The cries of trapped hotel guests screaming in agony are still seared into Richard Hamil’s memory, seven decades after the Winecoff Hotel fire in Atlanta.
As a 9-year-old boy, he and his father were blinded in thick smoke, stumbling from their 15th-floor room into the hallway in “absolute chaos,” then into a female guest’s room, Hamil recalls.
“She was preparing to jump, but Daddy told her, ‘No, not until we have to, we won’t do that,” he said.
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