Customer Reviews

Beverly Hills Supper Club Fire

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The author of this book gives a precise and complete in-depth picture of the rise and fall of the Beverly Hills Country Club from its beginnings and growth, to its horrific end. As a long time employee of the club, Ron Elliot tells the story from an insiders first person point of view. You feel that you've been there since the Club's inception, getting to know the owners and the employees on a first name basis. You watch as the building is remodeled and expanded on multiple occassions, but without regard to fire codes for reasons unknown. This is an excellent read for fire fighting professionals as well, giving multiple examples of crowd response to an emergency and reinforcing the need for adherence to fire codes in construction, as well as on-going safety inspections. Everyone would do well to read this as a reminder to be aware of where the exits are when going out for an evening's entertainment. An excellent book. I highly recommend it.

I was very happy when I discovered that this book had been written. My mother lost a good friend in this fire, and I appreciate the fact that Mr. Dammert included the names of all those lost in his book. I did find myself skipping over some of the history of the Supper Club itself, but the story of the fire is compelling and sobering. For those of us who remember that night, it is a reminder of just how horrible it all was. There are individual stories of heroes and victims and it is a book that I will keep in my library forever. Thank you.

I had chills from just looking at the cover. My mother and father-in-law both parished in that fire. My husband was just five years old in 1977. This book has been the only accurate information that has been given to us. I feel that the book was heart-wrenching and very compelling. If someone had taken the time and the expense to fix the problems at the Supper Club my daughter would know her grandparents. I want to thank Mr. Dammert for having the courage to bring back all of the memories from that night. I hope that many facility owners read this compelling book and learn from the mistakes that were made at the Beverly Hills Supper Club. Thank you again.

I am presently going through the Fire Education system in California and my parents bought me this book as a present. After reading the detail of the book I felt as if I was truely an occupant of the Supper Club. Ron and Wayne did a great job depicting the events of the fire. The history of the building was also of interest in terms of Fire Prevention. It protrayed the epitome of American business owners trying to save a few bucks with disregard for safety and authorities turning their backs to blantant violations to lessen tensions between themselves and a very visible business. Maybe we can all learn from this detailed story so the victims lives won't have been lost in vain.

As I made my way through the pages of Inside The Beverly Hills Supper Club Fire, I often questioned why exactly I was reading such of a sad, macabre occurrence. I think it was less about my being drawn voyeuristically to an account of a disturbing calamity and more about getting to the facts regarding an event I, born in 1978 literally a few miles from the site of the fire, had heard so much about through my entire life.

Ron Elliott's Inside The Beverly Hills Supper Club Fire is the sort of read that leaves you shaken up long after you finish it. I've never been through an account of any tragedy that got to me in quite this way, including some articles and books on September 11th. The comprehensive reporting found in this book, its multitude of second-by-second first-hand stories, the maps, diagrams and photographs it includes are all gripping testimony to a night that still defines tragedy for a great many people. Recently for instance, Cincinnati Magazine devoted much of an entire issue to its cover story on the thirtieth anniversary of the fire, and the issue was among the best selling in the publication's five-decade existence. But while that article did well to inform in the short space it had, Elliott's book is the source to consult for the facts concerning the club and its abrupt ending. For anyone who wants to know about Beverly Hills, I'd recommend it, but also warn that it takes a toll on a reader. Or at least it did on me.

As told in Mr. Elliott's book, the Beverly Hills Supper Club, which once graced a Kentucky hilltop with a commanding view of the Cincinnati skyline, was a massive, fabled locale, billed as the "showplace of the nation," the greatest nightclub between Las Vegas and Atlantic City. Its fifty year history reads like a who's who of mid-twentieth-century entertainment, as one superstar after another took to its stages in front of packed houses. It was said you weren't anyone in show business until you'd played the Beverly Hills. On Mother's Day weekend, 1977, the club was filled beyond safe capacity by more than 3200 patrons and employees, when an electrical fire long smoldering behind thin paneling raced down small hallway, creating a flash fire and a massive cloud of toxic smoke, trapping guests in the densely packed labyrinth of hallways and dining areas within the sprawling club. Most perilously overcrowded that night was the club's Cabaret Room, where singer John Davidson was set to perform later in the evening. The diagram which shows the location of each victim within that room, men and women found stacked atop one another floor to ceiling, testament to their doomed surge toward a single tiny exit, cannot but fill a reader with horror: an emotion that recurs again and again throughout the course of this book's re-telling of the fire.

You can't live in the part of the country where I do and not know about this disaster, or fail to know someone with a personal connection to the events of that horrific night thirty years ago when 165 people lost their lives in one of the most terrible fires in American history. My grandparents went several times a year to Beverly Hills; my two aunts had been there any number of times; my father once applied for a job there in the summer between high school and college, 1974, before getting work in New York City which he accepted instead. My next-door neighbor in childhood was at the club three weeks before the end, and knew six of the victims on, as he has put it "a first-name basis." I once attended a graduation rehearsal in the Fort Thomas Amory, which was a makeshift morgue in the days after tragedy struck. Maybe that's why I read this book. I don't know. What is amazing to me is how two generations later the club and its destruction still casts the shadow it does over an entire region. Even now the prime hilltop real estate on which the supper club sat is vacant, overgrown with weeds and scrubwood, as though it would be taboo to ever again utilize that ground.

If anything good came from the 165 deaths in May 1977, it is that today stricter laws exist nationwide, and whatsmore are enforced, regarding maximum capacity within public places, and the placement of sprinkler systems. Let's hope these actions have saved lives over the decades, as they surely could have on May 28, 1977, in Southgate, Kentucky.

This live account of a terrible story should serve to remind us why we have inspections and why politicians need to stay out of
the inspector's way! I bought my copy direct from the author and he signed it for me. To meet him and know his experience is a life changing event

This is a book that covers an event I remeber as though it happened yesterday. I was at the Beverly Hills two weeks before the fire as a prom guest in the garden room. Mr Elliott did an excellent job of recounting the events of that May.

I read this book after becoming a firefighter, this book will oper your eyes as to what can happen even today at any night club, or restaraunt with out anyone even knowing. , This is the best book I have ever read about fireand history combined.

The book provides an excellent resource for the history of the Beverly Hills Supper Club and the fire on May 28, 1977.

The author provides useful floor plans that help shows the lack of exits throughout the building. The book includes many photos from the Supper Club along with employees and guests, etc.

The "Other Voices" chapter has many disturbing stories (especially Bruce Rath) from those who somehow survived the fire or from police, firemen, etc.

After reading this book I am more aware of fire exits whenever I am in a crowded building.

Still to this day, I can not understand why people won't talk about this fire! I use to live in Lexington, KY and wanted to go to the site of the Supper Club and pay my respects...but no one would tell me where to go and when I expressed why I wanted to go, they just wanted me to forget what I read and push it under the rug!
We need books like this one to tell us what happened before, during, and after so that we can do whatever we can to make sure this NEVER happens again!!!