A Ponce Press reader who resides in New York writes us that his father narrowly escaped death, but that his uncle was a victim of the 1946 Winecoff Hotel inferno, as described in “The Winecoff Fire,” a book authored by Sam B. Heys and Allen Goodwin which was favorably reviewed in our April issue.
Robbie Irvin who was the protégé of Phantom of the Fox Joe Patten and who was billed as the “world’s youngest theatre organist” (pictured here at the Fox Theatre organ console in 1966) writes that his father and uncle stayed on the eight floor of the Winecoff while in town to interview for civilian airline jobs. Both were recently discharged Navy fighter pilots.
Irvin’s uncle Harold, 23, lost his life in a room on the Hotel’s south side, inaccessible to ladders. All occupants of these rooms above the seventh floor perished.
Robbie Irvin’s father, Bob, who still lives here in Atlanta , escaped from a room which fronted Peachtree via an 85-foot-tall aerial ladder.
His father never spoke of the fire, writes Robbie, but after that night, “he would never enter a hotel without a pair of thick gloves and a flashlight. I suspect he climbed down a very hot ladder.”
Son of Winecoff Survivor
was Fox Theatre Organist
by Bob Foreman © 2014