Steely Library establishing special collection for Beverly Hills Supper Club fire
Thirty-one years have passed since flames engulfed the Beverly Hills Supper Club, killing 168 people and resulting in a sweeping revision of fire codes across the nation. Yet, as Northern Kentucky University literature professor Tom Zaniello says, it is still one of the least studied and least understood events in Northern Kentucky history. Zaniello teaches his students about the fire and related Northern Kentucky history in his honors course, Community and Catastrophe.
In an effort to collect and preserve the information that is available about the fire, NKU's W. Frank Steely Library is establishing the Beverly Hills Supper Club Fire special collection. Zaniello will be donating his own small collection of artifacts, which include books, newspapers, magazines and samples of wire from the club, thought to be the origin of the fire.
"Although this was a local tragedy, the Beverly Hills fire had tremendous impact on national issues and standards of fire prevention," says Zaniello.
The special collection is the brainchild of Nancy Perry, director of Steely Library development.
"My inspiration came at the viewing of the documentary at the Carnegie last spring," says Perry, referring to the Kentucky Educational Television three-hour documentary, Where the River Bends: A History of Northern Kentucky, which premiered last March in Covington. In the documentary, NKU alumnus Walter Bailey talks about his experience as a young busboy at the supper club on the night of the fire.
"I was very touched by it," says Perry.
Realizing that Bailey was an alumnus, and that it was the 30th anniversary of the fire, Perry suggested that the university feature him in its alumni publication. From there, she says, things "seemed to mushroom." Perry decided to contact key individuals from the tragedy - attorney Stan Chesley, who represented the victims of the fire, and Wayne Dammert, a former banquet captain at the club - to pursue the possibility of obtaining archival documents to create a Beverly Hills Supper Club Fire collection for Steely Library.
In addition to the memorabilia, Steely Library will be the repository for the uncut interviews used in the production of the KET documentary. Among them are interviews with Walter Bailey as well as coroner Dr. Fred Stine. Marsha Hellard, producer of the KET documentary, says NKU seemed the "obvious place" for the tapes and transcripts.
"I was so glad to hear that NKU was collecting materials related to the Beverly Hills fire and was interested in our interviews from Where the River Bends," says Hellard. "When we were producing the documentary, I always considered the interviews oral histories that should be preserved and I think the NKU archives is a perfect fit."
Lois Hamill, archivist and librarian with Steely Library, says the library tries to focus on areas of Northern Kentucky history that other institutions might not be focusing on.
"I would say this is a niche for us," says Hamill. "I do feel that the significant history of Northern Kentucky is something we definitely want to focus on."
Dammert, a banquet captain and one-time card dealer at Beverly Hills, has spearheaded his own effort to preserve the memory of the club by working to create a memorial on the former site of the club.
"First of all, I loved working at Beverly Hills, and this is something that has to be done," says Dammert. "It's something that I have to do."
On May 28, the 31st anniversary of the fire, Dammert and Dave Brock, another former Beverly Hills employee, brought 150 people to a memorial event at the site. The two men gathered 900 bricks from the property and engraved them with the date of the fire. They sold 80 bricks at the event.
Dammert's own collection of memorabilia includes boxes of chandeliers, melted into a tangle; singed, ragged-edged menus; and blackened dining trays, marked with eight distinct circles, recalling the glassware that likely balanced upon them that final night. Dammert has yet to determine which items he will be giving to the Steely Library collection, but he's working to acquire a cash register from the club and possibly the remains of a safe.
The Steely Library collects, preserves and makes accessible materials documenting the history and heritage of the region. Associate Provost for Library Services, Arne Almquist, Ph.D., says that placing materials in the special collections allows the library to pull together items which may otherwise remain scattered in private collections, or which may make their way to disparate public collections over time.
"We also ensure that they are available to researchers over time, both in person and through virtual collections via the Web," says Almquist. "Bringing these materials in will also place them in close proximity to other materials that we currently hold that may have relationships with the Beverly Hills materials in ways that we haven't even yet considered."
Almquist says the special collection will have a strong potential impact on the university by bringing materials together and making them easily available to on-campus researchers and to students.
"We find so often that cold, dry facts can be made exciting when students are holding and accessing original documents and artifacts," says Almquist. "Events from the long past come alive through the physical connection that is created when one can actually hold and, or, read the comments of an actual participant of the event, thereby improving scholarship."
Among those palpable items will be Roger Auge's reporter's notes. Auge was a cub reporter for The Kentucky Post when he was told to cover the fire at Beverly Hills.
Auge says he drove from West Covington to a street near the nightclub and left his car in someone's yard. He recalls an atmosphere of chaos - firefighters and ambulances.
"Arriving at the bottom of the driveway, it was clear a disaster was taking place. At that time, the place was in chaos, firefighters from various Campbell County outfits, ambulances, people who had gotten out," Auge says.
"On the back lawn, 30 or 40 people lay in the grass near a place where weddings were held. They looked fancily dressed, nice, clean and relaxed," Auge says. "All were dead of smoke inhalation."
At that time, Auge recalls, there were no cell phones and The Kentucky Post had radios only in their company cars. He says he has long forgotten how he made contact with the paper, but that somehow reporters filed their stories by their 9:45 a.m. deadline.
"We put color, detail and all the tragic facts on paper," he says.
Auge says the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire had a "lasting impact" on him.
"Although I covered the Apollo 11 moon launch, a major Alaska oil-field sale and several presidential elections - I interviewed Nixon, Wallace and Muskie - coverage of the Beverly Hills fire made the most lasting impact on me," says Auge.
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