On This Day in Memphis History by G. Wayne Dowdy

Author:G. Wayne Dowdy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2014-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

JULY

July 1, 1978

Memphis Burns as Firefighters Watch

Memphis firefighters walked off the job, sparking a large number of fires that gutted parts of the city during the three-day strike. By late morning, dispatchers began receiving an alarming number of calls reporting fires. At first, the majority of fires erupted in abandoned or out-of-the-way parts of the city, including several vacant lots and warehouses, but by late evening, they had spread to more populated parts of the city. At the Audubon Square Townhouses, four units were blazing out of control when District Chief Charles Jurden and Captain James O. Wimberley arrived on the scene. Organizing residents and other volunteers into a makeshift engine company, they fought the blaze for forty-five minutes before they extinguished the fire. As the smoke began to clear, Jurden and Wimberley collapsed from heat exhaustion and were hospitalized. Meanwhile, across town at Vance and Lauderdale, a vacant two-story apartment complex burst into flames and spread to the nearby Vance Avenue branch of the public library. Nearly five hundred residents of the historic Vance-Lauderdale neighborhood poured into the streets to watch the inferno, while a group of striking firefighters laughed and taunted their former supervisors. “Hey captain, that’s not the way to lay a line. You’ll never get the fire out that way,” one striker yelled as another shouted, “Let it burn!” Three fire units combated the blaze, but they were unable to save either the apartments or the library. Twenty-two thousand books were lost in what library director Lamar Wallis aptly called “a horrible waste to the community.”

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