Was a joke at first:
Memorial Day weekend 1977 was to be marked by cookouts, parades honoring military members who gave their lives for our country, and for the staff of Wayne Elementary School in Jacksonburg, a retirement party at the Beverly Hills Supper Club in Southgate, Kentucky. But at about 8:30 p.m. on May 28, 1977, a waitress discovered a fire in the Zebra Room at the Beverly Hills Supper Club.
That began a devastating string of popping beverage bottles, crashing chandeliers, bodies at blocked entrances and lungs filling with black smoke.
It was one of the worst fires of its kind in the country’s history.
The fire at the supper club killed 165 people, including 13 from Butler County’s Edgewood City School District who were attending a retirement party for Wayne Elementary School teacher Ona Mayfield.
According to reports, a fire started in electrical wiring running through the walls of the club’s Zebra Room — a smaller private reception room located on the other side of the club’s Cabaret Room, where more than 1,200 people were seated awaiting the John Davidson show.
Within minutes, the small fire had turned into an inferno.
Panicked guests scrambled to escape the flames and smoke billowing throughout the complex.
Sunday marks the 40th anniversary of the fire. Wayne Elementary School is no longer standing, but those who perished are remembered by a plaque outside the fire house on Jacksonburg Road.
“With beauty all around me, I walk, in beauty it is finished,” an inscription reads under the names of those killed.
Forty years later, here’s what you should know about the historic event:
The club was overcrowded:
About 3,500 people were there that evening. The multitiered Cabaret Room alone contained 1,200 — 300 more than its legal capacity.
Some thought the fire
An 18-year-old busboy named Walter Bailey took the stage during a performance by the comedy team of Jim Teeter and Jim McDonald, the opening act for headliner John Davidson. He picked up a microphone and announced the Beverly Hills Supper Club was on fire. “He seemed like he was part of the act,” said Norma Lou Mitchell, a witness, in the years afterward.
A 1977 Kentucky state investigative report found 10 factors contributed to “the loss of life or injury.” Among them:
■ Overcrowding in the Cabaret Room, where most of the 165 victims perished.
■ Tables and chairs jamming the aisles and ramps of Cabaret Room.
■ No employee training in evacuation and emergency procedures.
■ Wood framing, lack of fire separation devices and the interior finish, especially “the decorative paneling,” contributed to the spread of the fire.
■ No audible alarm or sprinkler systems.
Victims and their families won about $43 million in settlements from a series of lawsuits. Settlements involved lawsuits against the club owners, insurance companies, a utility company accused of failing to inspect wiring, and makers of polyvinyl chloride and other products and materials used in the club.
Problems identified: Settlements:
Mario Di Lorenzo was a seventh-grader at New Albany Middle School in 2006 when a teacher asked her students to pen their own obituary.
“I will die young,” he wrote. “I will be running out of breath trying to catch a plane.”
Di Lorenzo has cystic fibrosis, a life-threatening genetic disease that affects lung function.
His perspective at age 13 shook his mother to the core: “It was stunning,” Daniela Di Lorenzo recalled, “and I thought to myself: ‘I want him to make that plane. What can I do to make sure he catches that plane?’ “
It also inspired an idea that recently raised thousands of dollars for others with cystic fibrosis.
Mrs. Di Lorenzo, an avid quilter for several years at that time, discovered a new purpose for her hobby. She began making and stocking quilt after quilt, all of them covered in hearts. She spent years crafting them without telling her family her plans for them.
Earlier this month, at the Philip Heit Center for Healthy New Albany, Di Lorenzo sold about 110 of those quilts, raising $25,000 for the Division of Pulmonology at Nationwide Children’s Hospital.
“We had no idea how much money would be raised, and we were blown away by the support,” said Kristin Ferguson, a family friend and business-development manager at the Heit Center, who helped Di Lorenzo arrange the sale.
“It truly was an act of service and of love.”
Mario Di Lorenzo, now 24, certainly felt that love.
“It was a touching gesture,” he said. “There’s a lot of hours she put into that (quilting), so to do all that to benefit me and anyone else who has CF is definitely appreciated.”
Mario was 6 weeks old when Mrs. Di Lorenzo and her husband, Carlo, learned of his diagnosis.
According to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, more than 70,000 people worldwide are living with the disease, in which sticky mucus builds up in the lungs and the digestive system.
Immediately, the family started Mario on an intensive treatment regimen involving both medication and daily therapy. Every morning and night, he spends an hour in a special vest that vibrates to loosen the mucus in his chest.
Since 2004 — when the family moved to New Albany from Pittsburgh, where Mario was born — he has been hospitalized only once.
“He’s very healthy; he’s been blessed in that way,” said Dr. Karen McCoy, one of Mario’s physicians at Nationwide Children’s. “To a great degree, that has to do with what his family does. This is a very demanding care program, and they have done it.
“If that wasn’t the case, he would be sicker.”
Because cystic fibrosis affects how the body breaks down food, patients have to consume extra calories. In Mario’s case, that number is between 3,500 and 4,000 a day (an average man is supposed to consume about 2,500).
Fortunately, such a demand falls within Mrs. Di Lorenzo’s wheelhouse: She and her husband, Carlo, are native Italians, and she loves to cook.
The couple also have three daughters: Cristina, 21, who recently graduated from Xavier University; Francesca, 19, who just completed her sophomore year at Ohio State University (where she is a standout tennis player); and Valentina, 16, finishing up her sophomore year at New Albany High School.
“She’s a phenomenal cook — she makes a five- or sixcourse meal every night,” said Mr. Di Lorenzo, division chief of pediatric gastroenterology at Nationwide Children’s. “She does it for Mario’s benefit, but it works well for all of us.”
Her family says Mrs. Di Lorenzo quilts everywhere and anywhere — on the sidelines and in the bleachers at her children’s sports events; in the waiting rooms of doctor’s offices; even, Valentina said, in stores while her children are trying on clothes.
Each of her heart quilts contains 20 hand-sewn panels, with the backing and borders finished using a sewing machine.