Included are Google Books scans from the April 19th, 1954 issue of Life Magazine, which contains a feature on the March 1954 fire at Cleveland Hill Elementary School in Cheektowaga, New York, which killed a total of fifteen children. Jackson C. Frank was one of the surviving children.
The cover of this particular issue features a picture of the ‘awesome fireball’ created by the November 1952 detonation of the ‘Mike Device’ on Elugelab Island in the Enewetak Atoll, as part of Operation Ivy, a series of American nuclear tests. The Mike detonation was the first successful test of a hydrogen bomb, and yielded 750 times the explosive energy created by the Hiroshima bomb, completely destroying the island and leaving an underwater crater.
Pictured in the Cleveland Hill fire piece below are Jackson’s parents, and Jackson himself, next to the teacher, in the second row from the top.
When Jackson Frank was 11, a furnace exploded at his school, sending a ball of flames down corridors until it ended up in Frank’s music classroom in the Cleveland Hill Elementary School in Cheektowaga, New York. The fire killed fifteen of his fellow students and burned Frank over more than half his body. It was during his time in the hospital that he was first introduced to playing music, when a teacher, Charlie Castelli, brought in an acoustic guitar to keep Frank occupied during his recovery. When he was 21, he was awarded an insurance check of $110,500 for his injuries, giving him enough to “catch a boat to England.”
Wikipedia
Jackson Frank was one of those to receive skin grafts. He was in hospital for seven months after the fire. Frank suffered for the rest of his life from a pronounced limp from skin grafts taken from his leg to repair his face and chest. He also put on a lot of weight later as the result of parathyroid malfunction, a side effect of the fire. He would later become a well-known folk-singer in the 1960s and 70s, releasing an album in 1965, sometimes referred to as “the most famous folk singer of the 1960s no one knew of.” Those who knew him said he led a most tragic life, having been misdiagnosed with mental illness, when he was actually suffering from depression from his childhood. He was occasionally homeless, and lost one eye when shot with a pellet gun by some kids. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He died in 1999 of pneumonia and cardiac arrest at 56.
Cleveland Hill Fire Aftermath












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