Chicago fire sweeps hall
CHICAGO—(UPI)—A runaway fire, believed triggered by an electrical spark, destroyed at least half of Chicago's huge, $35 million McCormick Place exhibition hall today shattering tons of concrete roofing and twisting steel girders like pretzels.
An estimated 150 workers, alerted by the alarms of private detectives, escaped the collapse of the three-block long lakeshore building.
DAMAGE WAS estimated to be at least $10 million and quite likely $20 million.
No known casualties or injuries were reported.
The blaze came a few hours before one of Chicago's largest annual merchandising shows—the National Houseware Manufacturers Association convention—was to open at McCormick Place.
The fire apparently broke out in the main exhibition hall where the housewares convention was scheduled to be centered.
MORE THAN 2,300 exhibition booths, some valued at more than $10,000, jammed almost all of McCormick Place's 486,000 square feet of exhibition area in readiness. A total of 60,000 persons had been expected to attend the big show.
Four hundred and seventy-five firemen and 100 pieces of equipment fought the blaze.
A half hour after the blaze broke out at 2 a.m. CST the north ceiling of McCormick place, located over the main exhibition hall, collapsed. The south ceiling followed.
IN THE EARLY morning darkness along the lakeshore, the standing walls of the modernistic structure loomed like teeth shielding hollow, blackened gaps.
The blaze ranked as Chicago's greatest fire disaster in terms of property damage since May 19, 1934, when flames destroyed 42 square blocks of the city's fabled stockyards. Damage then was estimated at $10 million in depression dollars.
Red China to stay out of Vietnam
WASHINGTON —(UPI)— Red China has assured the United States it will stay out of the Vietnam war unless the character of the conflict changes drastically, according to a French editor.
The State Department had no comment on the report by Rene Dabernat, foreign editor of the magazine Paris Match. Dabernat made the statement in a copyrighted interview with U.S. News & World Report yesterday.
DABERNAT SAID that Peking sent its assurances to Washington through the French Foreign Office last spring.
He said that a diplomat from the Red Chinese Embassy in Paris asked the French Foreign Office at that time to let Washington know that Peking would not enter the war on three conditions.
"These were that the U.S. not invade China, that they not invade North Vietnam, and that they not bomb the dikes of the Red River in North Vietnam.
"France transmitted this message. I verified this in Washington.
"Later, President Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara and Roving Ambassador W. Averell Harriman gave the necessary signals to Peking in various public speeches to show that they agreed to these conditions."
Whether McCormick Place, erected six years ago, and Chicago's guarantee that it would retain the title of the nation's convention capital, could ever operate again remained to be seen.
VC slay 44 captives
SAIGON — (UPI) — U.S. Air Force fighter bombers penetrated North Vietnam's deadliest defenses and for the first time in nearly a month struck the Hanoi area dump.
In the ground war. South Vietnamese soldiers stumbled on Vietnam's worst prison camp massacre. The government troops reported finding the bodies of
44 men, women and children who were stabbed, shot or killed with hand grenades by their fleeing Viet Cong captors.
GOVERNMENT spokesmen said Viet Cong guards bound most of the prisoners in groups of eight and killed them while other guerrillas held off the advancing Vietnamese troops.
HONG KONG — (UPI)—Red China's three-million-man army is fully behind Communist party leader Mao Tse-tung in China's power struggle, a ranking official said today.
Military backs Mao
It was an ominous warning to Mao's opponents, indicating that military forces might be used to repel any further resistance to the aging party chairman's "cultural revolution."
THE WARNING was in an article in the party journal Red Flag, and broadcast today by Radio Peking. The author was believed to have been Chen Po-ta, leader of the Communist party's purge committee and possibly Mao's personal ghost writer.
The article also claimed Maoist forces were winning in Shanghai which has been a focal point of opposition to the Red regime. Police there were given powers last week to crush anti-Maoist elements.
The Red Flag article was at variance with one appearing Saturday in the Liberation Army daily. It said a "handful" of capitalists had wormed their way into the army and were using "every imaginable trick to stir up trouble."
Daily Kansan
Monday, January 16, 1967