Mr Goodwin,
Recent news reports
of the tragic building collapse in Florida made me remember my family
stories of the Goodson family who perished in the Winecoff Hotel fire
in Atlanta in 1946. When my mother died in 2014, I found photo negatives
(2 3/8 x 4 inches) of the Goodson family in a box of mementos in her
closet. She never threw anything away. I wonder if you might like to
have those negatives for your memory archives?
Mr
Goodson had been a geologist with the Pure Oil Company, living in the
company camp in Clay City, Illinois at the time of the fire. My father,
Fred Pampe, was a young geologist hired by the Pure Oil Company at the
end of the war in December 1945. Because of the housing shortage, my
parents, my brother and I were living with my grandparents on a farm
near Parkersburg, Illinois for a year until a house came available in
the Clay City Camp in December 1946. The house had been occupied by the
Goodson family, parents and two children, who died in the Winecoff
fire.
My parents bought
some of the furniture left by the Goodsons and moved to the house in
Clay City. I recall two full size beds, a sofa, coffee table, dining
table and buffet which my parents kept for decades. The sofa and coffee
table are pictured in one of the negatives. The photo prints were
probably given to surviving family, but the negatives were left behind,
probably in a desk drawer or something. My mother, Mary Louise Minkler
Pampe, never threw things away and the negatives survive today in a
paper envelope from the Speith’s Photo Service in Olney, Illinois with a
note written in my mother’s handwriting saying “Goodson’s Negatives”.
If you would like to have the negatives, please advise where they should be sent.
Regards,
Cheryl Pampe Fowler
Lake Jackson, Texas
Ms. Fowler,
Well, YES! I'd be honored to care for the negatives. I'll share your find with our readers. I expect you learned reverence at an early age, moving into a home where tragedy had struck so recently and so completely. I'm sorry about the loss of your mother in 2014. I think it's really sweet that she held on to the negatives all her life.
Thank you,
Allen Goodwin
Update! Negatives received & processed. The Goodson family photos are here.
