"A few minutes past five o'clock on the drizzly Sunday evening of January 29, 1956, more than 1,200 men and women were preparing to return home following an oyster roast sponsored by the church many had attended that morning, in Brooklyn, Maryland. When workers spotted smoke drifting downward from the ceiling, no one panicked. World War II veterans and war workers, they were accustomed to dealing with this sort of thing themselves. No one called the...