Survivors of Indian Hill blaze recall tragedy that seared Worcester 50 years ago

Dec. 23--WORCESTER -- Fifty years later, those who survived remember the flames.

On a cold Sunday night in late December 1968, 10 teenagers were inside a 12-foot-by-14-foot cabin on Indian Hill, hanging out and playing cards, when gasoline splashed on a wood fire instantly turned the cabin into an inferno.

Five teens, all Burncoat High students, died in one of the deadliest fires in Worcester's history.

Five others narrowly escaped with their lives.

"You were in a ball of flames," says Harry Vysniauskas, then 15, whose older brother, Ronald, perished in the blaze.

Ray Slater, who had just turned 18 on Christmas Eve five days earlier, recalls standing next to Timmy Donohue, watching friends play cards by a homemade stove, a barrel of burning wood.

He describes, as if in slow motion, another of the boys approaching the barrel to boost the fire, with a can of gasoline.

"The kid who poured the gas on the fire -- I remember (Timmy and I), the two of us, just as he was starting to do it, we yelled at him: 'No!' It was too late."

He heard a great whoosh, saw a pillar of flame. "It just rose up like a column of fire," he said.

Lost in the fire were Ronald Vysniauskas, Timothy Donohue Jr. and Warren Briggs, all 17, and John Quinlivan and Michael Foley, both 16.

On Dec. 29, the 50th anniversary of the fire, the Indian Hill neighborhood will commemorate five young lives lost too soon, in an incident seared in local memory.

At 4 p.m. a memorial Mass will be offered at St. George Catholic Church, 40 Brattle St., with refreshments following in the church basement. At 6 p.m., a neighborhood reunion is to be held at Wachusett Country Club in West Boylston.

"Sadly, it did unite us as a neighborhood," said organizer Jeff Cammuso, 59, of Worcester, who at the time of the tragedy was a 9-year-old fourth grader at the Indian Hill School, friends with the younger siblings of the teens in the fire.

A monument to those lost in the fire now stands in Indian Hill Park on Ararat Street.

The site where the fire occurred, in a patch of woods behind what is now 37 Cheyenne Road, can be reached by a trail that borders the city water towers off Mojave Drive. If you look downhill today you see the backyards of houses, built in the '80s, and beyond that, a vista of the former Norton Co., now Saint-Gobain Abrasives Inc., with its smokestack.

Back in 1968 this was all pines, says Brian Beriau, 64, of Worcester, who was 13 when he and his neighborhood friends built the cabin there, with lumber mostly pilfered from Norton Co.

"We all wanted to be Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn," Mr. Beriau recalled one recent afternoon as he led the way to the place.

Nothing today marks where the cabin stood, except for a faded BB gun target that someone years ago hung from a tree, apparently to mark the spot. That, and the wonky trees.

"The place was hit by the Tornado of '53 -- or the Hurricane of '38 -- and all the trees grew in a loop," Mr. Beriau said, pointing to the odd, twisty shapes of some of the pines. "They were distorted in the storm. It's a really strange place. Deformed from the start."

Lives were shaped by the firestorm that touched down there on Dec. 29, 1968.

"Funny how you don't forget," Mr. Beriau said.

He wasn't up at the camp that Sunday night, he said. His mother wouldn't let him go.

Mr. Beriau described how he had used 16-foot boards to build the cabin, which had two levels, and was lined inside with plywood and insulated with newspaper. The cabin's one door, a patio door that had been boarded over, swung in, not out.

Inside, a few feet in front of the doorway, was a wood-burning stove. Mr. Beriau described building the stove out of a metal rubbish barrel, rested on coffee cans. He said the cabin also had a small gas-fueled Coleman camp stove used for cooking. He said gasoline for the Coleman stove was kept in a can that he knew, as a Boy Scout, to keep outside the cabin.

He would fetch a small capful of gas to use as a fire starter in the wood-burning stove, he said. "A capful would get the fire going," Mr. Beriau said.

A stovepipe for the wood-burning stove was run out a window and stuck 2 feet horizontally out of the building, he said. Because the pipe didn't turn up, it didn't draft properly, he said, and you'd have trouble getting a fire going on a calm night.

It was on a calm night that tragedy struck, Mr. Beriau said.

None of the teens in the cabin that night had been to the camp before, survivors say. Mr. Beriau offered a theory as to what must have happened. "I never knew who poured the gas on the fire," he said. "I didn't know and don't want to know. But they had to have used the can. The flame followed back into the can. He dropped the can and fire totally engulfed the place."

Mr. Slater, who was there, says that's what happened. Mr. Slater has never identified the person who made the fatal mistake, but confirmed the person did not survive.

"Among the victims were the neighborhood paperboy, a grocery stock clerk, an altar boy at St. George's and the third baseman on the Babe Ruth League team," Telegram & Gazette reporter Mark Melady wrote in March 2002 when the memorial at Indian Hill Park was dedicated.

"Before there was a 'Worcester Six' there was an Indian Hill Five," he wrote. "The deaths of the five boys had as devastating an effect on the close-knit Greendale neighborhood as the warehouse fire that killed six Worcester firefighters had on the city of Worcester 31 years later."

Of the five survivors that night in December 1968, one, Richard Halvorsen, from a firefighting family, went on to become a Worcester firefighter himself. Lt. Halvorsen served 26 years in the department and played bagpipes around the state as a founding member of the Worcester Fire Brigade Pipe & Drum Corps. He died in 2004 at age 50.

Bob Richardson, 70, of West Boylston, a retired telecommunications manager for TJX Cos., was 20 at the time of the fire. Temperatures were in the 20s that night, and ice and snow covered the slope. He was upstairs in the cabin.

"There was a real bright flash," he recalled. "There were just flames all over the place. I tried to bang out the door. I couldn't do that. I looked at my hand when I was doing that and it looked like it was liquid. I couldn't hit the door anymore.

"I do remember thinking, 'Don't breathe.' (The fire) was so intense," Mr. Richardson said.

"I went back to a corner and thought for sure I was dead. But I saw this card table and thought, 'Why don't I throw it at the door? God would want me to give it a shot.' The throw hit the rubbish can that was being used as the fireplace. As soon as it did, it exposed the window," which he was able to break.

"Once I got up in the window it was almost like I forgot I was in the fire," he said. "I was hanging out the window thinking, 'Man, it's cold out here, it's just freezing out here.' And then it dawned on me: I'm in the fire.

"I don't think (it took) more than two minutes," Mr. Richardson said. "Two minutes max."

Mr. Richardson was due to enter the Army that Feb. 1. Injuries from the fire kept him out of Vietnam. Two friends who did join the infantry fought in the Battle of Hamburger Hill that May.

Phil Jakubosky, 67, of West Boylston, now retired from the Worcester city health department, was 17 at the time of the fire. He described kicking his way out from upstairs. "You're so focused, it's like tunnel vision," he said. "You just know yourself. Then you're outside and you're standing there, and things are just flying around."

Mr. Slater, 67, taught middle-school history for many years in California's Bay Area, and has since moved back to his mother's old house on Ararat Street.

He suffered second- and third-degree burns over 30 percent of his body in the fire. Mr. Slater recalled trying to get past the burning stove that was blocking the door, being pulled from the building, and the "ssss" noise as he put his head in the snow to extinguish his burning hair.

He spent four months in St. Vincent's Hospital, receiving a series of skin grafts. "I got burned pretty good," he said. "Looking back, it was a painful experience." A memory of his prolonged recovery was listening to the Top 40 hit "Build Me Up Buttercup" on the radio, day after day. "WORC was the only station," he said, "and they only played like five songs."

Mr. Vysniauskas, 65, a Hubbardston real estate investor, was 15 when he lost his older brother, Ronald, an aspiring musician, in the fire. "For five years I'd come home and my parents would be in bed crying," he recalled. "It took a long time to recover.

"Teenagers, you bounce (back) quicker," he said. "That summer I was out at Woodstock."

Looking back, Mr. Vysniauskas said, he thinks to himself: "At least you had a life. They did not."

The survivors hope the memorial at Indian Hill Park will encourage youngsters to be mindful.

"At 18, you don't think anything like that can happen," Mr. Slater said. "That's the lesson we took from it: Life is precious and it can go anytime."

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