Residents of Wednesday Morning House Fire are Upbeat, Happy to be Alive

Happy to be alive, residents who escaped a said it was a miracle that they survived.

Charlene Smith, who lives there with her brother John A. Smith, said this was the first time a fire hit their family home in more than 50 years.

“We grew up in this house. It’s been in the family since 1959,” said Smith.

On most days, Smith said, she would have been in the house around 8:20 a.m., which was when she noticed smoke coming from the side of the house while standing outside, and called emergency services.

“No one was in the house when the fire struck,” said Smith. “One dog started howling and wouldn’t stop … I turned and saw the haze on the gutter, then saw smoke billowing out of the side of the house."

According to Smith, the home is uninhabitable, and she and her brother won’t be able to move back in for a while.

“We had to cut a couple of holes in the roof for ventilation because there were no windows in the basement,” said Evergreen Park Fire Chief Ronald Kleinhaus.

Smith, her brother and their two dogs are staying with neighbors until they can move back into their home.

Smith said everything in the basement was destroyed, including hundreds of thousands of dollars in sports memorabilia that she garnered as one of the owners of the former Tail Gate Bills Sport Bar and Tobacco Road, 10244 S. Kedzie Ave., which now houses . She said the bar closed in 1995 when the original owner died, and his son sold it to the owner of Durbin’s.

Among the valuables lost in the blaze was an original photo of the Chicago White Sox opening day in the early 1900s, and a 1910 photo of the Chicago Cubs.

“Each was worth at least $5,000,” said Smith.

The Smiths also lost a vinyl record collection handed down to them by their parents and other personal items the family had accumulated over about 50 years. Although they lost a lot of sentimental items, they said it’s no use worrying.

“Other people cry and get upset. I always make jokes, because it is not a thing we could do about it,” said Smith.

She said she’s happy her and her brother also took another precaution that their neighbor suggested after a friend lost all of her valuables in an Oak Lawn garage fire that spread to their house about a year ago.

“Take pictures of everything you have. I took pictures, downloaded them on a disk and gave them to my neighbor,” said Smith.

Kleinhaus said the house sustained between $40,000 and $45,000 in damages. After investigators assessed the damage early Wednesday afternoon, Smith said “they believe the air conditioner unit blower motor could have caused the fire.”

In the dangerously hot weather the Chicago area has been experiencing lately, the Smiths have kept the air conditioner on to keep it cool for themselves and their two dogs, but after an unusually cool Tuesday, they did not have the air on Wednesday.

“Had I had it on last night, I would have died,” said Smith.