician named William McMullen living
in Chicago in 1910, with a wife and three children,
but I could not verify it as the right
McMullen. They married in 1904, which would be about right if he married his ailing girlfriend. Electrician McMullen was the son of a family who lived at 2949
Wentworth for thirty or more years. Thinking
maybe the family shortened the name from McMullen to
Mullin, I chased that one a bit but in 1903 prior to
the opening of the Iroquois, when William Holt
McMullen was working at the Illinois Theater,
William Mullin was working as an oiler in the
stockyards.
In mid September, 1904, finally cleared of charges, William may
have moved out of Chicago. Authorities then
were looking for William to testify in trials
related to the Iroquois fire in Chicago and New
York. William's middle initial was given as
"E."
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