The Library Book

At the start of 1986, the Challenger spacecraft exploded during takeoff, killing seven astronauts. During the week in which Central Library was engulfed in flames, there was an earthquake in Central Mexico, the outbreaks of fires in numerous British prisons, tensions between the U.S. and Libya, and a construction mishap which resulted in raw sewage flowing into the Los Angeles River. On April 29, Central Library opened at its regular hour of ten o’clock in the morning. Elizabeth Teoman, the head librarian, was in her office with Norman Pfeiffer, a New York City-based architect whom the library hired “to renovate and expand the building” (18). Central Library was, at this time, 60 years old. It was too small for the city’s increasing demands, and it was falling apart. The building also didn’t meet contemporary fire safety standards. Funds for installing fire-resistant doors were persistently overlooked or diverted, resulting in the library repeatedly being reported for fire code violations. When Teoman was studying for her degree in library science, she wrote a paper about Central Library’s various problems, including overcrowding and fire safety risks. She received an A on the paper.

Central Library’s holdings, including around 2,000,000 books, manuscripts, and musical scores, were valued around $69 million. The library also held census records which dated as far back as 1790, theater programs from LA-produced plays dating back to 1880, and the most comprehensive collection of books about rubber. There was also a Shakespeare folio, car repair manuals for “every single make and model of automobile starting with the Model T,” and “the largest collection of books on food and cooking in the country” (19). Six of the latter were books instructing readers on how to cook insects.

On April 29, around eleven o’clock in the morning, a fire alarm went off. However, no one thought anything of this—the alarm was glitchy and often went off for no reason at all. Everyone left the building, as expected, but most of them left their personal belongings behind, expecting that they’d be allowed to reenter the building shortly. Elizabeth Teoman encouraged Norman Pfeiffer to leave his drawings behind, assuring him that they would soon be back to discuss his plans. Mary Ludwig, a scholar doing research on a distant relative in the History Department, left behind her notes, which took her two years to compile. Everyone left the building in an orderly manner. An elderly woman later told investigators that a young, blond man knocked her over as he rushed by; though, he paused to help her up before running out the door.

When the fire department showed up, they didn’t see any fire. One went to reset the alarm system, which didn’t stop sounding. This indicated that the alarm still sensed smoke. The crew looked around the building again, just to ensure that everything was clear. Another engine company arrived and saw a light wisp of smoke coming from the roof’s east side. Soon thereafter, flames erupted within the building. The building’s temperature reached 451 degrees, causing book covers to combust and pop. An hour later, 60 firefighter companies and other emergency units were reporting to Central Library.

Ron Hamel was a captain in the Los Angeles Fire Department at the time and is now an arson investigator. Recalling the fire, he still feels a sense of wonder about what he witnessed on that day in April. He remembered that the fire appeared transparent, like glass. The library patrons and employees who exited and stood outside on the sidewalk were awakened from their listless boredom by the sight of smoke. Norman Pfeiffer commiserated with Elizabeth Teoman over the inevitable loss of his building plans.

Wyman Jones, who supervised all 73 of Los Angeles’s libraries, was driving when he heard news of the fire at Central Library on his car radio. He rushed downtown. The fire, by then, had been blazing for three hours. The firefighters took breaks from fighting the flames to restore their core temperatures. Fire Chief Donald Manning asked Elizabeth Teoman to give him a list of the library’s irreplaceable items. He then briefed Jones on what was happening inside of the building before leaving for City Hall to inform Mayor Tom Bradley, who recently returned from San Diego.

The fire’s temperature rose to 2,500 degrees. Fire crews jackhammered holes through the third floor, in the walls, and into the roof to ventilate the building, in an effort to decrease the heat. This also made it easier for fire crews to fight the flames. The fire calmed, but only after it consumed 3,000,000 gallons of water and exhausted most of the city’s fire departments. The fire was, alas, extinguished at 6:30 p.m. on April 29, 1986, after blazing for seven hours and 38 minutes.

Among the items lost were an 1860 edition of Don Quixote illustrated by Gustave Doré, a French printmaker, all American and British plays and accounts of theater history, and 90,000 books about the sciences. The latter included all unbound manuscripts held in the Science Department. Other materials that were burned include a book by Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio, every book on ornithology, and 45,000 literary works.

Though the fire was out, the library remained overheated for five days and was still prone to spontaneous ignitions. Chief Manning insisted that investigators leave the fire site undisturbed while they tried to figure out what caused the fire. The librarians remained at Central Library for seven and a half hours and stayed on after the blaze was extinguished. Librarian Helene Mochedlover, now retired, recalled feeling as upset about the library fire as she was on the day President Kennedy was assassinated. Another senior librarian was so traumatized and distressed by the sight of the destruction that she didn’t get her period for four months.

Olivia Primanis, a book conservator, told Jones that the books that hadn’t burned had to be frozen as soon as possible to prevent the growth of mold spores. Mold blooms within 48 hours and can be just as destructive to books as fire. The staff was then tasked with packing, moving, and storing 700,000 damaged books within two days. Thankfully, Los Angeles has a lucrative fish-processing industry, which requires huge freezers. Companies agreed to provide some space for books. Radio and television stations aired announcements asking for volunteers to come to the library and help pack books. IBM gave its employees time off to provide the library with additional pairs of hands. Within 24 hours, the city acquired thousands of cardboard packing boxes, several thousand rolls of packing tape, and the services of Eric Lundquist, a mechanical engineer who was “an expert in drying out wet things” (36). All of the books, not only those that were damaged, had to be removed so that the library could undergo repairs. Jones did not reveal information about where the surviving books would be stored, out of fear that the fire was the work of an arsonist who could strike again.

The volunteers worked together, under Lundquist’s instruction, for the next three days. They packed over 50,000 boxes, each of which held 15 books. Wet, smoky books were shipped “in refrigerated trucks to the food warehouses” (37). The investigators believed that the fire was the work of an arsonist. In the past, library fires were caused by small acts of vandalism that resulted in major fires. To investigate, the city employed 19 arson investigators and 20 agents from the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. The public was offered a $30,000 reward for information about how the fire started. On May 6, the Los Angeles Times printed an interview in which Chief Manning claimed that the Central Library fire was the result of arson. Manning also announced that they were searching for a young, blond man in his twenties or thirties whom several employees saw in the area where the fire started.

During the week in which the fire occurred, every newspaper around the world was covering the Chernobyl disaster. Only the Soviet paper, Pravda, gave an extensive report of the Central Library fire, while only briefly mentioning the accident at Chernobyl. The Central Library was normally a bustling place, which dispensed more than 900,000 books a year to its patrons and served around 700,000 visitors yearly. Forty-eight hours after the fire, however, the building was empty. There were only the ashes of 400,000 burned books. The walls and ceilings of the reading rooms were blackened. The entrances were locked and barred by police tape. Near the entrance, someone posted a handwritten sign thanking the city for its efforts and promising that the library would soon reopen—next time, “bigger and better” (40).

Debra Peak, Harry’s sister, described the Peaks as a family beset with “unending woes” (41). Orlean met Debra in an effort to understand Peak. She wanted to know why he set the fire. If he didn’t set it, why was he accused? She found the phone number of Harry Peak, Sr. When Orlean called the number, Debra answered and invited Orlean to the family home. Orlean visited the family’s home in Hemet, around 80 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, the next day.

Debra described her brother as a prankster who invited trouble. She insisted, though, that Harry was very smart but lacked common sense. His misfortunes were typical among the Peaks. Her maternal grandparents died in a car accident shortly after they arrived in California from Missouri in the 1940s. They were driving drunk. Harry, Sr. was born in Missouri as a child. He dropped out of high school and took a job as a sheet-metal mechanic. He worked for Southern California’s aerospace industry in the 1950s and 1960s. He married young and had four children with his wife Annabell. Annabell took an evening job as a supermarket cashier when her children were young. With both parents at work at night, the children got into enough mischief to become known to the police. Their crimes were minor and typically juvenile—underage drinking and marijuana-smoking. However, Billy joined a gang and Debra cut up a fellow student with a box cutter when she was in tenth grade because the girl was harassing her.

Brenda Peak Serrano, Harry and Debra’s sister, described Harry, Sr. as a cruel man. Long after Orlean’s interview with Debra, Brenda was visiting the family home when her father slipped a coma while sitting on the couch. He died soon thereafter. The family was middle-class and had middling tastes and no high ambitions. The Peaks assumed that their children would stay in the valley and take jobs at Lockheed Martin or on the assembly line of one of the other local engineering companies. The Peak children were average students, except for Harry, who performed well when he tried. Compared to his siblings, Harry never got into much legal trouble. He did, however, “[like] to get wasted as often as possible” (47). When he was a teenager, a camp counselor molested him at a summer camp. Trauma from the event caused him to attempt suicide a few times. Debra insisted her brother never wanted to be gay but was compelled toward homosexuality as a result of this experience.

Harry pretended to be straight for a while during his teen years. He supposedly even became engaged during his senior year of high school. When he enlisted in the army, his high school sweetheart promised to wait for him, but began seeing someone else before he went home after being discharged. Harry then developed a relationship with a girl whom he impregnated with twins. The girl, Debra said, liked to party and ended up miscarrying both. Debra insists that these three events caused Harry’s homosexuality, which their father never accepted. During Debra and Orlean’s interview on the porch of the family home, Harry, Sr. stepped outside and yelled at his daughter about his lunch before noticing Orlean and stopping himself. He was a tall, stocky man with a large belly, spiky silver hair, and an approachable face. Debra looked up to her father for confirmation when telling Orlean about all of the celebrities her brother new. Her father agreed that he knew most of Hollywood’s stars. Debra then shifted and declared that her brother was, in fact, the biggest liar they knew.

Harry Peak moved to Los Angeles shortly after his second girlfriend miscarried their twins. He moved into a house in Hollywood with several other men trying to break into show business. Even though he started a new life in LA, Harry drove back to Santa Fe Springs often to party with his friends from high school. His roommates were becoming exasperated with his tendencies to be late with the rent or not to pay at all. Harry frequently lost jobs, too, including one in which he ran errands for law firms in Los Angeles and San Francisco. The attorneys who employed his services “found him blundering but generally reliable” (50). One of the lawyers, Robert Sheahen, made the mistake of trusting Harry to serve as a defense witness in a murder. Harry then ignored the rules that Sheahen explained to him by talking to jurors while walking to the witness stands. The district attorney then asked if Harry was an actor, and Harry answered that he was. He lost all credibility as a witness but didn’t care; he was happy to announce himself as an actor.

Harry did, indeed, go to acting and modeling auditions in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, he had stage fright. He told people that, during an audition, he met and befriended Burt Reynolds. Orlean checked this out by contacting Reynolds and leaving messages, asking if he recalled meeting Peak, but Reynolds never returned her calls. Orlean figured that, if the meeting took place, it must have been a brief encounter. The Peak family believed the story so wholeheartedly that they told Orlean that Reynolds once called Annabell Peak on her birthday. They recalled that she hung up because she disbelieved that the caller was who he said he was. Orlean concluded that Harry probably never met Burt Reynolds.

In 1980, after having been hired as an extra on the set of the remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice, Harry met another extra—photographer Demitri Hioteles and they began dating. Harry then moved in with Hioteles, who was living in Florida when Orlean interviewed him. Hioteles recalled Harry’s sweetness and innocence as well as his fabrications. He once told Hioteles that he had cocktails with Cher. The relationship ended after three years due to Hioteles’s exasperation with Harry’s lies. Ironically, Harry never brought that talent for fabulation to his acting.

Harry’s pattern of unsteadiness was broken when he met Father Archie Clark Smith—founder of the American Orthodox Church, an organization that operated in Echo Park and operated as a mission, community center, and religious order. Smith’s partner was Homer Morgan Wilkie—a chiropodist. Both men went by several different names. Both are also now dead, as is their so-called church. Perhaps Smith and Wilkie’s most important legacy is that they provided Peak with an alibi regarding his whereabouts on the morning of the fire at Central Library.