The Great Berkley Fire of 1922 | An eyewitness account

Today is the 101st anniversary of the Great Berkley Fire. Rather than attempting to give an account of the incident, we’ll leave it to our former colleague – the one and only – George Tucker to tell the story.

George, who was just a 12-year-old lad at the time, survived the fire, running through the streets of Berkley as houses around him burned. He even rescued his Grandmother's false teeth from her bookcase before her house was reduced to smoking timbers.

Virginian-Pilot photographer Charles Borjes was on the scene and captured these dramatic photos of the fire and the destruction it left behind. Borjes' reputation was solidified worldwide with these shots.

Originally published on June 7, 1999:

Great Berkley fire a memorable conflagration in 1922

GEORGE TUCKER

The relative tranquility of the first 12 years of my 89-year-old existence was rudely shattered 77 years ago by what is known in local pyrotechnic annals as the Great Berkley Fire, a horrendous conflagration that wiped out more than a third of Norfolk's southside community on April 13, 1922.

Not only did it destroy my maternal grandparents' home, where I had spent some of the pleasantest hours of my childhood, it was also my first encounter with the dreadful destruction that fire can inflict.

Ironically, it also provided me with an amusing anecdote that has lingered in my memory long after the traumatic experiences that I shared with many others on that fatal day have long since been forgotten.

To tell the story from the beginning, the Thursday of April 13, 1922, was the beginning of that year's Easter holiday. As school had let out early to provide any youngster so inclined an opportunity to prepare for the annual visit of the Easter bunny, I had gone to my grandparents' house at the tip end of South Main Street on the Southern Branch of the Elizabeth River to celebrate the occasion.

Except for a gale-force southwest wind that later played havoc when the fire got under way, it was a perfect and cloudless day, made even lovelier by the burgeoning of spring blossoms and the flowering of fruit trees.

Around midafternoon, my grandmother, an avid baseball fan, and I walked to a nearby field to take in a sandlot game played between some of Berkley's would-be Babe Ruths and an amateur team from Norfolk whose name I have long since forgotten.

Everything was going splendidly, and Grandma and I were rooting lustily from a precarious perch on the runningboard of a Model T Ford, when someone yelled, ''FIRE!''

Looking around, we saw the vast abandoned wooden sheds of the defunct Tunis Lumber Co., which abutted my grandparents' back yard, in flames. Subsequently, it was revealed that the fire had started when a secreted liquor still operated by a Berkley moonshiner in one of the abandoned mill lofts had exploded, setting off the blaze that resulted in almost a million dollars in property damage.

At that point, however, no one was aware of those details.

To return to Grandma and myself, somehow or other we got back to her old ivy-covered house, but by the time we arrived on the scene flames were flickering out of the upstairs windows.

Darting inside, I caught sight of Grandma's false teeth in a glass tumbler of water on top of a bookcase just as two sailor volunteers from the nearby St. Helena Training Station started to move it outside. Before that happened, I rescued the teeth, stuck them under a pile of books in the upturned bookcase and then headed for my parents' home on Berkley Avenue that was then in the direct line of the fire.

Fortunately, the wind changed abruptly an hour or so later, otherwise our house would also have been destroyed.

By then, the gale-force winds had blown the blazing brands northward from the burning mill sheds into a closely built residential area. And as I ran through the doomed streets, my heart pounding like a triphammer, I encountered hundreds of frantic householders trying to save a few of their possessions from the flames.

The next day, a Virginian-Pilot reporter wrote of seeing a coffin containing a dead man perched on top of an upright piano that had been pushed out of a burning house.

And as if that wasn't lugubrious enough, the same scribe went on to say that an unidentified male spectator got so carried away that he pulled a chair up to the piano, sat down, and proceeded to pound out ''A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight'' while the flames crackled around him.

In the meantime, the ongoing inferno had engulfed the Liberty Street business district and even came near reaching the city gas tanks on Berkley Avenue near my home. But a timely emptying of 85,000 cubic feet of gas by alert employees prevented an explosion that would have prefigured the atomic bomb.

By night, approximately 500 Berkley families were homeless and about 300 houses, churches and stores had gone up in smoke. Also, looting had begun while firefighters from all over the Hampton Roads area were frantically battling the flames and this eventually necessitated calling out the Marines to maintain order.

Later that night, when I finally got back to what was left of my grandparents' house, I had the pleasure of discovering that my foresight earlier in the afternoon had not been an empty gesture. I was standing near Grandma when someone offered her a ham sandwich, which she had to refuse, saying she couldn't eat it without her false teeth that she presumed had been victims of the fire.

At that point, I yelled, ‘’Wait a minute, Grandma!’’ And after burrowing through the remains of her household furniture that had survived I came up with the missing store-bought choppers!