The Circus Fire (26 page)

He parked the car and walked into the plush lobby, through the plants and brass ashtrays. The bar was already busy. Even here the excitement of the fire seemed to have stirred people up. He took the elevator, feeling the upward rush in his legs, then waited for the doors to open. He slipped his key in the lock.

In Evanston, Illinois, who knew what Robert Ringling was doing. He must know by now, Haley figured; somebody from the inner circle would have heard the news. All the more reason to call.

Finally he got the operator. He gave her the number, then waited for someone to pick up.

Evidence

Back on the lot, a detective accompanied a
Times
photographer as he slowly captured the scorched interior section by section. As part of the city's investigation, Prosecutor Burr Leikind had commissioned him to take shots from all angles. He wanted complete coverage, and the photographer was happy to oblige. Like any professional, he was taking forever.

The big top had become a crime scene, but the thousands of survivors and rescue workers had obliterated any traces of evidence except the most

gross. That's what the photographer focused on: the hulks of the north grandstands, the fallen rows of poles. The crowd was gone now, the smashed and flattened chairs fallen off the back of the grandstand, one upset fire bucket beneath it. The cageboys had moved the menagerie wagons and pulled their canvas covers over the bars: on the sides, a stencilled message read:

Wild Animals
DANGER

Do Not Touch

The men's latrine still held the buckets from its toilets and the sectioned urinal trough and a large barrel containing waste, but everything else was gone. Behind the barrel, some of the jacks backing the southwest bleachers were charred, others surprisingly pristine. The photographer stepped to the west and caught another shot of the whole thing—jacks, men's room, menagerie cages. Not much of a picture, but they weren't paying him for art, just solid documentation.

Around the stages and chutes and railings the cleanup continued, MPs poking through the dust with their billy clubs. Standing perimeter

guard around them was Gloria Barber's fiancé Orville Vieth, brought by truck from Bradley. People were still finding things. A civilian and an auxiliary policeman reported to one officer that they'd picked up a child's leg, some money and other personal belongings. They had them in a bag. Rather than handle the bag himself, the officer chose to take the civilian to the armory and let him personally hand it over to the medical examiner.

On the north side of the lot, investigators noticed a curious effect. Some patches of grass within a few feet of the tent were untouched while trees fifty to sixty feet away had withered leaves and scorched trunks.

Along Barbour Street, groups of men and women chatted on porches, drinking beer and ice water and fanning themselves. The neighborhood kids sat on the curb like a defeated team. All the sacks of hot dog buns and bags of peanuts and gallons of orangeade weren't going to be sold this year, and everyone was glum.

At St. Michael's, a few blocks away on Clark, an exhausted Father Looney heard the phone ringing in the rectory. It was a fellow priest calling from the armory. He had bad news. Little Billy Dineen had died in the fire. Father Looney knew the Dineens well; they belonged to the parish, and Billy's sister Marion went to the parochial school.

The phones at the armory were a problem, the other priest explained, and Mr. Dineen hadn't found Marion yet. The detective had asked him if Father Looney would let Mrs. Dineen know.

Of course, Father Looney said.

On the lot, Burr Leikind led a posse of Hartford fire, police and building inspectors on a tour of the big top, stopping often to examine the damage. The men were in their shirtsleeves and still sweating. They found two full pails of water under the stands, one beneath the southeast bleachers and one near the center exit of the north grandstand. Leikind and the fire officials were especially interested in the four water trucks; they could only locate two, way at the far east end of the lot. According to workers they questioned, the circus carried their own fire extinguishers. Leikind ordered a squad of policemen to round up any fire buckets or extinguishers they could find and bring them to the office of McGovern's. The formal investigation had begun.

At the armory, Commissioner Hickey was too busy to get away, so he deputized a state police captain to act as fire marshal in his stead. Two other

troopers would accompany him to McGovern's and help the prosecutors interrogate circus officials.

They arrived in time to join Leikind inside the perimeter as his team measured the exits. In the middle of the southwest exit they found a heavy stake, still erect, unbudged, which split the path in half. One man commented on how it must have stacked up the people fleeing.

Next they went to the center break on the south side and inspected the electrical cables that ran in from the light plant. The cables took up much of the exit, leaving a useful width at the sidewall of less than five feet. At the light plant itself they found three water-type extinguishers, two of which were unused.

State's Attorney Meade Alcorn caught the tail end of the tour, just before they adjourned to McGovern's, leaving the photographer popping away at the bleachers. Working from observation, hearsay and years of experience, Alcorn and Leikind made up a list of twenty people they wanted to question—ushers and seatmen, Herbert DuVal, circus police chief John Brice. They had enough John Doe subpoenas to back the list up, so they sent a committee to the office wagon in the front yard.

Circus vice president James Haley was there, returned from the Bond, still smarting from a decidedly unpleasant conversation with Robert Ringling. The committee told him they wanted these people on the list

kept available for questioning. Haley said he'd try to comply in every way possible.

Meade Alcorn turned McGovern's office into a courtroom, complete with a stenographer. Prosecutor Leikind did the questioning. The witnesses—at first, mostly John Carson's ushers—waited outside in the custody of police so they couldn't compare their statements. Some of the more important witnesses they couldn't find, like general manager George W. Smith. The one department head they did locate was Edward "Whitey" Versteeg, of the light gang.

Because his department was in charge of the diesel generators, Whitey Versteeg also controlled most of the show's fire extinguishers. At Alcorn's request, the trooper acting as fire marshal questioned him.

Versteeg stressed how shorthanded they were, thirty men doing the work of fifty. They had extinguishers, yes; he listed the different kinds and where they were located—all outside, near his equipment, which, he implied, was right where they were supposed to be. "As far as I know there are no fire extinguishers in the big top."

Everything was operating normally, he said, until someone yelled fire. His engineer cut the power and his men grabbed the extinguishers.

The water trucks, he said, were Mr. Blanchfield's responsibility; it took them four or five minutes to get over to the south side and put water

on the canvas. (In fact, they never did. The tent was too far gone to be saved at that point. They quenched the flaming tires and wetted down the light plants; that was their sole reason for being there.)

"I don't know how many men were on the trucks today," Versteeg said. "I believe that they are usually spotted about the big top." His diction here was a dead giveaway, a hint.
Usually
the trucks were positioned with their engines turning in case of a fire; today, for some unknown reason, they weren't—a charge Deacon Blanchfield would have to respond to later.

Asked about the top itself, Versteeg answered honestly: "In winter quarters the canvas was treated with a solution of paraffin and gasoline and brushed on with brooms. This was done by the canvas department, and I saw them doing this work."

Again, it was another department's problem; his had performed honorably. As for exit signs, he didn't remember seeing any. The ushers and seatmen? He couldn't say to the best of his knowledge whether they had been at their posts or not. But his lights were fine, all the plugs and switches checked before and after the fire. The lights were on inside the tent, and the big diesels were running outside, but he'd never detected any sparks from any of his machines.

Versteeg's confirmation of the top's waterproofing immediately added several names to the list of witnesses, including canvas boss Leonard Aylesworth and James Haley. Deacon Blanchfield made it because of the trucks. Detectives armed with John Doe subpoenas spread out over the grounds.

Publicly, Herbert DuVal was telling the press the circus had used nothing combustible, but the papers also mentioned that Hartford fire investigators were looking into a report that the top had been treated with inflammable weatherproofing. Ringling officials denied this, saying that the material had been treated by its manufacturer, not to make it fireproof but fire resistant.

Outside, the blank gravestones threw long shadows in the grass. The lights of the midway clicked on. As the sky colored, the photographer learned that he had to leave. The
Times
needed him to cover something else. A police captain took over, quickly going around the exterior, making sure he got it all before dark.

The police found Leonard Aylesworth, but when they checked the of-

fice wagon, James Haley was gone. They combed the grounds and still couldn't turn him up. A pair of detectives with a subpoena hopped in their car and drove downtown to the Bond Hotel. They asked at the desk, official business.

Oh, the clerk said, I'm afraid the gentleman just left.

In the evening, sun is going down

Abdominal scars turn purple as the epidermis burns. A medical examiner from Boston who'd worked on the Cocoanut Grove dead was taking William Menser to school. Look close, and even through the black crust you could tell if a woman had had a caesarean section, a man an appendectomy. Here was a ruptured navel, there a breast removed. The body was a map, a diary, a sign.

Leaning over the rows, parents suddenly realized how intimately they

knew their children's teeth—the missing incisors, the six-year molars just coming in. What a relief it was to see this girl had a gap, this one a canine that overlapped. It meant they could keep looking, that they might not find her here.

Soldiers moved the bodies who'd been identified to the checkout desk, past Thomas Barber and Ed Lowe, helpless as an honor guard. Here Dr. Weissenborn or Onderdonk removed all personal effects—some of which provided the only means of identification—and boxed them for the coroner to hand over to the next of kin. Clerks from the War Council kept a record, tapping at their Underwoods.

The phones upstairs had processed over three thousand calls, some from as far away as Iowa and Indiana—an oddity for the time, long distance being a luxury few used. Outside, the crowd on Capitol hadn't dwindled, stood vigilant as if they too awaited news. The whole city did.

A policeman led the civilian with the child's leg in a bag up the stairs and over to Dr. Weissenborn, who added it to the parts he'd already collected. Later, another officer also delivered a sack of fragments. In they went. Officially, the mix was named Unidentified #1. No one looked at it.

A sergeant who'd helped sort the effects salvaged from the grounds identified his niece and grandniece. The niece's husband had been a dentist but was now an army captain serving in the South Pacific. The girl had been their only child. The Red Cross would have to tell him.

A Hartford man worked downtown for the state health department. His younger brother and sister had gone to the circus on free passes given to their father. When their father heard of the fire, he was stricken.

"I kept calling home," the man remembered, "only to be told that they hadn't returned yet."

He drove to the armory and went through the boys' section, ultimately discovering his brother. He tried the girls over and over, lifting sheets, staring at the planes of faces. His sister, only thirteen, had been tall for her age. She was in with the young women. The man identified her by their mother's Hartford High class ring.

But these IDs were exceptions. By 9:30, when Mayor Mortensen returned to the drill floor, only twenty-five bodies had been identified.

Dentists had begun to accompany parents up the stairs. Dr. Butler directed them to the most likely cots.