The Circus Fire (25 page)

John Cleary, Grace Fifield's stepson-in-law and a reporter for the
Times,
remembered leaving the drill shed to use a phone on a landing. A man stumbled out and half collapsed on the stairs.

"Are you all right?" Cleary asked.

"Yes," the man said softly, "I'm all right. I found my wife and three children in there." He put his face in his hands and sat very still.

Yet, according to the records, there was no man who identified a wife and three children at the armory.

One tale that may or may not be true is the rather common one of morticians breaking the brittle arms and legs of victims to fit the bodies into rubberized bags—but right there in front of people? Similarly (incredible is John Cleary's assertion that someone bumped a cot and a charred foot fell to the floor.

Though there was no need to overstate the sensational here—as with the fire itself—people couldn't resist. The event engendered such overpowering feelings, such awe and incomprehension, that any means of relaying the waste and horror of it was fair game. The tallest tales could not be worse than what actually happened.

But the armory wasn't a story. It didn't end neatly with a gruesome twist or a heartbreaking minor chord. It just ground on, minute by minute, hour by hour. There were still a hundred bodies waiting to be claimed.

Those who'd found their loved ones could leave. After the checkout desk, they went with a police officer, who drove them past the crowds and through the dusky streets and home. No one said much. The policeman dropped them off, then came back for more. He would be doing this all

night. There was still a line outside, and more arriving all the time. In a quiet corner of the drill floor, nurses were bolting down their dinner of coffee and doughnuts, speaking in whispers. Upstairs, behind the glass door of the conference room, the phones were ringing off the hook.

Bad face

For parents missing children, the optimistic route started with the circus grounds, police headquarters, and the Brown School, followed by inquiries at Municipal, Hartford, and then St. Francis Hospital, and ended with the armory. The pessimistic went straight to the armory, enduring a kind of purgatory for their lack of faith, then raced off to the hospitals.

By six o'clock, three hours after the fire, all the children who'd been at headquarters were now at the Brown School, sliding down the slides on the playground, or inside, under the watchful eyes of the policewomen. The radio stations had announced that parents should call for them there, and a line formed outside, smaller than the one at the armory yet just as desperate.

A father of two had rescued one child and left him with a stranger while he went back into the tent for the other. When they came out safely, the stranger and the first child were gone.

The registration of names was on a much smaller scale. The War Council had sent a stenographer, and the American Legion and Red Cross volunteers manned a table, but to the parents in line they were painfully slow. They compiled the names and addresses and ages of the missing and compared it to their single sheet of found children.

In their initial circuit around town, worried relatives and friends left the names of Barbara and Mary Kay Smith, Jerry LeVasseur, and Grace Fifield, among others. Of the thirty-five mothers and children on this early list, sixteen were already dead.

Beyond the table in the entryway, on the playground and in the classrooms, the children waited, thirty of them, unsure what had happened to their parents and brothers and sisters and cousins.

A Hartford couple gave the names of their three-year-old and his teenaged cousin. A volunteer checked the lists—they had a match. In a

minute a policewoman reunited the four of them. During the panic, they'd been separated. The teenager had pushed his cousin over the northeast chute, and the crowd swallowed him. It took him several hours roaming the grounds to find the toddler again, but he had.

After touring the armory and St. Francis Hospital, another couple found their seven-year-old son at the Brown School. They'd been sitting in the east bleachers. When the fire broke out, the father dropped his son and then his wife down between the boards and squeezed through after them. By the time he got outside, the child was gone. A woman took him to a store, the boy explained. She called the police and stayed with him until a cruiser could come and take him to the school.

But for every happy ending, there were ten disappointments. The line was long, and there were only so many children. Some who came away empty had run out of places to look. They headed back to the armory to check the children's section once more, or off to Municipal Hospital to ask at the front desk again. A few stood on the sidewalk by Market Street, unsure just what to do.

A police captain conferred with Commissioner Hickey at the armory to make sure there were no lost children still there, then drove up Barbour Street. He cruised the blocks around the grounds, keeping an eye out for any children by themselves. He pulled his car up by the lot, got out and swept the backyards and parking areas on foot. From Kensington all the way to Cleveland he canvassed the houses and tenements, going door to door, floor to floor.

Another officer had had a long day. He'd started before noon, doing traffic on Barbour for the big crowd coming in. Now he drew duty at the Brown School, becoming the officer in charge. Three adults approached him. "Where do we get our refunds for our circus tickets?" they asked.

The man was so nonplused he didn't even laugh at them. "I'm sorry," he said, "I don't know. We're not taking care of that here."

The line kept steady. The Red Cross Canteen Corps furnished dinner for the staff and the remaining children.

Communications were still all snarled. They needed to get through to police headquarters to verify the name of a patient but couldn't raise them. Finally the officer in charge detailed a policewoman to Municipal Hospital to get a list of the injured.

Mayor Mortensen was already there, visiting the wards while Mrs. Mortensen, a volunteer, worked with the burned children. By now the radio broadcasts had brought in scores of nurse's aides; two took the train all the way from New York. The trouble now was space. Patients wrapped head to foot in bandages lay on cots along the hallways. Nurses walked about in masks—not from the danger of infection but because of the smell. Tall fans had been set up by windows to blow fresh air in, but it was still hot and there were far too many people. The children on the cots looked up, suffering. The mayor paused to offer a comforting word, then went on. In a room, two little girls—apparently unhurt—were playing. They were the only ambulatory children he saw.

His entourage got on an elevator. Before the doors closed, a nurse rolled a gurney in with a boy on it, his face swathed in gauze. Only his lips showed, puffed to twice normal size. His breath came in uneven, shallow gasps.

"He's going to be operated on now," an aide explained.

The doors rolled open and they took him away. The mayor's party stayed on.

Upstairs, just as he entered a room to cheer the injured there, one of the children in it died. A little girl—unidentified, said the hospital superintendent. They hadn't been able to locate her parents. It's likely from the girl's age, sex and time of death that this was the girl who came to be known as Little Miss 1565.

Municipal was not only running out of room but out of basic supplies. They had to call New Britain General to request more cots and stretchers, more sheet wadding and cast plaster. New Britain got a shipment on a truck immediately.

The overcrowding was pitiful. Nurses helped Jerry LeVasseur out of his oxygen tent and laid him in the same bed with a five-year-old boy, also critically burned. The boy had a pillow and Jerry didn't. He asked for one but they were all out. (A hundred were on the way, donated by the Veterans' Hospital in Newington; doctors needed them to elevate the arms and legs of patients.)

On the same floor, Barbara and Mary Kay Smith shared a bed. They were both burned on the arms, legs and back. Agnes Norris was on the floor above them, though they didn't know it. Down the hall, their mother was recovering. She hadn't been able to catch their father; he'd heard about the fire from their aunt and come up from Middletown to look for them, checking first at St. Francis, then Hartford Hospital and finally the armory. Because he didn't know the city, he'd never heard of Municipal.

Dr. Alfred Burgdorf, the city's health officer, ran into Mayor Mortensen in the hall. The overcrowding concerned him. He suggested a redistribution of the injured among the city's hospitals, since St. Francis and especially Hartford were nowhere near capacity. The mayor agreed— once the patients were stabilized.

Municipal was doing the best it could, considering. Volunteers had filled the gaps at every turn, and state, nonprofit and even private organizations stepped forward. The Red Cross Mobile Canteen established a stand on every floor to supply cold water and fruit juice to the workers as well as the injured. G. Fox, at owner Mrs. Beatrice Auerbach's bidding, sent five hundred sandwiches and twenty-five gallons of coffee to keep people moving. She heard there was a shortage of bedding and nightclothes, so she sent over a truckload. Nurses opened the linen cabinets to find brand-new sheets and pajamas, the G. Fox price tags still attached.

As the mayor left (for now; he'd be back, and Mrs. Mortensen would be here all night), the hospital superintendent called to a group of volunteer nurses going on break, "Please, all of you, all of you who can come back tonight, please do. I think we're going to need everybody we can get."

"We'll be back," most of them said.

The superintendent wouldn't get a break. Governor Baldwin was due soon.

The list of injured—still incomplete, not yet ready to be released— grew as people reached home and discovered they were hurt. The litany of outpatient injuries ranged from sprained backs, concussions and dislocated thumbs to "abrasions of both elbow flexures," "rope burns of the thoracic area" and "marked nervous shock." Some older folks were simply black and blue, their shins dented and bloody from stumbling through the grandstand chairs.

Friction burns were the most common injury, all the people who'd gone down the ropes and poles. Crush and trample injuries came next. One woman had sprained her ankle and suffered bruises to her head, shoulders and legs. Someone had stepped on another woman's foot and broken the second metatarsal. One boy showed up with burns from the elbow to the hand on both arms; though they hurt, he was more concerned about his mother, still missing.

The list of those recovering upstairs was more dire, and not for public consumption. Of ten-year-old Edith Budrick, it said: "bad face, legs, arms."

Of Mildred Cook, her age strangely estimated as twenty: serious. Mrs. Emily Gill, sister E. Hampton. Call Clarence Colson.

Edward Cook, room 505: legs, arms, face.

Agnes Norris, fifth floor: critical.

Marion Dineen, age fifteen: not serious.

Gerald LeVasseur, fourth floor: face, arms, head, buttocks.

But the first list of Municipal's injured given out to the police and newspapers and radio stations had entries even more upsetting. One patient was listed as "John, 5"—nothing else. A number were listed by a single name (Logan, 11), or names that would later prove garbled versions of their real names (Freddie Bryarz and Freddie Bryant turned out to be Freddie Boyajian). Their estimated ages, like Mildred Cook's, were way off. Relatives hearing this list over the radio would only grow more confused and anxious. And what could be made of "Unidentified Boy of 8 or 10"?

Downstairs in the lobby, the Red Cross and the hospital's social workers were busy taking missing persons reports, running through the same

routine as their counterparts at the armory and the Brown School, with similar results.

All these efforts were a first step at getting reorganized after the raw chaos of the fire. Downtown at police headquarters they were restoring order in a different way. In the basement, in the property room, two sergeants headed a detail that tagged and catalogued every item recovered from the Barbour Street lot—the shoes and pocketbooks and eyeglasses and earrings,

the marbles and coins and buttons, the bankbooks and ration stamps. Outside, a clutch of onlookers huddled around a barred window well to see what they'd found. They placed all the valuables in the vault on the main floor. Above the clamor of the front desk, a voice on the radio slowly intoned the names of the dead.

The vice president of the circus, James Haley, could not escape the broadcast; it was on all the stations, constant. He left the lot and drove to the Hotel Bond on Asylum, where he and some of the star performers were staying. Haley had been an accountant in Florida, dabbling in real estate; he'd been politic enough to be appointed the state's representative of the John Ringling estate, then married into the business after falling for Aubrey Ringling. He was a money man, at best a local politician, not circus folk. A veteran, he'd seen his share of hell in World War I, but this was something else.