A book landed in my office mail last week called “Tennessee Tragedies,” by Allen Coggins (University of Tennessee Press, $39.95, www.utpress.org).
Coggins is a former Tennessee Emergency Management specialist who spent 20 years combing through libraries and newspaper archives to dig up facts on the worst disasters in state history.
I was about to toss the book into the “donate to the public library” pile when it fell open on my lap to Page 113. I looked down at the book and immediately felt my stomach start to churn.
There, on the page, was a 1977 photo of a disoriented deputy sheriff standing inside the charred remains of the Maury County jail in Columbia, Tenn., my hometown.
Forty-two people died on June 26, 1977, in a jail fire. I have always been haunted by the thought of inmates caught behind bars in a cloud of suffocating black smoke.