Shown with his wife Martha in this photograph which appeared in the July 27, 1916 Cleveland Leader, Gus Van Duzen was alternately called either a hero or the person responsible for the tunnel explosion on July 24. Van Duzen was undoubtedly a brave, but stubborn, man. He had been a hero in the 1901 fire at Temporary Crib No. 2, which took the lives of six tunnel workers. And he bravely went down into the west side waterworks tunnel in the early morning hours of July 25, 1916, in a failed effort to save either the work crew trapped by the explosion, or the first group of rescuers who attempted to save the work crew. He was cleared of responsibility for the explosion in Mayor Davis' abbreviated probe of the disaster, but later was fired by the Water Department. He continued to make Cleveland newsprint for the rest of his life. In 1941, when he was 82-years old, he tried to volunteer for submarine duty three days after Pearl Harbor. In 1950, at age 91, he resisted efforts by the city to remove him from a rundown apartment at 2532 Lorain Avenue, described in the papers as a "fire trap," and place him in a west side sanitarium. He died several months later. | Creator: Cleveland Leader | Date: 27 July 1916 | Source: Cleveland Public Library, Digital Newspaper CollectionDownload Original File
Creator
Cleveland Leader
Source
Cleveland Public Library, Digital Newspaper Collection
