Bystanders had to restrain him to keep him from running into the inferno. “I’ve got to go see how many people I’ve killed.” Several firefighters on the scene were literally blown apart; the mayor of Roseburg a little later picked up a firefighter’s glove and found a hand inside it.Several people nearby were killed by broken glass – a woman and her daughter slain by the picture window through which they’d been watching the fire, and another woman picked up by the blast and thrown into the window of a car dealership.After calling the fire department, Dennis stayed to help.

Only two years earlier, the Soviet Union had sent Sputnik I into orbit, demonstrating that they could drop a nuclear warhead pretty much anywhere they liked, the same as we could.

The 40-year-old Wisconsin driver won for the fifth time on the 1 1/2-mile oval."I complained about it all night long, just no balance, no grip," Sauter said.

"We made great adjustments and played the track position game. Going into Turn 3 on the last lap, I ran out of fuel, but then it fired up."Haley, a 19-year-old, was third to also match his best result.

It might have been a pile of oily rags bursting spontaneously into flame; it might have been a hobo’s jungle fire by the railroad tracks; it might even have been an employee’s cigarette left in the wrong place hours before.

What everyone does know is what happened when the flames got into the barrels of paint thinner, kerosene and other flammable spirits kept in Gerretsen’s warehouse. The alarm was sounded at around 1 a.m., when a young mill worker named Dennis Tandy, driving home with his pregnant wife in their tiny air-cooled Fiat, noticed the fire.