The Fall of Miss Minnie B. Werner, Chicago, 1916

1916

Girl Will Live

CHICAGO, Jan. 25. — St. Luke hospital attendants announced today that Miss Minnie Werner, the stenographer who yesterday plunged sixteen stories from a window of a loop skyscraper, may recover fully from her injuries. An auto-truck load of cardboard boxes broke her fall.

—La Crosse Tribune, La Crosse, Wisconsin, Jan. 25, 1916, p. 5.


"I Must Be Hard to Kill"

These Are Words of Girl Who Fell Sixteen Stories

Chicago, Jan. 26 — Miss Minnie B. Werner, who fell sixteen stories from a window of the Transportation building last Monday, recovered consciousness today.

Her first words were: "I must be hard to kill."

—St. Paul Pioneer Press, St. Paul, Minnesota, Jan. 27, 1916, p. 1.


She Things She is Hard to Kill

Chicago, Jan. 26. — "I must be hard to kill," was the comment of Minnie B. Werner when she recovered consciousness at St. Luke's hospital and heard how she had fallen sixteen stories to the netting of an auto truck.

Miss Werner, who is 22 years old and lives at 2417 North Washington, sustained a broken shoulder bone and possibly internal injuries. Physicians say she has an excellent chance to recover.

Elsie Werner, a sister, said she fell by accident, although the police were inclined to think that Miss Werner jumped intentionally.

—The Daily Review, Decatur, Illinois, Jan. 26, 1916, p. 10.


Excerpt from article called "Escapes a Matter of Luck," originally from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

She escaped with a broken shoulder and a few bruises.

She worked as a stenographer for a publication concern in the Transportation Building, 608 South Dearborn street, Chicago.

One day, about three weeks ago, she complained of being ill and left the office. An elevator took her to the sixteenth floor where there is a rest room for women. From the time she left the elevator until she was picked up, broken and unconscious, no person seems to have seen her. Whether she had leaped or fallen could not be determined until she herself was able to tell about it and then she said she fell.

From the window of the rest room to the ground is a distance of about 200 feet and Miss Werner fell headlong. That she was saved from destruction was due to a queer freak of chance. The driver of a big truck, laden with paper boxes, had stopped under the window. She fell among the boxes and they broke her fall.

When she was picked up after the fall a policeman rushed up and asked if she had leaped. "I fell," she said, although at that moment she seemed actually unconscious. As soon as she could talk intelligently about the matter her sister, Edith, asked her to tell how it happened.

"I did not intend to jump," she said. "I felt dizzy and went upstairs to the rest room. When I got there I couldn't make out the details of my surroundings. I went to the window for air. The next thing I knew was when I felt myself falling."

Then she told of how she found herself plunging, head down, toward the earth. Although she could have been in the air only a few seconds at most, so rapidly was her mind working, that it seemed almost an eternity. Her memory divides the period into two distinct phases, the first of which is clear and accurate in detail; and the second obscure and uncertain. She seemed to have a curious, detached feeling, as if if were not she but another who was falling, a sensation not uncommon in dreams.

Her first impression was that she was suffering a nightmare in which one imagines himself falling through infinite space. She felt that sickening faintness persons frequently feel when an elevator unexpectedly starts downward. Her chest felt compressed, as if inclosed with bands which were squeezing out all the air. The air seemed to pluck at her eyelids as if about to tear them away. There was a ringing in her ears and her body tingled all over.

She realized that she was perfectly conscious — able to stream. She idly wondered if she could move her fingers. She tried and found she could. And then came the realization of what it all meant. She was in full possession of all her faculties and yet she couldn't avert the disaster that lay below.

Then she passed into the second stage. The speed of her fall was accelerated. Now she did not seem to be falling. Instead she was caught in the midst of a canyon and the earth was rushing up to meet her. Where the buildings had been were nothing but white streaks and below them was the black street. She had a hazy impression that she was all right, but that the world had suddenly been turned upside down. Then the white streak and the black merged into one vast chasm of blackness. Apparently she never saw the truck before she struck it. Her fall carried its load of papers with her to the street and a few minutes later she was pulled from the wreckage.

—The Washington Post, March 12, 1916, p. 1, Miscellany Section.


Girl Who Fell Sixteen Floors Ready to Work

CHICAGO, Ill., March 13 — Miss Minnie Werner, the stenographer, who ten weeks ago fell out of a sixteen story window of the Transportation building, will be back to work in a week, it was learned on Sunday.

Miss Werner fell into a truck load of paper boxes, and her most serious injury was a badly fractured arm.

"If you ever had a dream that you fell out of the mountain you know something of what my experience was like," said the young woman. "Any way it shows that the popular idea that a person dies after falling a hundred feet is not true."

—The Racine Journal-News, Racine, Wisconsin, March 13, 1916, p. 2.