Paul Coates

Feb. 19, 1958

May 14, 1954--Three workers were critically burned in a foundry explosion at 1651 S. Compton Ave., Compton, late today.

The men, whose bodies were turned into flaming torches when a pot of molten magnesium exploded, were rushed to Georgia Street Receiving Hospital. Doctors offered little hope that any of the trio would live.

Witnesses reported that one of the victims, Cipriano Torres, 31, ran from the foundry room, stripped off his flaming shirt and ran back into the rain of liquid fire to rescue his foreman....

As doctors predicted, two of the three victims died within 10 days after the explosion.

But the third--with more than 70% of his body burned--defied all laws of fatality. He lived.

His name is Cipriano Torres. He was, on May 14, 1954, the man who ran back into the spewing, burning liquid metal to carry his boss out of the foundry.

I visited Cipirano Torres yesterday--to see how he was getting along. I met his wife, Mildred, and his four children, Christine, 11; James, 9; Linda, 8; and Robert, 7.

The kids had just come from school, but they looked more like they had just dressed up for church. Even 7-year-old Robert, who was preoccupied outside chasing his sisters with a dead mouse, looked immaculate.

I was surprised, because I had heard through a church organization that things weren't too well with the Torres family.

As I talked with Torres, I learned that 29 months passed after the accident before he left the hospital to rejoin his family. The first seven of those months were a blank nightmare.

In the past year and a half, he said, he's been back in the hospital seven or eight times for additional operations and grafts.

"But I'm improving all the time," he told me. "I can drive the car a little now." With his good right arm, he pointed to the small patch of lawn in front of the house. "I cut the lawn...."

Torres' wife got a word in here. "To cut that little patch, it took him five hours and had him aching all over."

"But," she added, with unhidden pride, "he insisted on doing it."

There was some talk then about the kids, about friends who had done so much, about the Rev. Arthur Herries of the Vermont Avenue Presbyterian Church, who supplied the faith, and about matters more general.

Torres told me that he had done foundry work for eight years before the accident. "It paid well," he said. "As a matter of fact, we had just started looking for a home when the accident happened."

Then I asked him the rather personal question about his current financial status.

He confirmed what I had heard before. His compensation benefits of $35 a week were cut off a week before last Christmas, when he was "officially" released from hospital care.

"About last August, I reached a point where I could start doing a few things," he said. "So I took over in the house and my wife went to work. She'd cook the meals before going. All I'd have to do was serve them."

She was laid off once last fall and again six weeks ago.

"Do you have any income now?" I said.

Torres said that as a veteran, he received a small monthly pension from the government for nonservice-connected disability. he was also drawing $20 a week against a final insurance settlement for his disability.

"But with a little luck, I'll be working again pretty soon," he told me. "Pensions don't buy the kind of things I want my kids to have."

He's already been out, looking ...

"But when I take a physical exam, they look at me like I was nuts."

Mrs. Torres broke into one of her frequent smiles about then. "They said he wouldn't live," she said. "But he did. They said he wouldn't walk. He's walking. Now the say he can't work, but I don't believe them."

Then a more sober thought changed her expression.

"One day at the hospital," she told me, "about a year after the accident, one of the insurance representatives came up to me and told me, 'Frankly, Mrs. Torres, your husband would be a lot better off dead.'

"So I told him, 'As far as you're concerned, mister, maybe yes. But as far as he's concerned, and as far as I'm concerned, and as far as our children are concerned, no, mister. No, never."

And this is the hero and his family today.