“My father stayed in the house for a long time,” she says. Meg remembers walking to the curb and sitting down with her toy horse. Meanwhile, recalls Meg, “My father ran back into the house to get my mother and brother and sister.” Meg had her own second-floor bedroom her siblings shared one down the hall, also on the second floor. Heck told the newspaper that he called the fire department and then ran to grab a ladder. Heck said he opened the door and found Meg standing on the stoop, and also saw that flames had engulfed the Rapagnas’ house. 27 in the Courier-Post of Camden, New Jersey, Charles Heck, Carl’s father, said that Meg’s knocking on the front door awakened the family dog, which in turn awakened him. So I went next door, to my best friend’s house, Carl Heck, and I knocked on the door and told them to call the fire department.” This is what Meg remembers of those moments, which were unlike any that most children will-or should-experience: “My father said, ‘Go run next door, and get them to call the fire department.’ There were no cell phones, of course, or anything like that. Meg’s dad picked her up and rushed down the stairs and out the front door. Meg’s favorite gift that year was a plastic Breyer model horse, which she had slept with on Christmas night and snatched up to hold close when her father called to her. Twenty-four hours earlier, the family had opened presents next to the Christmas tree in what was in those times called a rec room. The Rapagnas lived in a comfortable two-story house on Arch Street in Delran, New Jersey, a suburb along the Delaware River 15 miles northeast of Philadelphia there were parents Robert and Judy, and their three young children-Meg, four-year-old Lynne, and three-year-old Robert Jr. 26, 1971, five-year-old Meg Rapagna-”pronounced like lasagna,” she would explain, many years later-awakened to the sound of her father’s voice, and then to the realization that her family’s home was in flames.
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