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America's worst theater disaster took
place on December 30, 1903 in Chicago at
the new Iroquois Theater on Randolph
Street. A stage fire spread to the
auditorium and within minutes over six
hundred people were dead, many of them
women and children.
People began fleeing from the front
entrance of the theater around three
thirty in the afternoon and from fire
escapes at the back of the building soon
afternoon. It was a bitterly cold
Wednesday afternoon and many escapees
had been forced to leave their coats and
hats in the theater. They ran to
nearby stores and offices, or floundered
in the street in front of the theater,
unsure what to do next. Many had
parents, siblings and friends still
inside the theater and hoped they'd soon
emerge from the theater. As the
fire grew, however, police prevented
re-entry.
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Wrestler Louis Zimmerman helped rescue several Iroquois victims.
The news story refers to Zimmerman as, "the wrestler,"
suggesting he was known in Chicago, but I have not
yet found information about him. I found one
reference in a 1903 Chicago newspaper to an amateur
boxer named Louis Zimmerman. He was a member
of the Chicago Fencing and Boxing Club.
If the fire story got it wrong and Zimmerman was a
boxer rather than a wrestler, could it have been
Dutch Zimmerman, a boxer who earned a place in
boxing history in 1908? Zimmerman was a common
German name and Dutch was a common nickname for
Germans so in the early 1900s there were many Dutch
Zimmermans, including in baseball, track and
football, if not professional players then amateurs.
Makes researching it difficult. According to
Chicago city directories there were no Zimmermans
living at 602 Lincoln and the only Louis Zimmerman was
an attorney.
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