Minutes after midnight, 50 years ago this morning, a second shift of government employees including janitors, maintenance workers, and summer interns, were going off duty at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, which was a giant archive and repository for the service records of many millions of American military veterans.

Among them was Kathy Trieschmann, a St. Louis University student who had landed a coveted internship after her freshman year. Trieschmann was an adventurous young woman -- an avid scuba diver -- but she also had severe asthma, and she was the type of person to notice and check air quality reports, years before most people would have thought of the idea.

It was Trieschmann who first noticed the faint smell of smoke coming from somewhere in the upper floors of the cavernous records facility. She led a small group of fellow interns upstairs to investigate. The air grew thicker and more acrid as they ascended.

As Megan Greenwell put it in Wired recently:

I've had today's date on my calendar for quite a while now, since back when I worked as the reporter covering veterans for Stars & Stripes. I'd never heard of the 1973 St. Louis records fire before that experience, but it came up constantly in trying to cover the history of Americans in the military before the last few decades.

The fire took four days to put out, and involved soaking the entire collection of paper files with millions of gallons of water. In the end, the personnel records of 17,517,490 U.S. veterans were destroyed.

Here's how the government archives explain it now: Imagine if someone served in the U.S. Army and was discharged between 1947 and 1963; there's an 80% chance the government's only copy of their service record was destroyed. If they served in the U.S. Air Force from 1947 to 1963, there's a 75% chance the records were gone.

These paper files contained all kinds of information that would be useful to veterans (for example, medical and service records that would show they were entitled to veterans' benefits), along with award citations, photographs, and first person narratives and stories of soldiers’ experiences -- basically the kinds of things that would be invaluable for historians, relatives seeking to know about their ancestors, and frankly, reporters covering the veterans beat for Stars & Stripes in the 2010s.

Now, the good news is probably twofold:

First, as far as I can tell, nobody was killed or seriously hurt in this enormous blaze.

Second, the U.S. government undertook a mammoth effort -- one that has lasted five decades and continues -- to try to reconstruct a lot of these records.

There are literally so many records in such disrepair that the work is prioritized in order of whether anyone thinks to ask for a specific veteran's record. Much of it was (and continues to be) painstaking and manual -- literally drying millions and millions of pages of records, treating them in order to kill mold, separating them from one another with tiny blades they apparently refer to as, "microspatulas," and seeing what survived.

The records of Burt Lancaster, who served as an entertainer in the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II, are a good example of records that were singed and soaked, but not destroyed. (That's the photo accompanying today's newsletter, or you can see the original here.)

That said, a lot of records were gone for good.

"We can usually prove eligibility for benefits and get the vet or next of kin their entitlements; however, we cannot recreate the individual file to what it was," Bryan McGraw, access coordinator at the NPRC, said on the official Archives.gov account of the fire and its aftermath. "We don't know what was specifically in each file, and each of these was as different as each of us as individuals. So from a purely historic or genealogical perspective, that material was lost forever."

So, should I wind this up with a reminder to back up your data and important documents?

Or else, maybe a description of how the fire affected construction of similar archival buildings that came afterward?

For one thing, fire walls, doors, and corridors were scarce within the St. Louis building, and the designers had also made a conscious but unfortunate choice not to install sprinklers, on the theory that it might malfunction and accidentally drench the records.

This is no longer considered to be a best practice, I gather.

Overall, I think it's just an under-noticed event in U.S. history that affected a lot of people, and it happened 50 years ago today. If you didn't know about it before, you do now.

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7 things worth knowing today

• Turkey approved Sweden’s bid to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, paving the way for the alliance to complete a historic expansion launched in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The agreement was reached in the final hours before a NATO summit in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius on Tuesday, potentially allowing NATO to expand across more than a thousand miles of territory straddling the Baltic Sea, shifting the balance of power in Northern Europe and creating a potential chokepoint for Russian warships and aircraft in the region. (WSJ)
• The percentage of Brown University students who say they are heterosexual has fallen sharply in recent years: 85.95% in 2010, versus 59.87% in the spring 2023 semester, according to a poll of current students conducted by the campus newspaper. Other self-reported categories: homosexual (7.63%), bisexual (17.92%), queer (4.77%), pansexual (2.38%), asexual (1.33%), questioning (5.91%), and other (.19%). (Brown Daily Herald)
• Nearly 30 percent of American households comprise a single person, a record high. “It’s just a stunning social change,” said Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at New York University and author of the book “Going Solo.” “I came to see it as the biggest demographic change in the last century that we failed to recognize and take seriously.” (The Hill)
• The suspect in the 1982 Tylenol poisonings that killed seven people in the Chicago area and led to an overhaul in the safety of over-the-counter medication packaging, has died. James W. Lewis, 76, was found dead in his Cambridge, Massachusetts, home. His death was "not suspicious," according to police. No one was ever charged in the Tylenol case, in which seven people were killed. Lewis, however, served 12 years in prison for sending a $1 million extortion note to manufacturer Johnson & Johnson. (AP)
• A 14-year-old girl whose family claimed she was "sold" to a U.S. Marine for sex has been found inside a barracks at Camp Pendleton in California two weeks after she went missing. The teen, who family members say has learning disabilities, was found at the San Diego area Marine base on June 28. Days later, a Marine was seen being led from the barracks in handcuffs. (NBC San Diego)
• The New York Times announced Monday that it plans to shutter its sports desk, and rely instead on coverage from the Athletic, the subscription sports website it purchased last year. The move enraged members of the New York Times Guild, which called it “a profound betrayal of our colleagues and of Times values.” In a statement, the guild said it would “fight this flagrant attempt at union-busting with every tool we have.” (WashPost)
• An influencer-backed energy drink that went viral among kids is facing scrutiny over its potentially dangerous levels of caffeine. Backed by two of YouTube’s best known stars, PRIME was an immediate sensation when it launched last year, prompting long lines in grocery stores and reports of school yard resale markets. But, critics say it has 200 milligrams of caffine per 12 ounces, equivalent to about half a dozen Coke cans or nearly two Red Bulls. (AP)

Thanks for reading (thanks again!). See you bright and early tomorrow.