Inferno on Locust Walk

It was 1:30 a.m. on Dec. 10, 1967, and then-College sophomore Tom Davis was relaxing in the basement of his Locust Walk fraternity house watching reruns of The Untouchables with some of his Phi Kappa Sigma brothers.

Suddenly, his classmate Kevin Stitt burst into the room.

"Delt's flaming!" Stitt yelled.

Though Davis and his brothers didn't quite know what Stitt meant, they rushed outside after him.

The first thing Davis saw when he went outside was someone crashing down onto Locust Walk -- the person had jumped from the second floor of Delta Tau Delta. Looking up, he saw the house bursting with flames.

In a matter of seconds, the Delta Tau Delta fraternity had become engulfed by a fire, in which three people died.

Then-College sophomore Richard J. Noble had started it.

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District Attorney Arlen Specter heaped 11 charges on Noble -- a football player from Orofino, Idaho -- including three counts of murder, three counts of voluntary manslaughter and three of involuntary manslaughter.

Before Irina Malinovskaya -- a Wharton senior currently on trial for allegedly bludgeoning Temple pharmacology student Irina Zlotnikov to death -- Noble was the last Penn student to be tried for murder.

Unlike the Malinovskaya case -- which revolves around an incident that happened off campus and has sparked little public consideration at Penn -- the Delta fire was experienced deeply by the campus, as it took the lives of two students and destroyed a campus landmark. But the tragedy sparked sweeping fire reform, the legacy of which can still be seen today.

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Delta Tau Delta, then located at 3533 Locust Walk -- currently the site of the Sweeten Alumni House -- was hosting its annual Christmas formal the night of the disaster.

The Delta brothers had hung sheets on the walls and around the door to create the illusion of an igloo. The centerpiece of the party was a 10- to 12-foot-high snowman the Delts built out of tissue paper and chicken wire.

Noble, a Delta brother who was not allowed to live in the house because of academic ineligibility, had helped build the snowman.

Though he was a six-feet-two-inch, 200 pound football player and rower, Noble was exceptionally drunk after downing what he testified were 15 to 20 glasses of champagne.

Given that nearly all of the party-goers had been imbibing, how exactly he started the fire is still somewhat unclear.

What is clear is that by 1:30 a.m., most of the guests had left the party, but at least 30 people remained.

While the party was emptying out, Noble was over by the snowman playing with a box of matches.

He testified in court that he was playing a game with another Delta brother; Noble would light a match, and the brother would snuff it out. According to Noble's lawyer, Bernard L. Segal, they did this twice successfully. The third time, they lost control of the flame.

In an AP story that ran the next day in The New York Times, Delta brother Paul Kreher recalled that the fire "spread so rapidly [that] soon the ceiling and its wood beams were burning. It got hot real fast. It really only took 10 to 15 seconds and the whole room was in flames."

"It was like everything was soaked with gas," Lance Kollmer, a 19-year-old sophomore, told The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Fire-doors on the house's second and third floors had for some reason been propped open during the course of the party, causing a draft that fire officials said caused the fire to spread more rapidly.

Fifteen to 20 people on the first floor dove out the windows, while others in the back of the house fled out a rear door.

The students upstairs, however, appeared to be trapped. Many jumped from the second-story window.

Davis, Stitt and others used rugs and blankets to attempt to catch the leapers.

Davis told The Daily Pennsylvanian that night that he saw some who refused to jump being pushed.

Meanwhile, The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin reported, Delta sophomore Joseph Grochowski had escaped to safety. Thinking that his date was still in the building, Grochowski rushed back inside to find her.

His date -- who suffered first degree burns to the face and a broken left foot -- had jumped out of the house already, but Grochowski did find Susa Sagendorph, a high school senior attending the party.

Sagendorph had refused to jump from a window, her friends later said.

Through the heavy smoke, Grochowski and Sagendorph groped their way into a second floor bathroom, perhaps thinking it was a fire-exit.

Firemen found their remains there. They had suffocated to death.

Kent Smith, the other victim, was found badly burned in his bedroom, dead of asphyxiation.

While the fire was raging, a crowd of about 1,000 people -- mostly students, gathered outside the frat -- according to DP coverage from the time. Party-goers wept openly outside the burning building.

"The orange-red glow that lit the sky could be seen up to 37th Street and across to Chestnut Street," the DP reported, adding that the fire's smoke could be smelt across campus.

It took 50 firemen -- five of whom were injured -- from eight engines and three ladder companies to finally quell the flames. Nine other party-goers were injured.

Unaware of the fatalities, a panicked Noble fled to Pittsburgh.

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Then-School of Education graduate student Thomas Weinberg, who was the emergency contact for the dean's office that night, said that the police immediately started looking for Noble.

Coincidentally, Weinberg was the graduate adviser on Noble's freshman-year floor, and Noble called him from Pittsburgh the next day seeking advice.

Weinberg convinced him to come back to Philadelphia and face up to what he had done.

Meanwhile, Penn was reeling from the tragedy.

Over 500 people turned out for a memorial service at Irvine Auditorium that Tuesday.

"I just remember how down everybody was," Davis said.

For Delta Tau Delta, the fire was a crushing blow. The fraternity moved back into the house in the fall of 1968 but became inactive in 1972.

"It was not much like belonging to a fraternity," one Delta brother said in December 1968. "If things start to get boisterous at a party, people calm down ... because they remember."

Charles Coyne, who had a friend at the party, said the fire was a "huge shock."

"My friend was shattered psychologically by this for life."

For students whose college careers would see the Vietnam War and the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., Coyne said that it was another harsh blow.

"For those of us who lived through those years, it was like being hammered at again and again and again," he said.

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For Noble, his troubles were just beginning. He went on trial for murder in October, 1968, with his lawyer Bernard L. Segal essentially making the case that he was too drunk to have intended to kill anyone.

Segal also argued that there were a number of outside factors that led to the deaths, including the flammable fraternity decorations.

Recent attempts to locate Noble were unsuccessful, but Segal said that he was incredibly remorseful. Many at the time have attested that Noble was a kind person who had simply committed a tragic mistake.

Segal's challenge during the trial was coaxing Noble -- the son of a marine and stoic by nature -- to display his emotions.

"He was taught that a man handles his pain. ... You don't show emotion, you don't cry in public," Segal said.

His parents -- who came in from Idaho -- watched the entire case unfold.

The jury accepted Segal's defense and ultimately convicted Noble only of involuntary manslaughter. He was sentenced to 11 months in prison.

A photo could be seen in the DP the day after the verdict of Noble smiling broadly.

"I would like to believe that we got a fantastically good result for Richard," Segal said.

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During the trial, Weinberg said, "the campus was very much in touch with what was going on." He noted that the media covered the proceedings extensively.

Segal agreed, saying that he recalled a large amount of antipathy toward Noble during the trial.

But Davis, Stitt and Coyne -- all students at the time -- say they don't remember the trial as a constant topic of discussion.

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Far from being an isolated incident, the Delta fire was part of a disturbing trend on campus.

In 1966, three students died in an off-campus apartment fire. Just a year earlier, a smoldering cigarette had caused the Sigma Alpha Mu house to burn down, though nobody was seriously injured.

The Delta Tau Delta house itself had its own history of fire problems: a minor fire in 1965 and a student death in a 1950 house fire.

This time, however, change was swift. The reaction from the administration to the Delta fire was immediate and decisive, if perhaps overdue.

Within five days, the school banned flammable party decorations.

It also instituted a policy to educate students on how to use fire extinguishers and pull fire alarm levers, as well teach students as where fire ladder boxes are located in their residences.

In the week following the fire, the other 32 fraternities and 10 sororities were screened for dangerous decorations and fire hazards.

Over winter break, renovations were performed on all dormitories to provide every resident with access to at least two fire exits. Some residents were temporarily displaced from their rooms while these changes were made.

The University also launched a program to install new expensive sprinkler systems in all fraternities and dorms.

Today, Penn's Fire and Emergency Services inspects all fraternity and sorority houses four times a year and conducts fire evacuation drills twice a year.

All houses now have sprinklers and fire alarms connected to a central network -- not the case in 1967 -- and Fire Services offers special inspections of properties upon request.

Officials have also placed regulations on holiday decorations and Christmas trees.

Presumably, tissue paper snowmen are included.

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