The Youngest Victims

 We are approaching the 108th anniversary of the Eastland disaster. The Eastland, a Great Lakes steamer, had been chartered as one of four or five vessels to ferry employees of Western Electric's Hawthorne Works plant near Chicago to Michigan City, MI, for an employee picnic (yes, they needed five vessels: that year, the Western Electric picnic would have hosted over 6500 guests). The Eastland rolled over in the Chicago River, just before setting sail for Michigan. 844 passengers -- virtually all party attendees -- died.

As this was the biggest employee function of the year, Western Electric -- which had an enviable reputation for the way they treated their employees -- had told employees to bring not only the immediate family, but extended family and friends as well. As a result, a staggering number of victims were children.  The most iconic image of the disaster is a shot of a Chicago fireman, anguish and horror etched on his face, carrying the body of a drowned child.

In so many disasters, it is the youngest and most innocent victims who often become the eternal memorial of an incident.

December 30, 1903, promised to be a winter day like any other in Chicago (a city which has seen more than its share of disasters). But then a stage light ignited a piece of scenery at the Iroquois Theatre, during a matinee performance of "Mr. Blue Beard," featuring the legendary Eddie Foy. By the time the fire was out, 602 people -- mostly women and children -- were dead, and another 250 were injured. Among the victims was Amy Holst, a seven-year-old whose brother, sister, and mother were also lost. One look at her picture, and you can tell she was a spitfire, and would have been raising pure hell with Chicago's boys in about 10 years.

In December of 1958, a fire ripped through the Our Lady of the Angels School in Chicago, killing 92 school children and three nuns. As that fire occurred in "modern" times, there were plenty of photographs to choose from, to show the horror of the situation. The most iconic is firefighter Richard Scheidt carrying the lifeless body of ten-year-old John Jajkowski. Again, the anguish and horror are plain to see.

The deadliest domestic terrorist attack in the United States was the April 19, 1995, attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, by anti-government extremists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. 168 people were killed, and 680 injured, but the image that is seared in our collective memory is Oklahoma City firefighter Chris Fields cradling the body of one-year-old Baylee Almon.

These children, these BABIES, are seared into our memory for eternity, as symbols of the evil that pervades our lives. The image of innocence lost, of lives wasted, drives home the heartache of the scene.

Who knows what these children might have become? Might Amy have become a writer, possibly penning a novel to rival "Gone With The Wind"? Would John have been a doctor who discovered a cure for cancer? Maybe Baylee might have been the first woman President.

We'll never know.

But because of their lost potential, these children -- and probably millions more -- live on in our memories, and as long as one person remembers, they never truly disappear.