No Way Out--Couple Perish in Blaze : Fire: Flames blocked the doorway, and security bars covered the window.

When fire broke out Thursday night in Lonnie (Skillet) Skelton and Inez Callaway’s tiny apartment in South Los Angeles, there was nowhere to turn.

Flames blocked the only doorway out of the 10-foot by 15-foot cubicle where they lived. The apartment’s single window was covered with unremovable security bars.

Skelton, 56, and Callaway, 51, huddled in the bathroom until they died, Los Angeles city fire investigators said.

The fire, ignited by a cigarette ember, gutted the couple’s apartment on Avalon Boulevard near 107th Street and caused $11,000 in damage to the building and its contents, Battalion Chief Lon Pursell said.

Earlier Thursday night, Skelton and Callaway had been celebrating the birthday of a neighbor. Drinking, laughing and offering toasts, they sat with a group of friends just a few feet from the doorstep of the apartment. As they often did, the friends began talking in the early evening and continued into the night.

After the gathering broke up about 10 p.m., neighbor Manuel Calvin, 19, said he helped an intoxicated Skelton back to his apartment.

“I put him on the couch, and we talked a little bit more,” Calvin said. “Inez started heating up food on the stove. We all had cigarettes.”

Five minutes after leaving to go next door, Calvin saw smoke billowing out of the couple’s apartment and called 911.

Calvin said he kicked open the door but flames pushed him back. By the time he and other neighbors were able to bring a garden hose from an auto body shop next door, flames had engulfed the room.

“We were all just standing there, trying to figure out how to stop it,” Calvin said.

The furniture and bric-a-brac that the couple had accumulated during the more than six years they lived together fed the blaze for nearly an hour until firefighters were able to douse the flames.

Neighbors remembered Skelton and Callaway as a gregarious couple who did maintenance work at a nearby park as part of their work program to receive welfare payments from the county. Skelton--who friends called “Skillet”--also worked part time at a grocery store in front of the apartment.

“He was always joking,” said Thomas Vann, who spent his 42nd birthday with the victims.

“He would tell funny stories,” said neighbor Joe Silas. “Like the one about Red Skelton,” whose publicity people were convinced that Lonnie Skelton was a long-lost brother and sent several letters asking that he get in touch.

The letters from Red Skelton came periodically, and Skillet’s recounting brought humor to the group of regulars in front of the market where Skelton worked.

“The letters stopped coming when they found out that Skillet was a black man,” Silas said.

Although none of the neighbors gathered in front of the burned-out apartment Friday knew how Skelton received his nickname, they all called him by it. Staring at the couple’s charred belongings heaped nearby, a number of them remarked on the irony of the accidental fire.

“They were sociable, you know, nice,” Calvin said. “They never started anything.”