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For many of the young firefighters, the 1977 blaze at the Beverly Hills Supper Club was their first glimpse of death - and it was all around.
The fire killed 165 people, and the images of that hot May night remain vivid to emergency workers who fought the blaze and pulled the people from the smoke and flames. More than 2,400 patrons and workers escaped the fire.
"For a lot of us it was our first fatal fire," said John Daley, who was 21 and had just been hired as a full-time firefighter in Bellevue when blaze started.
"That was my first glance at death," said John Stein of Covington, who was a 17-year-old rookie volunteer for Southgate on his first fire run.
Stein was on the first fire truck to the scene and helped pull bodies out of the Cabaret Room, where more than 100 died, many in a pile at the exit.
"We were pulling them out and just laying them out in the yard," he said. "Most of the people were dead. We didn't have any blankets or anything to put over them. I remember the expressions on the people's faces. You could see their final struggles in their faces."
On May 28, 1977, as many as 2,800 guests and employees were in the club on a hilltop across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. An estimated 1,300 of those people sat at tiny tables jammed into the Cabaret Room, nearly triple the number of occupants the room could safely accommodate.
The building did not have an automatic sprinkler system, now regarded as a common fail-safe in public buildings and required in many areas.
Investigators later blamed the fire on problems with the aluminum wiring.
John Beatsch, now chief of Southgate Fire Department, was 21 and on the first fire truck to respond.
After arriving, he ran to the back, where firefighters were pulling people from the Cabaret Room. The overflow crowd had been wedged in. Tables and chairs had been set up in the aisles and along ramps to the stage.
"We could hear people calling for help. Firefighters were yelling, 'Move your arms.' They were piled up. It seemed the people on the bottom were alive. The people on top were overcome."
Firefighters were also frantically searching inside the building; they worked until nearly dawn pulling bodies out.
"There were plenty of signs that said exit, but they didn't lead directly to exits," said Greg Hirsch, a Southgate firefighter. "There was a long hallway and if you went all the way down, there was an exit. But there were dressing rooms and closets along the hallway. We found people inside those rooms. They got confused, couldn't see. They thought they found a door."
Gerald Sanford, now chief of Central Campbell County Fire District, had traded shifts with another firefighter and was working that night.
"Being in Vietnam, I thought that was the worst you could see," he said. "But even having that training I wasn't prepared for 165 people dying.
Ernie Pretot was a police officer in Southgate and headed to the supper club with the first rescue crews. Pretot said he remembers someone calling in on a CB radio earlier that evening asking for directions to Beverly Hills. "I gave him directions. I often wonder if that poor fellow made it out," Pretot said.
He helped carry bodies to the garden area. "I picked up a young girl, 15 or 16 years old, in a pink dress. She died in the fire. I had a daughter about that age. If I live 30 more years, you don't forget those things.
"In time you push it back. It hurts less, but it never really goes away."
