steve andracik/viewMartin Dean Dupalo points to a building in the Clock Tower Apartments, Sept. 26. Thirty years ago, he and a friend put out a fire started by boys playing indoors with fireworks.
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Las Vegas resident Mark J. Mauro starts out his novel "The Incarceration by my Father" with a brief introduction. A demolition supervisor overseeing a job knocking down old mansions to make way for townhomes acquires a journal with the title "My life before they got me."
The story explored in the journal is that of Paul Copolla, aka Peter A. Mastratta, an innocent underachiever drawn from his job at a plant nursery into the world of organized crime.
Mauro was born in Pequanock, N.J., in 1970 and raised in Wayne, Totowa and Paterson, N.J. He graduated from Bergen Community College and moved to Las Vegas in 2001.
APARTMENT RAZING STIRS MEMORY OF AVERTED TRAGEDY
He was only 9 years old. It was 1976 and he lived in an apartment complex, originally named Tara Hill apartments. It is now named the Clock Tower apartments and soon will be another parking lot adjacent to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.
Thirty years ago, the boy made a positive, potentially life-saving difference there but few, if any, ever knew about it.
A latchkey kid, the boy wasn't part of any extracurricular activities, spending his quarters down the street at the local Swenson-Twain 7-Eleven playing the Evel Knieval pinball machine.
He attended Ruby S. Thomas Elementary School just beyond the Boulevard Mall. He attended school every day and nothing more. No key to the house and unallowed to bring his friends inside supervised or not. His mother constantly battled against dust and dirt, and the wear and tear of jeans on a sofa.
One summer day, the boy was outside playing with a new friend, Doug, maybe a 100 feet away from what would become the focal point of a possible tragedy.
Like himself, Doug was about 8 or 9 years old and new to the apartment complex.
The two boys saw gray smoke come out from the balcony of a second-story apartment across from his own locked apartment. It was a 16-unit, two-story building. They ran as fast as they could, no thoughts or concerns about what was in front of them. The door was open. The boy's eyes burned. He had never experienced that burning and coughing reaction before. The smoke was pouring through a bedroom door into the living room. The layout of the apartment and his burning eyes are both memories still easily recalled.
He didn't know where the idea came from, but he grabbed a bunch of towels in the kitchen and soaked them and ran into the room. A bed was on fire. The two boys doused the flames and by then several adults had seen the smoke. Fire engines responded and so, too, did the boy's mom.
Coming home from work, she chose to think the worst and didn't bother to question him as to what had caused the fire. He had approached his mother with the exuberance of a child that had just extinguished a dangerous fire whose mom would be proud. She had approached him as a mischievous kid who had caused a world of concern. No words were exchanged and he ran away that night after a very public display of corporal punishment. His eyes watery from smoke and flames now had a second reason to be watery.
Other than a troubling memory, nobody else was hurt from the fire and smoke that summer day.
In the end, apparently two kids that lived there had been playing indoors with fireworks.
A few years ago, the boy attempted to see if there was a record of the fire; there was none.
(To this day), the boy always knew inside he was responsible, along with his childhood friend, for putting out that fire. A tragedy was prevented. Nobody ever really knew until now. I wonder if those other 15 units of tenants knew what those kids did. Most important though, they were all safe, regardless.
Thirty years later, the old Tara Hill apartments have been razed and many of the memories that went with it, good and bad.
That 9-year-old-boy was me.
-- Martin Dean Dupalo
UNLV instructor and resident of Las Vegas since 1973
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