Others will also remember one of the worst disasters in Cleveland's history that happened 60 years ago: the Oct. 20, 1944, explosions and fire at the East Ohio Gas Co. plant.
Anne Strazar, who thought Cleveland was being bombed by the Germans. And Louis Turi, still haunted by parts of a body on a chain-link fence.
The death toll was 131 people, including 55 East Ohio employees. Some of the victims were so badly burned they would never be identified.
The first explosion rocked the neighborhood about 2:40 p.m.
Krivacic, who had just turned 14, was at Willson Junior High. He saw the blast through the window of his science class.
``It was facing the lake, which was where the fire was,'' he recalled. ``The teacher thought it was the corner gas station that blew up because it looked that close. But it was probably a mile away.''
Krivacic and his classmates were released early from school. He ran toward his home until firefighters stopped him. ``We saw the manhole covers blowing up, the fire truck blowing up,'' he said.
The memories of that day are still vivid for the Rev. Victor Cimperman, a Catholic priest, who acknowledges, ``I don't want to remember what I saw.
``But none of us can ever forget.''
He can't forget the devastated wasteland that was his neighborhood. Or the crying children. And frightened adults wandering the streets, looking for relatives, or pieces of their homes. His sister can't forget, either.
Anne Strazar, then 18, was working at the nearby Fisher Auto Body when she looked out her window at the ``giant silver balls'' that housed liquid natural gas at the plant, known as No. 2 works.
``I looked at them all the time, wondered what would happen if they exploded,'' she said. ``Then, that day, they did. The top blew sky high. There were three or four men on the tank when it exploded. It was horrendous. I thought that the Germans were bombing us, and ran to get away.''
She and her co-workers ran outside behind the plant to escape, but were blocked by a tall chain-link fence.
``We dropped to our knees and dug in the dirt until we could get under the fence,'' she said. ``One of my friends died there, she was unable to get under the fence.''
The explosion at the plant north of St. Clair Avenue sent a 3,000-degree fireball into the sky, burning, sometimes vaporizing, a square mile of Cleveland's mostly Slovenian neighborhood.
Like Strazar, many people thought the explosion was the work of German bombers, or saboteurs. The disaster was something the neighborhood had always feared.
``People looked at those big gas storage tanks and worried that they would explode someday,'' said Father Cimperman. ``The gas company always said it could never happen, that the tanks were perfectly safe.''
Cleveland in 1944 was a very different city. Employment was booming, buoyed by war demands for tanks, planes and ammunition.
Fuel for those factories came in the form of liquid gas supplied by East Ohio. Years before, scientists had determined that 600 times more gas could be stored if it was liquefied at minus 250 degrees. At No. 2 works, there were four tanks holding millions of gallons of liquid natural gas.
On the afternoon of Oct. 20, a thin wisp of vapor was seen leaking from beneath the cylindrical tank No. 4. The vapor wafted to East 61st Street. Somehow, the vapor was ignited by a spark. The exact cause was never determined.
Houses on both sides of East 61st and 62nd streets burst into flames. People in other parts of the city thought the entire East Side was burning. Birds were flash-fried in flight. Houses a half-mile away were blistered by the heat.
The force of the explosion blew out storefronts a mile away.
At 3 p.m., intense heat melted supports on the ball-shaped tank next to No. 4. It collapsed and exploded. The ball of flame could be seen at John Adams High School, seven miles away.
Freed from the tanks, liquid gas ran down the streets and disappeared into sewer openings. The gas seeped into basements. Homes exploded. Manhole covers were blown hundreds of feet into the air.
Turned away by firefighters, Krivacic, whose father had died of cancer the previous February, went to the home of his sister and brother-in-law in Euclid. His school was used by the Red Cross to house 680 people left homeless by the blast.
Three days later he was able to get back to the neighborhood. His mother's body was found later that day in the ruins of a neighbor's house.
``They found her, my mom, on top of my niece,'' he said.
Frank Likovic, a brother-in-law, identified Krivacic's mother. Likovic had been with her before the fire and recognized the apron she had been wearing.
Krivacic thinks his mother went next door because it was a bigger house and she thought it might be safer.
``But even if she'd stayed home, it would have been the same,'' he said.
The Cuyahoga County morgue was besieged by people desperate to know if their relatives or loved ones were among the dead. Identification took a long time, for many because bodies were charred beyond recognition.
People cried over tin boxes that held charred remains of their life's savings. After the Depression, many people kept their money in tin cans. These were incinerated.
Despondent survivors were told the federal government would only refund bills that were at least 3/5 intact. Anything less than that was subject to a determination by the Treasury Department.
Louis Turi, 81, of Wickliffe, was a member of what is now called the Ohio Military Reserve, which backstops the Ohio National Guard during emergencies. Now a lawyer, he was a 21-year-old college student working at nearby Graphite Bronze Co. when he was called to help with the explosion's aftermath.
Two sights haunt him still.
``On a fence there were the remains of a human body, a chain-link fence. Somebody tried climbing it (to escape the fire),'' he said. The other was a 1935 or '36 Plymouth that the initial explosion pitched into a lamp pole, slightly folding the heavy vehicle around the pole.
``The whole thing looked like a war zone.''
Neil Durbin, a spokesman for Dominion East Ohio, said the gas company's most significant safety measure after the tragedy was when they ``shifted from liquefied natural gas to a system of underground natural-gas storage.''
East Ohio Gas paid more than $3 million in damage settlements to the neighborhood and $500,000 more to families of the dead gas company employees. Houses were replaced, new families moved in and the life of the neighborhood continued.
