Grand Beach “Monte Carlo” Closed By U. S. 

The Purple Gang 

The Great Black Strip

Fire Destroys Night Club

August 7,1931

GRAND BEACH ‘MONTE CARLO’ CLOSED BY U. S.

Gaming Patrons In Panic As 12 Federal Agents Take Control

All was quiet, and gloomy today, at the Grand Beach Inn, south of New Buffalo, and wealth resorters who, it is alleged, have been wont to gamble merrily there are looking for new play spots.

The depression was due to a raid by federal agents.

While 90 members of the middle west prohibition enforcement agents swooped over Knox county, Ind., a group of 12 federal men, outside agents working from South Bend offices, threw a net around the Grand Beach Inn, on U. S. 12, arrested three occupants of the place and confiscated large quantities of liquor and gambling devices.

WIELD AXES

The alleged gambling den was running ‘wide open’ when the federal agents swooped down upon it, and was crowded with beach resorters, patrons of the gaming tables, according to officers. As the officers broke in the patrons dashed for the doors, but were kept from flight. After making arrestes of three men, reputed operators of the parlor, the agents proceeded to destroy the inn with axes, destroying the walls and decorations, Roulette wheels and other gambling devices and a quantity of alleged liquor were confiscated as evidence.

Sam Katson was arrested by the officers as the owner of the inn, and George Karras and George Seanceonis were taken as bartenders. They were placed in the St. Joseph’s county jail at South Bend and their bonds were placed at $2,000 each.

Liquor confiscated in the raid were specified as; Three barrels of ‘wildcat beer’, five kegs of Canadian beer and 33 quarts of whiskey. Most of the beer kegs were destroyed on the scene and the contents spilled, officers said.

WARNED TO QUIT RACKET

South Bend agents said today they had warned the proprietor of the Grand Beach Inn to get out of business in the previous raid and that their wanton destruction of the place in Wednesday’s was a step taken to make difficult and expensive any attempt to reopen the gaming house.

From “The Story of Harbor County”

Michiana-Grand Beach

Unlike nearby Harbor Country communities, Michiana and Grand Beach were solely founded as resort communities. The Long Beach Development Company began subdividing and building Michiana in the 1920s. The area that is now Michiana (Michigan side) and Michiana Shores (Indiana side) was originally called Michigan Shores.

Stately white gates have welcomed visitors to Grand Beach since the early 1900s. The community’s golf course dates to 1911 and was a huge attraction for Chicagoans who arrived three times a day on the Michigan Central Railroad. Frank Lloyd Wright built homes in Grand Beach, but the village’s most famous architectural offering was the 175-room Golfmore Hotel. Opened in 1921, the Golfmore offered concerts, movies and a huge, at least for the Midwest, ski jump located on a dune behind the hotel. But the

Golfmore was destroyed in 1939 by a spectacular fire.

The Grand Beach Inn was once The Pinewood Lodge and served as the training camp for James Braddock as he prepared for his prize fight with Joe Louis.

Gangsters: Purple Gang members hide their faces from the camera in May 1929 after they were arrested on charges of providing protection to Detroit narcotics dealers. Over the years gang members were accused of hijacking, bootlegging, extortion, kidnaping and murder.

Detroit's Infamous Purple Gang

By Paul R. Kavieff

     Detroit's lower east side was a breeding ground for poverty, crime, and violence during the early part of the century. It was in the chaotic streets of this ethnic melting pot that the Purple Gang was born in the years just preceding World War I.

With the advent of Prohibition in Michigan on May 1, 1918, the young delinquents quickly graduated from nuisance types of street crime to armed robbery, hijacking, extortion, and other strong arm work. They became notorious for their high profile manner of operation and their savagery in dealing with enemies.

The four Bernstein brothers, Abe, Joe, Raymond, and Isadore (Izzy), soon became the recognized leaders of the mob. The Purple Gang was never a tightly organized criminal syndicate but a loose confederation of predominantly Jewish gangsters. By the early twenties, the Purples had developed an unsavory reputation as hijackers, stealing liquor loads from older and more established gangs of rumrunners. The Purple Gang always preferred hijacking to rumrunning and their methods were brutal. Anyone landing liquor along the Detroit waterfront had to be armed and prepared to fight to the death as it was common practice for the Purples to take a load of liquor and shoot whoever was with it. In the early years, the Purple Gang preyed exclusively on other underworld operators, insulating them from the police.

     The young Purple Gangsters came under the tutelage of two older and established Detroit mobsters in the early twenties named Charles Leiter and Henry Shorr. These two men operated a legitimate corn sugar outlet on Oakland Avenue known as the "Oakland Sugar House." Leiter and Shorr became the mentors of the Purples using the younger men for strong arm work, extortion of local businesses, and to muscle in on the alley brewers to whom they sold bootleg supplies. As a result, the Oakland Sugar House Gang was born, in reality only an early phase of the Purple Gang's evolution.

With their numbers swelled by the influx of mobsters from other cities who came to Detroit to cash in on the golden harvest of Prohibition, the Purple Gang prospered. The mob soon branched out into other rackets. During a period of strife in the Detroit area cleaning industry, the Purple Gang was used as terrorists by corrupt labor leaders to keep union members in line and to harass non-union independents. This conflict became known as the Cleaners and Dyers War. Bombings, thefts, beatings, and murder were all methods employed by the Purples to enforce union policy. They were paid handsomely for their services. The labor war ended with the Purple Gang Trial of 1928 in which all of the Purple Gangster defendants were eventually acquitted. The gang emerged from the trial unscathed and became the dominant power in the Detroit underworld. The Purples ruled the Detroit underworld for approximately five years from 1927 to 1932.

The gang rose to underworld prominence rapidly after a machine gun massacre at the Milaflores Apartments in March of 1927. Three imported gunmen suspected of killing a Purple Gang liquor distributor were butchered in the ambush. Fred "Killer" Burke, famous for his role in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago in 1929, was hired by the Purples as the machine gunner. Two other notorious Purple Gang gunmen also participated.

During the late twenties, the Purple Gang reigned supreme over the Detroit underworld, controlling the city's vice, gambling, liquor, and drug trade. They also controlled the local wire service which provided horse racing information to all of the Detroit horse betting parlors and handbooks. The gang even became the suppliers of Canadian whiskey to the Capone organization in Chicago. This arrangement was made after Capone was told by the Detroit underworld to keep his operation out of the city. Capone thought it more prudent to make the Purples his liquor agents rather than go to war with the gang.

For several years the Purples enjoyed almost complete immunity from police interference as witnesses to crimes were terrified of testifying against any criminal identified as a Purple Gangster. Jealousies, egos, and inter-gang quarrels would eventually cause the Purple Gang to self-destruct.

In 1931 an inter-gang dispute ended in the murder of three Purples by members of their own gang. The three men had violated underworld code by operating outside the territory allotted to them by the Purple Gang leadership. Three members of the "Little Jewish Navy," a group of Purples who owned several boats and participated in rumrunning as well as hijacking, decided they would break away from the gang and become an underworld power themselves. The three men, Hymie Paul, Isadore Sutker aka Joe Sutker, and Joe Lebowitz, were lured to an apartment on Collingwood Avenue on September 16, 1931. They believed they were going to a peace conference with Purple Gang leaders. In reality, they were only going to their deaths. After a brief discussion, the three unarmed Purples were shot to death by the Purple Gangsters they had gone to meet. A bookie named Sol Levine, who had transported the three men to the fatal rendezvous, was arrested soon afterwards and was quickly frightened into becoming a State's witness. Levine had been allowed to live because he was a friend of Ray Bernstein. The State had a live witness to the murders and Levine's testimony was devastating. Three of the four Purples involved in the incident which became known as the Collingwood Manor Massacre were quickly arrested. Irving Milberg, Harry Keywell, and Raymond Bernstein, three high ranking Purples, were convicted of first degree murder in the Collingwood Manor Massacre and sent to prison for life.

Although the Purples remained a power in the Detroit underworld until 1935, long prison sentences and inter-gang sniping eventually destroyed the gang's manpower. The predecessors of Detroit's modern day Mafia family simply stepped in and filled the void once the Purple Gang self-destructed.

Before the freeways were built, even before the riot of 43, there was a strip in Detroit called Paradise Valley, and it was swinging all night long...

By TONI JONES

Detroit Free Press Staff Writer

Count Basie’s band wailed "After Hours" thinly from the juke box, but the small gathering in the Garfield Lounge of the Randora Hotel hardly heard. The faces and clothes were 1972, different. Drinks were more expensive. And the music didn’t croon live and bittersweet as it did 30 years ago. Gone were the handsome, smooth talking sporting men dressed in Al Capone suits with money in their pockets and beautiful women on their sleeves. Gone too were the big bands, the long shiny chauffeur-driven limousines, the high-ceilinged dance halls with their crystal chandeliers and the chorus girls in puffed sleeved satin dresses with low cut backs, floppy brimmed hats and cigarette holders.  

The Randora Lounge at 98 Garfield now comprises almost all that’s left to suggest the frenzied night life and the people who made this part of Black Bottom distinctly and uniquely Paradise Valley. The valley burgeoned in the early 30’s along and around Adams and St. Antione shortly before, after — and some because of — the legalization of whiskey in 1933. It included nearly all the black businesses in the densely populated black section of Detroit. It was centered in Black Bottom the name given the area which housed most of the city’s blacks whose boundaries extended from Hastings to Brush and from Gratiot to Vernor Highway.

The business district containing black owned shops, music stores, grocery stores, bowling alleys, hotels, bars and lucrative policy offices, was all called Paradise Valley. The Valley was open 24 hours a day as were its restaurants, gambling houses and the after hour clubs where the best whiskey in town, legal and illegal flowed steadily for 25 cents an ounce.  

The Valley attracted all of the best black entertainers in the country. And many aspiring young singers, dancers and musicians got their first big break before the audience at the Club Plantation and the 666. Earl Hines, The Inkspots, the Will Mastin Trio, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway and Dinah Washington were Valley regulars. They were booked into the Greystone Ballroom or the Michigan Theater or any of a dozen other big white-only nightclubs or gathering places, but they were only welcome there during show time.

Racial discrimination, especially in the downtown hotels, forced black performers to stay in black hotels when they were in the Valley. Hotels included the Dewey, the Biltmore and the Norwood, which was best known for its shows staged on a revolving floor in the Hotel’s Club Plantation. Ella Fitzgerald, Billy Eckstine, Sugar Brown, and the McKinney’s Cotton Pickers were frequent performers.

Dance groups featuring long-legged beauties like Mitzi, Mary and Mike (the 3M’s) or Ziggy Johnson’s dance productions were familiar shows at the Chocolate Bar, the Plantation and Club 666. Tap dancers Baby Lawrence, Durb Wilson and some of the best performers in town unabashedly practiced their show routines on the sidewalk in front of the Carlton hotel. Crime was practically nonexistent.

Valley regulars included Uncle Dan, who lent whiskey money to his friends and always had a spare $1,000. Uncle Dan would sit outside the Turf bar or Lee Lucky’s to shoot the breeze with passersby and he was never robbed. Black policemen assigned to patrol the Valley partied with the night crowd, but they set absolute rules forbidding criminal disorder.

Characters like Buffalo James, owner of a prosperous restaurant was often seen socializing with the cooks and entertainers when the restaurant was empty. As the ballroom closed and the hungry night-clubers began looking for a place to eat, Buffalo would stand outside the restaurant with a big white handkerchief in his hand. When he spotted groups of people coming toward the restaurant, he would signal the cooks to start stirring and the band to start playing by wiping his face with a large white cloth. Another favorite figure was Sonny Bronson, a temperamental bartender who owned a sandwich shop but refused to serve anyone who yelled at him or made him angry.

"It used to look like a carnival on the weekends," recalled Jimmy (The Greek) Johnson, who owned a couple of pool halls in the Valley. "You could go from club to club and after three in the morning, you’d have the thrill of listening to a jam session.

"Say for instance, Earl Hines’ band was playing somewhere in Flint, Basie’s band in Pontiac and Duke’s band would be over here at the Greystone and maybe Cab’s band would be playing somewhere else in the state. They would all stay here (in the Valley) and go to the places by bus and come back here at night. When they came back, all these musicians would get together and stay up and jam all night, playing all of their songs. Sometimes, they would jam until 10 or 11 a.m. the next morning," he said.  

The heart of the Valley’s economy was the Policy operation, later replaced by the Numbers. It was generally believed and accepted that the only way a black man could make a lot of money was to run a policy house. Unlike the numbers, policy houses — which were exclusively black-owned and operated — had a reputation for honesty. The policy was played by buying three numbers for five cents. The numbers ranged from one to 78. Twelve winning numbers were drawn daily and paid odds of 500-1 or $25 for a nickel.

Gradually policy houses gave way to the numbers operation. It was a common sight for those allowed near the money to see $150,000 in cash in a safe with the door wide open. The next day, however the same safe might be wiped clean from one day’s winning pay offs.

"It (the numbers) was a game of the percentages and they managed to make money out of it," said one of the Valley’s ex-patrons. "But it was based on the daily races and you could pick up a newspaper — because they published the race results — and anybody who knew how could figure the number. When the numbers came out that’s what it was. Even kids knew how to pick the numbers out of the paper.

"But there was still gambling all over the place. One man had a club upstairs over the Turf Bar and it was open 24 hours a day. "They played poker and black jack. One of the things they always had a hard time selling the police on in this city was crap shooting. Police didn’t allow any crap shooting in the Valley.  

"At that time you had all of the politicians, council members, the mayor and big people in the police department who use to come down there," he said.

Many skilled black comptometer operators, adding machine operators, secretaries, stenographers, accountants and lawyers served their apprenticeships in policy and number houses in the Valley. Before the policy operations, few black owned businesses required highly trained help. But policy money came in so fast that adding machine workers soon became proficient and well paid.

In August, 1939, the policy opera-tion received a severe blow. A policy house bookkeeper, Mrs. Janet McDonald, murdered her child, and committed suicide when her boyfriend, who allegedly was connected with protection payoffs to police officials, ended their affair. Letters she had written and addressed to local newspapers, the governor, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation charged that her former boyfriend was the collection agent of illegal money for the police department. The papers were near her body.

Circuit Court Judge Homer Ferguson was appointed to conduct an inquiry. A special prosecutor, Chester O’Hara, was appointed to handle the investigation when the prosecutor, Duncan McCrea, was disqualified by charges of his involvement in the conspiracy to protect gamblers. A mayoral aide, who testified that he collected money from racketeers for the mayor, said he delivered more than $3,000 from policy operators to Mayor Richard Reading in his City Hall office.

The prosecutor’s key witness also testified that one of the convicted racketeers had told him of a plan to set up a special racket squad in 1938 to help the numbers operators. Other witnesses charged that Reading had accepted $55,000 in payments to "protect" the $10-million-a-year Detroit operation.

By June, 1942, Reading, his son Richard Reading Jr., the mayor’s administrative assistant, McCrea, several policy operators, including Joe Louis’ manager, the former sheriff, the police superintendent, and 20 police officers were convicted of graft conspiracy. But the scandal only enhanced the glamour of the Valley.

Joe Louis, the Valley’s beloved "Brown Bomber," was still in his prime and Sugar Ray Robinson was a promising young boxer. Each time the Bomber fought, mobs of Louis fans huddled into stores, shops or restaurants with radios to hear him slug out another victory. Whites in Chauffeur-driven cars would ride through the Valley after victories carrying black riders on top of the cars. Everyone shared the booze and good feelings. When Louis wasn’t training or managing his Chicken Shack on the outskirts of the Valley, or running from Broadway Joe (one of Louis’ friends who would catch a taxi to chase the boxer about ten blocks to ask for a few dollars), Louis was partying in the Valley.

T-Bone steaks at The Hole cost 35 cents. A bologna sandwich on toast at Biddy’s Restaurant was a nickel. "Duke Ellington’s band would always stop by Biddy’s for a nickel sandwich when they were in town," said Jesse Faithful, owner of Valley Foods Restaurant, 1719 St. Antione, one of the last remaining shops of Paradise Valley. "I don’t know how I ever made a sandwich for a nickel. This place is empty now, but at one time I had eight waitresses and four cooks. The expressway (Chrysler) took that away.

"This whole street used to be some kind of night club or bar. If you came to Detroit from another town and the cab driver asked where you wanted to go, every black person would say Paradise Valley," Faithful said, looking through the front window of his restaurant which now seats only 15 customers and sells bologna sandwiches for 40 cents.

"There was gambling in about every other joint, usually upstairs. My building was adjoining one of the biggest number houses in the area. It was originally suppose to be a bank, but it didn’t work out too well, so it was turned into a numbers house and eventually became a real estate office.

"The Norwood was torn down about seven years ago. The Biltmore was just up the street where the Stroh’s parking lot is now. They bought the Norwood and sold it to Hudson’s for the warehouse. "They’ve (Stroh’s) been here nine times trying to buy this property but I’m not going to sell for anything less than $75,000. This is valuable property and a lot of rich Negroes who owned property down here sold for almost nothing."  

Every two years by popular vote the Valley elected a mayor who promised fried chicken in every skillet and pork chops in every ice box and claimed to have direct contact with City Hall. The title Mayor was also given to leaders of Bronzeville in Chicago and Cleveland, Sepia City in Toledo, and Harlem in New York. Roy Lightfoot, one the Valley’s first mayors and owner of B&C Club and Long’s Drug Store, used his drug store as a central information center. If someone died, disappeared or was in the hospital, relatives and friends could call Long’s for the latest information.

While much of the sporting life continued to flourish in the Valley during the early 40’s, new businesses began to open on John R near Canfield. Black servicemen who ate their last breakfast at the Norwood Hotel before being shipped overseas during World War II returned to find that the Valley had been replaced by a Las Vegas-like strip along John R.

Instead of meeting at El Sino’s, Peking or Cookie’s Restaurant, the social hour and the chi-chi place to be seen shifted to the Ebony room of the Gotham Hotel or the Wal Ha Lounge of the Garfield Hotel. "Cookie’s Place was quite prominent at one time," said James Cookie, the former owner who works part-time now as a bellman at the St. Regis Hotel. "My clientele was mixed. During that time, whites weren’t afraid to go to black clubs. Integration had just started and Negro entertainers began to move out to other hotels. Soon anybody who was anyone would stay in the white hotels. People left the Gotham, which was a fine hotel, to go downtown to the Sheraton and Hilton.

"We had been in business for 26 years. Our place was open 24-hours and we would gross $1,000 every night. We were never held up once in all those years," Cookie said. "When we left in 1963, we were just about the last ones to go. Now I hate to go over there because it brings back memories."  

Mounting racial tensions were largely ignored until June 20, 1943, when two black youths were arrested for starting a fight with white youths on the Belle Isle Bridge. The black youths later claimed that they were seeking revenge after being ejected from Eastwood Park by white youths a few days earlier. Before police could quell the argument, a 17-year-old black spread the rumor that a black woman and her baby had been thrown off the Belle Isle Bridge by whites and both had drowned. More than 200 enraged blacks and whites began a wild fighting spree.

Police used tear gas to clear the bridge but small fights broke out along E. Jefferson. Later that night, rumors spread to the Forest Club recreation center on East Forest. A checkroom operator at the club announced the report over a microphone in the dance hall. Rioting spread along Hastings, St. Antione, Brush and John R from east grand Boulevard to the river. White mobs attacked a group of blacks in the Roxy Theater on Woodward then went after black pedestrians.

The riot was ended the next day when 4,000 army troops were sent under martial law into the city. Although troops never fired a shot, 35 people were killed, 530 injured and 1,300 arrested. Many of the blacks who lived in Black Bottom began to flee for fear that another riot would eventually repeat itself in their neighborhood. The new homeowners began buying houses in white neighborhoods surrounding 12th street.

After the riots, the Gotham Hotel, a previously white-owned 300 room-luxury hotel at 111 Orchestra Place, was sold for $200,000 to a black group reputedly connected with the numbers operation. Like the Valley in its prime, "The Strip" was mobbed with night-clubers waiting outside the Garfield Lounge, Sonnie Wilson’s, the Chesterfield Lounge, The Flame, and the Forest Club to catch the late floor shows. But some of the friendliness was gone.

Entertainers such as Josephine Baker, Lionel Hampton, Sarah Vaughn and Nat (King) Cole were as familiar to the strips as they were to other tourist spots in the country. By the late 1950’s, the strip began to fade as more black people started buying homes near the 12th Street area. And by 1962, the Gotham had closed after a series of raids destroyed the hotel which allegedly served as the clearing house for Detroit’s $12-million numbers racket. In March 1963, the Garfield Hotel burned. Guest and residents leaped from second floor windows after the flames that started in the kitchen blocked their escape down the front and rear stairs. Two residents were killed, and the Garfield, once a focal point of Paradise Valley, was destroyed.

The Randora Hotel which was being built as an annex to the Garfield by Randolph Wallace, owner of the Garfield Hotel, was completed but the guest list changed. When Wallace died a few months later, plans to convert the once lively strip into a medical center were finalized. Some of the people who frequent the Garfield Lounge in the Randora still remember the old days. Paradise Valley, The Strip. The sophisticated set and the night crowds have been replaced by thugs, junkies and winos.

Integration and prosperity have forced the city to expand its boundaries to the edges of newly developed suburbs. Slowly, night life and entertainment — with the perfection of modern stereophonic equipment — have become home affairs. Night-clubers are more sedate now and reluctant to travel outside their own neighborhoods. What was once a swinging town — a place where free spirits and sporting folks from New York, Chicago, Cleveland and nearby states could come together on the weekends — is only a memory.

Article reprinted in "Paradise Valley Days" with permission of the Detroit Free Press. Article dated January 7, 1973

...

                           Jefferson City (Missouri) Post Tribune

                                          September 20,1929

          16 DIE WHEN FIRE SWEEPS NIGHT

                       CLUB AT DETROIT

FLAMES OF UNDETERMINED ORIGIN TRAP PATRONS AT HEIGHT OF MERRIMENT AT EXCLUSIVE CLUB.

SEEK SHELTER IN CLOAKROOM.

EYE WITNESSES AND SURVIVORS TELL STORIES OF PANIC WHICH FOLLOWED CRY OF FIRE.

Detroit, Sept. 20 -- (UP) -- A mysterious fire which crackled through the silken hangings of one of Detroit's most exclusive night clubs took at least 16 lives today and injured 55 persons.

The luxurious interior of the Study Club, on Vernon Highway in the center of the downtown district, was hollowed out by the flames as 100 panic-stricken patrons dived for exits, leaping from windows and risking broken bones to escape.

Firemen advanced the throry that the blaze might have started in the basement where rubbish accumulated after the club was redecorated. Police, however, were investigating a report that a bomb explosion caused the fire.

Firemen who smashed their way into the second floor cloakroom found 25 persons, the living piled with the dead.

The exterior of the building was only slightly damaged. All the heat and smoke were concentrated in the interior. Damage was estimated at $35,000. As the flames fumed and sputtered up the silken hangings, dead gases were thrown off. Rescuers found several of the dead had been asphyxiated.

Passersby To Aid

Passersby volunteered to aid in the rescue work. Among them was JOHN DUVALL DODGE, a member of the automobile manufacturer's family who groped his way through the smoke and was slightly burned.

JACK CARNEY, his companion, also was slightly hurt after carrying injured and dead from the building.

Receiving hospital, where most of the injured were taken, was crowded, and physicians there said at least five might die from burns.

When the first smoke spiraled up the stairway, the patrons of the club dashed for the doors. The 25 trapped in the cloakroom tried to retrieve costly garments before escaping, but were unable to make their way out of the second floor room.

In the main club room, scores stormed the windows. Two men and a woman, who jumped from a window, were taken to the hospital with broken legs. Others followed, most of them escaping serious injury.

Once firemen had beaten down the flames to the main room, they soon had the blaze under control. As victims, many with their clothing burned off, continued to struggle out of the building, a search was started for bodies and possible survivors. On the small dance floor was found the body of a cigarette girl, her arms wrapped around her tray.

Questioned Owner

All available fire apparatus in the city was sent to the club, and the staff of Receiving hospital immediately began to muster physicians and nurses from other institutions to aid.

MARTIN COHN, owner of the club, was questioned by Inspector HENRY J. GARVIN of the crime and bomb squad. COHN told police he believed the fire had been caused by a bomb because he left the building shortly before the blaze and there was no indication of a fire then.

Approximately 100 persons were dining and dancing in the uptown cabaret when the fire was discovered. The flames spread rapidly throughout the building, trapping 25 in a cloak room on the second floor where they were found overcome.

Several, hemmed in on the third floor by the congestion and panic, leaped to the sidewalk. At least two men and one woman sustained bromen arms and legs by jumping.

In the panic, the slower ones were trampled and crushed and met their doom as they fought to get to the exits.

The club had recently re-opened for the winter season after being refurnished, and one theory of the fire was that it started from rubbish heaps left in the cellar by decorators.

Patrolman EDWARD CANNANE discovered the fire and turned in the alarm.

Another patrolman, JAMES McGUIRE, who also turned in an alarm, described the early stages of the blaze.

"I saw flames coming from the windows," he said. "At first, I thought it was only a small blaze and deshed to the nearest box to sound the alarm. In the next two minutes, however, the place had been converted into a blazing inferno. Women were screaming. Crowds were collecting. Soon they were carrying the dead and dying out."

Spread Rapidly

BEATRICE HEATH, a 23-year-old check room girl, told police she suddenly saw the wax-covered draperies flare into flames. She dived for a rear exit, but already the fire was cutting across the interior of the club, she said.

WILLIAM FELS, 45, a waiter also told police he saw the flames sweeping toward the dining room. He said he dashed to a window, swung himself out to a telephone pole and escaped.

SALLY SWEET, singer, who with her mother, SARAH, was filling an engagement at the club prior to returning to her Chicago home, dashed into a blazing room and rescued MILDRED PICHARD, pretty cloakroom girl.

M. H. BAKER, one of the taxicab drivers who carried several injured persons to hospitals, said a mad panic seized the patrons as they fought to escape. BAKER said he and several other drivers had gathered in front of the cabaret to await the home-going crowds. "Suddenly we heard screams and when I looked at the building I saw flames spreading everywhere," he said. "Men were fighting to get out -- one man, blinded by the smoke, locked the door and dropped the key on the floor. We broke down the door and pulled them out and drove them to the hospital."

On their return to the cabaret, BAKER said they went to the back of the building and by means of a telephone pole, reached a window in the rear.

Many Jumped

"One man got an axe, climbed to the window and smashed it," he said. "Man started fighting to escape, but none got out. I then saw a man on top of the roof with his clothes afire. We called to him to climb to the edge of the roof, but he dropped from sight."

Later, when the front door was broken down, BAKER said, the air that rushed through must have helped spread the flames, for they grew brighter from then on.

The flames started in the crowded cabaret so quickly that only a few near the doors had a chance to escape, GEORGE W. BROWN, president of the BROWN and MORRIS Manufacturing Co., said at Receiving Hospital. "A man and woman entertainer had just finished a clog dance and another couple were doing a Spanish tango near the main entrance," BROWN asserted. "Most of us rushed to the entertainers' room at the other end of the dance floor, but the fire soon worked its way there by burning down the inflammable draperies. More than fifty of us tried to crowed into the small entertainers room, some of the men so intoxicated that they considered it just another part of the night's entertainment. It seems a miracle that more were not killed."

ANOTHER DIES.

Detroit, Sept. 20 -- (AP) -- The death list in the fire that early today swept through the Study Club, a cabaret in East Vernon Highway, was increased to 17 shortly before noon with the death of an unidentified woman in a receiving hospital.

The latest victim wore a ring bearing the initials "L. J. K."

She was the eighth woman to be added to the death list. One man and one woman remained unidentified at noon today.

Of the 47 seriously hurt in the fire and panic that followed, several were so badly injured they were unable to give their names or even describe their experiences.

Six separate investigations were underway before noon by state and city authorities. Coroner ALBERT L. FRENCH will hold an inquest later to determine whether the loss of life was due to criminal negligence.