THE LITTLE BOY WHO LOST HIS LEG
The Story of Ron Plewniak and the Whiting Refinery Explosion

 John Hmurovic
August 2020

For almost sixty-five years, Ron Plewniak heard the question: “Whatever happened to that little boy?” He knew the answer better than anyone. It was him. He was the eight-year-old boy who lost his leg in the explosion of the Standard Oil Refinery. That accident happened 65 years ago this month, on August 27, 1955. Earlier this year, on March 17, 2020, Ron Plewniak died at the age of 72. So, on the explosion’s first anniversary after his passing, it’s a good time to answer that question one more time, and to see how the “little boy” overcame a terrible tragedy to live a long and productive life.    

At 6:11 A.M., the official time of sunrise on August 27, 1955, the Plewniak family was, like most of Whiting, still in bed. It was a Saturday, and in an era when home air conditioning was uncommon, it was already a hot and humid day. That’s when disaster struck. A hydroformer in the refinery, designed to increase the octane rating of gasoline, blew up.

It was twenty-six stories tall and made of thick walls of solid steel. The blast was so strong that people in southeast Michigan, one hundred miles away, thought the shaking ground was an earthquake.

The blast ripped the hydroformer into pieces. Chunks of steel flew through the sky. A fifty-ton chunk traveled two blocks, landing on a neighborhood grocery store which had not yet opened for the day. Another chunk demolished a house, not long after its occupant left for work. At the time, there was a neighborhood directly across the street from the refinery, located at Indianapolis Boulevard and 129th Street. It was called Stieglitz Park. The damage was so extensive, that the entire Stieglitz Park neighborhood would soon disappear, bought up by Standard Oil and turned into a field for oil storage tanks.

Many families fled, many lost their possessions, but none suffered a greater loss than the Plewniak family. They lived at 2638 Schrage Avenue in the Goose Island neighborhood, which was just west of Stieglitz Park, four-tenths of a mile from the hydroformer. Frank and Joan Plewniak were sleeping in their bedroom, while their two sons, Ron and Ricky, were in the bedroom across the hall.

Frank was 33 years old, born in Calumet City. He was a carpenter who worked for different contractors. “He was very good at it,” Ron said in an interview with the Whiting-Robertsdale Historical Society in 2015. “He’d always be one of the last ones they would get rid of after the project’s finished, because he could do cabinetry work.”

He was also a veteran of World War Two, but he didn’t talk about that very much. Frank received a Purple Heart for his service and years later, Alan Plewniak, a younger son born two years after the explosion, asked him why. Frank opened up enough to say that he was in a nine-man platoon in France during the Normandy invasion, when an artillery shell landed and killed his eight comrades.

Joan Plewniak was a Whiting girl who grew up just down the street. Her parents, Martin and Anna Dybel Marek, ran a neighborhood grocery store on Schrage Avenue. Most of her family still lived just a few doors down the street, a family which included a brother, three sisters and their husbands and children. The extended family gave Joan’s two boys, eight-year-old Ron and three-year-old Ricky, plenty of playmates.

The year 1955 was one of the hottest on record in Whiting. When they went to bed on Friday night, it was so hot that Ron decided he needed to change positions on his bed. Instead of his feet being next to the open window, he flipped around and laid his head so he could be close to any kind of breeze that happened to find its way into the bedroom. Ron shared the room with Ricky. Ricky slept in a crib parallel to Ron’s bed, which was just a couple of feet away. That’s where they were at 6:12 the next morning, when the hydroformer exploded.

The hydroformer was 262 feet tall, but after the explosion there was nothing left of it. All of it, the two-inch thick steel walls, the pipes, everything, was launched into the sky by the blast. Most of it landed inside the refinery, with numerous pieces crushing oil storage tanks. That, in turn, set off a tremendous fire that burned for over eight days, with flames shooting as high as the top of today’s John Hancock Building in Chicago. Some of the pieces of debris from the hydroformer landed in Stieglitz Park, but miraculously, no one there was injured by any of it.

One piece, however, a large, heavy pipe, soared over the entire Stieglitz Park neighborhood. It landed at 2640 Schrage Avenue, hitting the home of Thomas and Fran Demkovich. It caused damage to their home, but it bounced off and hit the Plewniak home, next door at 2638 Schrage Avenue. The pipe ripped into the wall of the bedroom where the two boys slept. It landed directly on Ricky and hit the leg of Ron.

“I woke up,” Ron remembered, “in a dense fog, with plaster and dust all over the place.” He couldn’t see anything but the white dust. “I got down on my hands and knees, and there didn’t seem to be any obstructions, and I knew where the doorway was.” As he crawled toward the doorway, he was unaware that the pipe had sliced off a part of one leg.  

In the room across the hall, Frank and Joan were jarred awake by the blast. “There was a terrible roar,” Frank told a reporter that day, “that shook our house and knocked the plaster off the walls.” The plaster fell on them, but Frank jumped out of bed and ran to the neighboring room. He saw both of his boys covered in blood. He frantically tried to lift the pipe off Ricky, but it was far too heavy to move. The pipe was also extremely hot. In trying to lift it, Frank suffered severe burns to his hands.

According to Larry McClelland, who lived a few doors down on Schrage Avenue, Joan frantically ran from her house down the street screaming for help. Larry was one of about a dozen men who rushed to the house to help Frank lift the pipe. It was even too heavy for all of them to lift. They quickly cobbled together a makeshift jack to finally free Ricky. Frank lifted the dead body of his three-year-old son and carried it outside.

In the years to come, the tragedy, the loss of Ricky, rarely came up in conversation within the Plewniak household. “My dad,” Ron said, “didn’t talk a lot about it. It was like his experiences in World War Two. He came back and he didn’t talk.” As far as the rest of the family,” Ron said, “everybody knew it was an emotionally charged subject.”

But, they never forgot. Ron thought quite a bit about how his mother coped with the loss of her son. “It had to be a really, really, really terrible experience. She had every right, after that, to go on with her life being depressed and sad, but she didn’t. She was always a happy, cheerful woman, and made the best out of the life she could.”

When Joan passed away in 2014, her family found a battered stuffed animal among her belongings. “I figured that had to have been Ricky’s, because the way she just held onto it and wanted it. You hang onto everything you can at times like that.”

While Frank and his neighbors were trying to remove the pipe off Ricky’s body, Ron was being rushed to St. Catherine’s Hospital in East Chicago. He said at that point, he was still unaware of what was going on and wasn’t even aware of the extent of his injuries. He was in critical condition and underwent emergency surgery. The surgeons could not save his left leg, which had been sliced off by the same pipe that killed his younger brother.

What saved Ron’s life, however, was the heat and humidity of that late August night. By flipping around on his bed, sleeping with his head next to the window in the hope of catching a breeze, the pipe landed on his leg. If he had slept as he normally did, Ron said, the pipe “would have landed across my head.”

He remained hospitalized for five weeks and remembered that the nurses were nice, but his main memory from his hospital stay was that they didn’t allow other children to visit. His cousins, however, found a way to let him know they wanted to see him, as much as he wanted to see them. “There was a second-floor room, so they’d come outside the window,” he laughed while recalling the memory.

His cousins were a major part of his readjustment after his release from the hospital. In an article by Nancy Kane in the Hammond Times on Christmas Day of 1955, almost four months after the refinery explosion, Ron was described as a “happy” little boy. “The main reasons for his happiness are his four cousins living in the neighborhood and his other buddies there.”

The Plewniaks considered moving after Ron returned home. “My dad desperately wanted to leave,” Ron said in the 2015 interview, “in case lightning strikes twice.” But Joan wanted to stay in their Schrage Avenue home. “My mother never wanted to move out of the area, with her whole family there, right on the same block. For her it was good.” Frank and Joan had two more sons born to them after the explosion: Alan in 1957, and Mark in 1959. They were raised in the Schrage Avenue house, and both Frank and Joan lived there for the rest of their lives.

Ron received tutoring while he was hospitalized, but he was anxious to return to school at St. Adalbert’s. Ron Gaspar, who was a year behind Ron in school, remembered Joan Plewniak driving Ron to school, and said he’d sometimes help Ron carry his books. “He had crutches at the time,” Ron Gasper told the Historical Society in an interview in 2014. “We would help him get into the school. It was a little difficult, because it had three floors.” Ron would practice using the crutches at home. “For quite a while I was on crutches,” he said, “because everything on the amputation had to be healed before you could go further with it, to get a leg.”

Early on, people stared. “People try not to stare or look, but curiosity gets the best of them.” He said it felt strange, “but you get used to that.” Early the next year he was fitted with a prosthesis. He quickly began to adapt to his new reality. “I was able to walk around and look, appear, more normal. From then on that was fine. I just started to develop and live with that.”

He did his best to do all that his artificial leg would allow. Frank Vargo, who lived in the same Goose Island neighborhood as Ron, and helped conduct the 2015 Historical Society interview with him, remembered the scrub baseball games that the neighborhood boys played outside the old South Side School, and Ron being the pitcher.

In high school, Ron was unable to compete in sports, but Peter Kovachic, the athletic director at Whiting High School, took him under his wing and made him a team manager for football and swimming. “It was nice,” Ron said. “You could go around to all the games or meets.” He was awarded a school letter for his work.    

As much as possible, Ron blended in at Whiting High School. Justine Moskalick Bircher didn’t know Ron until high school. One day she asked him, “Ron, why do you limp?” He responded by saying in a matter-of-fact tone, “I lost my leg in the thing.” As if, Justine said, it was an everyday thing. She said if he had a hard time in school, he never showed it. “He was,” she said, “as normal as everybody else.”

“I tried to be very independent,” Ron said. “If I could do it myself, I’d do it myself. I really wasn’t requesting much. I wanted to be treated the same.”

He graduated from Whiting in 1965 and attended Purdue University, where he graduated with a degree in electrical engineering. There were rumors in town, he said, that Standard Oil would hire him any time he wanted a job. Out of curiosity, he applied. He went for an interview but was not hired. By that time, though, he was already working at Inland Steel. “I was very good at fixing things, fixing problems that people had with equipment.” After thirty years at Inland, he retired. He then got a job as an electrical engineer with Crown ESA, where he continued to fix problems at various steel mills.

In 1970, Ron married Deborah Kosior, who grew up in Robertsdale and graduated from Clark High School. They remained together until her death in 2008.

For many years, Ron said, whether it was at school in West Lafayette, on job interviews, on work assignments, or in casual conversations, people would bring up the refinery explosion and fire when he told them he was from Whiting. To anyone who remembers the 1955 incident, that is no surprise. The explosion and fire were so spectacular, that they made international news for days. Most knew that a little boy died in the refinery explosion, and that his older brother lost his leg. But as time passed, few knew what happened to the boy who lost his leg. To those who asked, Ron didn’t hesitate to tell them.

“They always had a deep desire to find out whatever happened to that little boy,” he said. “After I started to see, I became more open, telling people about this. I thought it was a good question that people deserve an answer to.”

The basic answer is that Ron Plewniak did not let a tragedy destroy his life. He learned to get along on an artificial leg and made the most of it. He had a good education, a good job, a good marriage, and lived a good life. He learned the lessons that his parents, Frank and Joan Plewniak, taught him by example. His mother, he said, didn’t use the tragedy as a crutch. “She made the best of her life after that.” His father, he said, never dwelt on the tragedies he experienced, whether it was the horror of war or the loss of a son. For the Plewniak family, Ron said, it was more, “Where do we go from here? That’s what’s more important. Where do we go from here, and what’s to be done.”   

Asked to sum up how his life went after the tragedy of August 27, 1955, Ron’s reply was simple: “It went very well.”