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| Fire escape slide on west side of St. Vincent School [Courtesy of: Cleo Bee Jones] |
The type of slide St. Vincent installed was a metal slide/chute, the type commonly installed in the 1930s...
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| Another shot of fire escape slide - Many times I crawled up it in bare feet - metal hot -during summer breaks, just to slide down! [From the Jamie Rustad Meagher Collection] |
I went to school in Winnipeg and my school, J.M.King,1941-1946, had a circular steel fire escape for the second floor. It had a large steel door at the bottom that could not be opened from the outside. When we had a fire escape drill, the first child down the shoot was the largest one. He sat on a burlap sack so that he cleaned the slide for all those that followed. The inside of the bottom door had a large metal plate and when the first person down hit it with his feet, the doors unlocked and swung open. Only once did I get to go first and it was pitch dark all the way down until the doors burst open.
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