The Day the Church Burned Down
My father was a firefighter, and rose to be Chief of the whole city. One day when I was about 15 I was walking home from Downtown and saw that there was a big fire off in the distance. As I continued walking it started to become clear that the fire was in my own neighborhood, and it was a big one. Still closer, I saw with great sadness that my parish church, St. Boniface, was engulfed in fire, and it looked real bad. I later learned that it was a total loss.
It was a beautiful old German influence church, with lovely elaborate wood carvings lettered in Gothic style German captions, and many other irreplaceable features and fixtures. Later at home I learned that my father was the officer leading the fire companies that tried vainly to save the church. I think he took it as a crushing defeat, although he didn’t project a lot of emotion about the tragedy in my presence. Fire Engine Company #8 was located diagonally across the street from the church, but the fact of this fortuitous location was insufficiently providential to save the old structure, with its magnificent, towering steeple. Not too long after, the church was replaced by a new building, but it was only an ordinary, mediocre substitute for what had been lost, or so it seemed to my young eyes.
