Bruce Twickler, writer and director of the film Damrell's Fire, explains why Boston can credit its deliverance from Chicago's fate to John Damrell, its courageous fire chief. A spark in the basement of a building on Boston's Summer Street turned into a firestorm, reducing over 700 buildings to 65 acres of rubble. Tragically and miraculously, only 30 people were lost.
Bruce Twickler is President of Docema, LLC, the film company that produced the ground-breaking documentary *Damrell's Fire* (2006) for PBS and is currently producing *Broadside, the Influence of Sea Power on History *(2009). Bruce graduated from MIT with a BS/MS in Electrical Engineering; was on the technical staffs of GenRad and MITRE Corp; and, he spent a dozen years in the consumer electronics industry, the last few as VP of Marketing for Pioneer Electronics. In the early personal computer market of the 1980s, he was President/CEO of Hayden Software and later, Shiva Corporation. In the late 1990s, his Internet company, Andover.Net, with over 50% of all Linux-related internet traffic, enjoyed one of the most successful initial public offerings of that era.