A fire which caused $25,000 damage to the home of John and Marguerite Smith of 64 Greenfield Dr. on Monday night may have originated somewhere to the left of the fireplace when a burlap bag containing wood caught fire.
Fire causes $25,000 damage to London home
By Joe Matyas of The London Free Press
John Smith stood amidst the smoke-blackened rubble of his burned-out living room at 64 Greenfield Dr. today, reluctant to talk.
He wasn’t worried about insurance; he had plenty of that, he said. And he didn’t have the agony of knowing that the fire which licked through his house Monday evening had taken a life or injured one of his five children. The family escaped unscathed.
But it was the loss of his sweat and toil that bothered him – years of working on the family home so it was just the way he and his wife Marguerite wanted it.
“There are some things insurance just can’t replace,” he said.
Mr. Smith is a carpenter, a supervisor at Westminster Hospital, and for years he has been putting his own personal touches into the family home.
Touches such as the cedar wall he built over the fireplace, and the hardwood wallboard he had just finished installing in a living room wall a few days before the fire. He had been saving the board for three years.
When a Free Press photographer asked if he could take a picture of the aging carpenter – Mr. Smith is due to retire this year – in the burned out living room, he lowered his head and said:
“I wish you wouldn’t, the loss of these memories saddens me enough. I don’t want a record of it.”
He turned, and walked outside.
His wife echoed his feelings about loss of memories. Her mother had given her a music box shaped like a piano when she was two.
“It still worked,” she said, “but the fire destroyed it.”
“We lost a few things like that,” she said.
Mrs. Smith said it was “funny” how fires travelled. The one which gobbled up the living room had consumed a chair, but didn’t touch a pair of soft indoor shoes she had placed beside it.
Fire investigators were at the Smith home today, trying to determine the cause of the fire and get an accurate assessment of damage – estimated at $25,000.
Mrs. Smith said the family doesn’t know for sure how the blaze – which took its toll in about 20 minutes – started. But they have a theory.
Larry, the Smith’s six-year-old son, was the only person in the living room when the fire started there. There was a fire going in the living room fireplace.
Mrs. Smith speculates that Larry decided to put a couple more pieces of wood on the fire and might have dragged a burlap bag containing small pieces of wood from a corner of the room to the edge of the fireplace.
She said her husband collects wood fragments from the hospital, puts them into the potato sacks, and brings them home for firewood.
She thinks that the bag may have caught fire, ignited the wood in it, and started throwing flames up to the highly varnished cedar wall.
“Once the flames reached the varnish, that’s probably when the fire really travelled,” she said. A new set of drapes, destroyed in the fire, may have fed the blaze.
Vicki Woodard, a boarder at the Smith’s home and fiancée of son Ian, said she was alone in the house with Larry when the fire started. She was in the basement ironing, she said, when “Larry came running downstairs and said ‘you better come up.’ When I did, the whole living room was in flames.”
Miss Woodard took the boy, went to a house across the street, and turned in the alarm; Mr. and Mrs. Smith were shopping at the time.
Mrs. Smith said neighbors have been “real good” to the family since the fire. Some of the children stayed with neighbors overnight while the rest of the family is either bunking in a camper trailer in the driveway or in a spare room over the garage, which was untouched by fire.
