DAVENPORT, Iowa — What started with a photo hanging on a hospital wall has grown into a Bettendorf chiropractor's debut book all about one of Davenport's deadliest and most tragic fires.
On Jan. 1, "The St. Elizabeth Hospital Fire in Iowa" by Bret Grimes officially hit the shelves.
The story follows the 41 lives lost at Davenport's St. Elizabeth's Mental Health Facility for Women on Jan. 7, 1950.
Grimes paints a starkly realistic picture of the events that unfolded that night. What started as a fire in one woman's room quickly exploded into a raging blaze that claimed dozens of lives in the early morning hours of a bitterly cold January day.
Firefighters that arrived on scene had to not only battle the flames, but also hypothermia from water exposure as they attempted to beat back the fire. Bars — placed over the patients' windows just shortly before the fire took place — prevented the women from escaping. Locks on the outside of their bedroom doors also contributed to the chaos and slowed down rescue efforts.
It was a gruesome, deeply tragic set of events that resulted in one of Davenport's deadliest fires.
Grimes had never heard of the fire before visiting Genesis Hospital in Davenport one day. He saw the fire mentioned on a memorial painted onto one of the walls within the hospital and became curious. It turns out the old mental facility once stood on the current-day Genesis campus.
A chiropractor by day, Grimes had never written a book before. But never one to back down from a challenge, he threw himself into the research process. He conducted interviews, combed through countless pages of newspaper archives and even visited the gravesites of the victims he was writing about.
Each of the 41 victims are individually memorialized at the back of his book.
Grimes says he became connected to their stories and the stories of their surviving family members. One of those family connections reached out to him after the book was written, saying it had brought her to tears. That, says Grimes, is why he wanted to tell this story.
You can find "The St. Elizabeth Hospital Fire in Iowa" at all local retailers and online at Amazon and Bank Square Books.
Grimes joined The Current on News 8 to discuss his story and the process of writing it. You can watch his full interview in the above video. He also made an appearance on This Week on News 8 to dive further into the tragedy and the fallout.
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