Discovering my grandfather, the bank robber, on the 90th anniversary of America’s worst prison fire

Sooner or later, you could receive a revelation like this in your inbox: A distant relative or amateur genealogist writes to tell you that you have a parent, sibling, cousin, or ancestor you didn’t know about. In my case, I learned that my father, raised an only child, had a half-brother born from a brief relationship that my grandfather had before he married my grandmother. It took me a few minutes to absorb the news, but I was hardly shocked. These things happen, and we hear about them more and more, thanks to databases such as Ancestry.com. Personal essays about discovering an unknown family member are so common now, they’re practically a literary genre.

But that’s not the story I want to tell.

The people who contacted me in mid-February about my half-uncle had uncovered a trove of information on my family. Marriage licenses. Naturalization papers. Death certificates. My forebears were not fussy about spelling, so sometimes they went by “Safran,” other times by “Saffran,” but almost never by “Saffron.” My father, Stanley, was 4 when my grandfather, Isidore Lawrence Saffran, died in 1930. Larry, as everyone called him, had grown up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the only son in a large Jewish family headed by a modestly prosperous butcher who sold live poultry from a shop on Avenue C.

My grandfather’s five sisters doted on him. In one of the two photographs I have of Larry, he stands among a group of friends, hoisting my infant father onto his shoulders. It’s Labor Day 1927, a scant three years before his death at age 28, and they’re having a “Smile Contest.” His hair flops impishly over one eye, a cigarette dangles from his lips. Larry looks handsome and fun-loving, yet I always had the sense that he was trouble. Perhaps because my father was so young when Larry died, he almost never spoke about him. My grandmother, Dorothy, also shared little. She told me that Larry, a salesman, had been killed in a trolley crash on Houston Street.

So, when I looked at Larry’s death certificate, I was surprised to see he died in Columbus, Ohio. Odd, I thought.

My eye traveled down the page, landing on the cause of death: conflagration.

Larry had died in a fire. At the Ohio State Penitentiary.

My fingers raced across the keyboard. Before I could finish typing the prison’s name, the words “Ohio State Penitentiary Fire 1930” appeared in the search field. Dozens of people had searched the same words before. As I soon learned, Larry was serving time in Ohio’s state prison for “forcing a safe-deposit box” — bank robbery.

The tragedy unfolded on the evening of April 21 — Easter Monday — two months after Larry arrived at the overcrowded, 19th-century prison, on a strangely elastic, one-to-20-year term. The fire started in the attic, in an area where construction was taking place. Flames fed on the wooden rafters. Within minutes, great balloons of smoke were rolling through the halls, seeping into the cells where the prisoners were bedding down for the night. The inmates screamed for help, but the guards, fearful of a prison break, initially refused to unlock the cell doors, according to Mitchel P. Roth’s Fire in the Big House. Even when the guards finally began to act, they had no firefighting equipment to battle the flames. Rather than be burned alive, some inmates slit their throats, using shivs. When the fire was extinguished two hours later, 320 prisoners were dead, including my grandfather. The prison yard could barely contain the bodies. Ninety years on, it remains the worst prison fire, and the third-deadliest building fire, in American history.

The news that Larry had an out-of-wedlock child didn’t faze me, but discovering the gruesome circumstances of his death set off a swell of emotions. I was close to several of Larry’s sisters, and I couldn’t understand why no one ever told me how he died.

I also wondered how it was possible that I had never heard of such a significant tragedy. My relatives, descendants of sweatshop workers, frequently invoked New York’s Triangle Shirtwaist fire, which killed 167. In high school, I heard all about San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake and the great Chicago fire of 1871.

It’s not like the penitentiary fire wasn’t big news. The story dominated the front pages of newspapers around the country, including The Philadelphia Inquirer. There were vivid photographs and film of the blaze, and Roth noted that they were turned into one of the first “talking” newsreels. Within 21 hours, he wrote, patrons of Broadway’s movie theaters could hear “the shrieking of the prison siren, the hissing as water hits the flames, the howling of desperate prisoners, the crackling of burning logs, the thud of falling beams.” After Larry’s body was returned to his family, the New York Daily News ran a photo of his funeral procession. But there is still no plaque in Columbus commemorating the fire. The sprawling Ohio State Penitentiary compound was unceremoniously leveled in 1998 to provide land for an entertainment district.

When it comes to sweeping our shame under the rug, countries are a lot like families. That’s especially true when the history concerns people deemed unworthy, like prison inmates. Look how long it has taken us to acknowledge the unspeakable lynchings of African Americans and the mass internment of Japanese American citizens during World World II. As I’ve mulled Larry’s death over the last two months, I couldn’t help thinking of the inmates who remain locked up as deadly COVID-19 seeps through their prisons.

It’s human nature to edit out unsavory parts of our past. Yet, we will never feel complete until we know the whole story. I am grateful to the researchers who tracked me down; I only wish they had found me before my father died in 2018. I want to know what he knew. My father lived the classic Depression-era childhood. His younger brother, Charles, died from an infection a year after Larry. My father nearly succumbed to rheumatic fever in his teens. His heart badly damaged, he was sent to Miami to recover. He remained in Florida, boarding with strangers, through high school. His mother stayed in New York, where she could make more money, working as a bookkeeper at one of those Broadway movie houses.

I have always wondered about the loneliness my father must have felt, a boy from the teeming Lower East Side, thrust into a strange house in a faraway city. Like many of his generation, he was a man of few words. If he found himself in a gathering, he sneaked off to a corner to read the newspaper. Learning about Larry’s death has opened a window into my father’s life. If Larry was reckless and wild, my father was a model of familial responsibility. For much of my childhood, he worked two jobs, stopping home only for dinner between shifts. After my grandmother went into a nursing home, he visited her every afternoon for more than a decade.

I can’t say for sure that the Safran/Saffran family was ashamed that Larry ended up in prison. They gave him a lavish tombstone, with the word “Father” etched on the base. Bank robberies had become quite common during the ‘20s, the era of Prohibition and Al Capone. His criminal past certainly didn’t stop my family from naming me in Larry’s honor: I became Inga Laura. Yet, I can’t help wondering why my grandmother changed the family surname to “Saffron” the year after Larry’s death. I have spent a lifetime trying to explain my strange name without ever understanding the history embedded in it.

Replacing the ‘a’ with an ‘o’ long kept me separated from the Safrans around the world. Not only do I now know about the cousins descended from Larry’s first child, I have been given a family tree tracing my forebears back to 1787 in western Ukraine. Using Google street view, I can locate the street, and maybe the house, where my great-great-great-grandfather lived. I can finally fill out my story.