Vonnegut RIP cont.

from link on ALDAILY:

In his letters to me, Vonnegut downplayed the importance of his family’s architectural career (his father was also an architect). Instead, his “family’s most beneficial contribution” was the development of the modern emergency exit. This, he wrote, was the invention of his great-grandfather, Clemens Vonnegut, a hardware store owner who was horrified by the tragedy of the Iroquois Theater fire of 1903, America’s deadliest fire. A total of 602 victims were claimed in the mad stampede to the doors, and most bodies were found piled in heaps just inside the entrance.
Clemens Vonnegut realized that the theater doors could not be operated unless one stood away from them and operated the handle, something impossible to do when being crushed against it. He conceived the idea of a strip of metal on the door, which would open it automatically whenever someone pushed up against it—or was pushed.
So was born the “panic bar.” The late Vonnegut suggested that I look for some of these on my college campus: “Some old such fixtures may still be in use at Williams, bearing the trademark ‘VONDUPRIN.’ The ‘VON’ is for Vonnegut.” He was correct. Since them I have grown accustomed to finding Vonduprin doors throughout the country.
The Iroquois Theater fire happened two decades before Vonnegut’s birth, but accounts of it clearly dominated the family’s history and his childhood. In that mythic account, architecture, fire, and death converged—as they would again in his Slaughterhouse-Five. I might have asked him about this, had it not seemed presumptuous to proceed from a cordial exchange of information to the offering of speculative literary interpretation. Such was the odd architectural background to Vonnegut’s literary career. “I would have been an architect,” he wrote in his second and last letter, “but Father told me to be anything but that.” -- Michael Lewis