The Circus Fire (28 page)

Hal Olver, an assistant in the publicity department, said that absolutely no credence was being given to any theory of incendiarism or sabotage. He couldn't know that as he spoke J. Edgar Hoover's FBI was seriously examining that very possibility. After all, it was wartime.

At the armory, Marion and Ted Parsons were concerned with simpler questions. They had Donald stay at the car. James Yee went in with them.

Marion was a powerful woman, sure of herself. She'd taken on her sister-in-law's children without a second thought and loved them as her own.

Edward had come to live with her and Ted before he was a year old. Every day they were apart, Eleanor wrote to her. In many ways she knew the children better than their mother ever could.

The escort took the Parsons straight to 1565, in the front row of the girls' section. Marion knew at a glance that the body was not Eleanor's. 1565's hair was shoulder length; her niece's was cut short. The clothes weren't hers either—a white dress hardly touched by the fire. Eleanor had been wearing a red playsuit. She knew all of Eleanor's clothes, and she didn't have a dress like this. The brown shoes weren't hers either. Closer inspection made it certain: 1565 had all baby teeth; Eleanor had eight permanent teeth, four upper and four lower. No, she was sure this wasn't her.

Ted said no, and the Reverend.

The others were nothing like Eleanor, and they retreated to Marshall Street. Emily Gill was there. They compared notes, agreeing the girl they'd seen wasn't Eleanor. Marion and Ted decided they should take Donald and Reverend Yee back to Southampton. Emily was going to stay the night in the apartment and visit Mildred and Edward in the morning, then keep searching for Eleanor. She said good night to them and watched their car away.

On Broad Street, Governor Baldwin returned to the armory, shocked to find among the dead some of the patients he'd talked to this afternoon.

About now, Mayor Mortensen's office received a call from Salvatore DiMartino. He explained his situation. His wife had died, and he had eight children. He wasn't sure what to do about the funeral. "I have no money," he said. Could the city pay the expenses?

The mayor promised to do all he could.

Shortly before 11:00, the Brown School sent its last child home with its parents. They'd taken 113 names of missing persons, including Billy Dineen and Muriel and Maurice Goff. The officer in charge turned the list over to the night desk and checked the duty roster. His shift wasn't over yet.

At Municipal, graveyard came on, with extra nurses and nurse's aides. One nurse went home and had bad nightmares. She couldn't get the smell out of her uniform or her hair.

On Barbour Street, two doors north of the lot, Mrs. Dewey Howrigan noticed there were still three cars parked in her backyard. She went out to investigate. The air smelled of wet ashes and fresh hay and elephant dung.

It was still hot, the air thick. Nose in against the garden rested two Chevys, one a sedan, one a Suburban; on the far side, in the el that abutted the circus lot, sat a black Buick backed up to the trees. She peered through the Buick's windows and saw a blanket and an umbrella on the backseat. The door was open; she decided to take them into the house for safekeeping.

A block north, in Keney Park, William Epps slept on the soft ground beside his brother Richie. No blanket, no night-light. The boys weren't scared though. It was a warm night, and the stars were out.

Bad news

Of Hartford's two main dailies, the
Courant
was the paper of record. Continuously in print since 1764, it was known as "The Old Gray Lady of State Street" for its Brahminic independence, and was often so thorough as to be unreadable. The
Times
had a leaner, grittier style befitting its earthier subjects, and powerful allies in the state's Democratic party. Both were solid big-city newspapers, and both were totally overwhelmed by the circus fire.

At no time in American history was the delivery of accurate news more important than during World War II. Censorship and self-censorship were issues that concerned not just journalists but average citizens. To impress this on war workers, both papers ran little fillers at the bottom of their columns. "Don't be a rumor-monger," the
Times
reminded. "Watch your speech in public," the
Courant
advised. The same rules applied to their writers. Hearsay and scuttlebutt were useless. Even eyewitnesses were suspect; the era of firsthand reporting—sometimes live—had begun, and stories had to be both right and on time, often an impossible combination.

The
Times,
being an afternoon paper, had a much harder job with the fire than the
Courant.
Its initial reports were sketchy at best, and wrong about some very important points. No show people died in the fire, yet for several hours the AP wire ran the subhead: Three Performers Killed. Forty years later, while researching a radio documentary on the tragedy, a local radio journalist spoke with the reporter responsible for the gaffe. The man had seen three bodies whose lips were grossly oversized, their cheeks bright red, and had just assumed. An honest mistake, compounded by later writ-

ers who gussied up the bare facts with sentences like "Three performers were carried out dead, the bright makeup on their faces darkened by smoke."

Some reporters opened the show with a grand parade or spec complete with horses and elephants; others had Alfred Court performing with his big cats in the center ring (he was in his room at the Bond Hotel at the time). One journalist said several ringmasters and ushers had tried to lead the crowd in a sing-along of "Old Black Joe" to calm them. The Wallendas, it was written, had performed seven minutes of their twenty-minute act.

Not one but two witnesses recalled a member of the Wallendas falling to the ground: "The most awesome sight was seeing the guy jump from the trapeze. And when he landed on the ground—there was no net—one leg was askew at a strange angle in front of him and one ankle was behind him. I watched him all the way down. He was screaming for help." And later, a different man: "While we were waiting on the street, a dump truck went by with the high-wire person in it. He was lying flat, like a sack of grain." Both episodes were apocryphal; of the five, only Helen was hurt, stepped on in the rush for the exits.

The gravest falsehoods, predictably, came when discussing the most serious issues. "Almost all of the dead were believed to have died in the panic of suffocation, of shock induced by acute fright, and of being knocked down and stomped under the feet of thousands stampeding for the exits." (No. At least one hundred showed no crush injuries, none died of asphyxiation, and death by shock was just wild conjecture.) Many papers said the majority of the dead were children; the
Waterbury American
went so far as to say two-thirds. For years, papers have reprinted these figures as if they were true. They weren't. Of the 167 victims, only
67
were children below the age of fifteen.

Yet in a way the need for both falsehoods is understandable. In their gross overstatements, they deliver two important truths; they tell the reader who wasn't there two very important things. First, there was no way you could imagine the panic inside of that tent. And second, a hell of a lot of kids died.

The prose that reporters chose to work with was melodramatic and overheated—possibly, again, because they felt there was no way to overemphasize the actual happenings. A sampling: "The flames shot up to the top

like slivers of lightning." "Then screams and moans and frenzied shouts laden with lunacy induced by panic burst upward like an explosion." "The band's tunes were drowned out by the screaming throng." "Afterward, they couldn't find a piece of canvas more than three inches square." "It was like looking at a giant skeleton stripped of all flesh."

One writer whose articles for United Press bear little resemblance to actual events had Gargantua and M'Toto pathetically in tears in their air-conditioned cages.

And there were rumors and tall tales galore that never made the paper, or did so only years later. They became part of the lore of the circus fire, unverifiable, strange. The one most widely reported as being true was that there was an infant who died in the fire and then went unidentified and was cremated in the incinerator of Hartford Hospital. The Incinerated Baby. In reality, that was the fate of Unidentified #1, the grab bag of parts Dr. Weissenborn didn't show to anyone checking at the armory. Officials made the mistake of including #1 in the initial tally of the dead, as if the parts constituted one whole person. They didn't, so the number of 168 (eerily the same as the Oklahoma City bombing) is wrong. The real number of people who died in the circus fire is 167.

Another famous story is that of the fake doctor at Municipal Hospital. In the commotion an unbalanced woman who'd always wanted to be a doctor volunteered at Municipal, bringing a little black bag with her. No one questioned her skills. She set up shop in a hallway, setting broken limbs. Later, after she'd disappeared, nurses discovered her amateur handiwork. The people she'd worked on had to have their arms and legs amputated. Perhaps this is a sideways and sexist reading of the plaster cast fiasco, the results of which could have been just as dire.

Despite all the schlock and misinformation, and the twenty-seven hundred people reported missing in the first twenty-four hours after the fire, the papers and state officials combined to provide near flawless casualty lists. They were a comfort to the public, a quick way of comprehending what had happened. Readers were used to them from war coverage. Here were the dead, the wounded, the internees, the missing. Along with the pictures of the circus fire dead ran posed portraits of local boys killed in service—"PFC J. A. Longo, 20, Killed in France."

Less accurate and comforting were the answers given by Ringling ex-

ecutives in Sarasota concerning the big top. The circus now claimed the tent had been treated to resist fire, but, being canvas, could not be made fireproof. Robert Ringling, reached in Evanston, Illinois, said: "Every test we put that through showed that it would resist fire. A fire might endanger some of the equipment but would never endanger human life."

Later the circus would fall back to a position that maintained they had tried to find fireproofing chemicals for some time but that with the war the army had priority.

Even this didn't wash. Since the Cocoanut Grove, every decoration in city restaurants and nightclubs had to be fireproof. New York City's acting deputy fire chief in charge of places of public assembly said a blowtorch test was applied to all canvas trappings before they were permitted to be used in public gatherings. The fire department had sanctioned several types of chemicals to be sprayed on canvas, and tested the treated material at least four times a year with four hundred degrees of heat from a blowtorch to prove it remained fireproof.

In addition, the Clyde Beatty and Russell Bros. Circus, playing in Portland, Oregon, advertised that all their tents were fireproof. They hauled hundreds of gallons of flameproofing in their wagons, spraying their canvas every four weeks in case the chemicals wore off during setup and tear-down. Most of their personnel were former Ringling employees who said the Big Show's claims that they couldn't get priority were spurious.

The argument at this point was legal, and useless after the fact. The dead were dead, the dying were dying. At Municipal and Hartford Hospitals the operating rooms and corridors were still busy—as were the basements and halls of the Weinstein Funeral Home, and Dillon's, and Farley's, and O'Brien's.

As Barbour Street shut down for the night, Mayor Mortensen made his last public announcement of the day. He let the criminals of the city know that he'd asked Deputy Chief Godfrey to assign a dozen policemen to watch cars in parking lots and on the street near the site of the fire. He asked that the license plate numbers be taken and the owners identified. He asked that the police guard against the stripping of these automobiles.

Were you in Cleveland?

Commissioner Hickey began his hearing at state police headquarters on Washington Street by interrogating the highest-ranking Ringling official in custody, Vice President James Haley.

To keep the witnesses' testimonies separate, he detailed police to the hallway to stand guard over Smith, Aylesworth, Blanchfield, Versteeg, Brice, and the ushers and seatmen who'd responded to their summonses until Hickey called for them. Of the seven accused, only head usher John Carson was missing.

Inside, Haley faced not just Hickey but State's Attorney Alcorn and Prosecutor Leikind.

Commissioner Hickey did the questioning. The first fact he ascertained was that Aylesworth was responsible for treating and maintaining the canvas. He verified that John Carson assigned the ushers to their respective sections, though Haley couldn't say if he kept a record of it. Haley estimated the capacity of the top as approximately nine to ten thousand— six thousand in the grandstands and three to four thousand on the blues— but as Hickey asked him to describe the precise layout of the lettered sections, Haley turned vague. He wasn't familiar with their firefighting equipment; Smith would know that. And while he believed their public liability insurance was spread among several carriers, he himself couldn't name them; his secretary could. There were nine exits, though, he was certain of that.