Perry Schulman: a famous fire with a surprise ending
My father, Hy Schulman (1906–1975), practised law in Winnipeg. In 1954 his law office was on the third floor of the seven-storey Time Building at 333 Portage Avenue, on the northwest corner of Hargrave Street. Around four o’clock in the morning of June 8 of that year, the building burned down in what the Winnipeg Fire Department still describes on its web site as “the biggest and most memorable fire inWinnipeg’s history,” the result of faulty wiring. The building was completely destroyed, but no one was in it at the time of the fire. My father feared that he had been wiped out. It is the only time I can recall seeing him cry.

A few days afer the fire, the firemen made a surprising discovery in the debris. The two safes in which my father stored his files had crashed from the third floor into the basement. The cabinets were intact, and the files inside them were barely singed. A few months later, a photograph of my father—with a joyful look on his face and standing next to one of the open safes—appeared in an advertisement in Time magazine on behalf of Chubb Safes, which is still in business as a multinational corporation.