The Circus Fire (31 page)

The AP reported that a few hard-hearted residents around the grounds charged a dollar a phone call, one tenant clearing $200. Though many of the women had lost their pocketbooks, the chiselers were adamant—no cash, no call.

Flags across the city flew at half-mast. Survivors waking up at home

were so bruised they had trouble walking. One woman couldn't lift her arms to button her dress; her son had to help her.

In West Simsbury, neighbors feared one family had been killed in the fire. They hadn't come home overnight; their dog was tied up outside and barking.

As morning papers hit stands and stoops across the country, inquiries concerning relatives from servicemen stationed as far away as New Mexico poured into the Red Cross. It was also the duty of the Greater Hartford Chapter to inform ten men overseas that relatives had died or been injured in the fire. That number would grow.

At Municipal, day shift was still cleaning up from last night. A new roster of injured and dead listed both an Agnes Morris (dead) and an Agnes Norris (injured). At Hartford Hospital, the most seriously burned patients woke up in the bright first-floor ward of the new South Building, its windows overlooking the hospital grounds and Retreat Avenue. Some had their faces bandaged, some their extremities, a few their whole bodies. None would be ambulatory for weeks; many couldn't use their hands. The majority were either children or grandparents. The staff assumed—not quite rightly—that the more able-bodied had died helping them out. Visiting hours for non-circus fire patients were summarily canceled.

It was going to be another scorcher. The temperature was creeping toward seventy as the crowd gathered outside the armory. The line was smaller and less edgy, the panic and confusion of last night cooled to a stolid resignation. The found children of the Brown School were all gone, the injured at the hospitals positively identified. Were there any other possibilities?

Some of the searchers from last night had returned. They knew the routine, and knew what was waiting for them upstairs. Others were fresh, late to discover what had happened or filling in for those who'd tried last night. Dorothy Bocek's mother and brother-in-law were there for Stella Marcovicz and Francis. At 8:00 sharp, the grates opened.

The morticians had sprayed again, but the smell was just as bad, and now on top of it the stink of decay: butyric acid and methane gas naturally given off by the bodies. Jennie Heiser and her girls were back to do the typing; Thomas Barber and Ed Lowe stood sentrylike by the checkout desk.

It went faster than last night. With the smaller crowd, the odds were

better. There were more dentists along, and they'd had time to prepare. Ralph and Olive Snelgrove were the first, identified by Dr. Frank Board-man—orphaning their daughter Shirley on her thirteenth birthday.

Stella Marcovicz' husband Frank passed out but recovered. He helped her mother identify her by his mother's signet ring. As for Francis, his aunt Dorothy Bocek said the family claimed the body of what they assumed was a four-year-old boy. "Whether it was him or not we don't know, but they buried him with her."

In Keney Park, a passerby noticed the Epps boys lying together in the brush and went to fetch the authorities. They were fine, just hungry, achy from sleeping on the hard ground. The police took them home, where their aunt Theresa Wells had been out of her mind with worry. William and Richie learned that their mother was in the hospital and that their aunt Maurice and cousin Muriel were dead.

At 386 Barbour, Mrs. Dewey Howrigan looked out her back window to find all three cars from last night still sitting in her yard. She took down the license plates. The Howrigans didn't have a phone, so she couldn't call

back, she'd have to call them somehow.

The lot smelled of ashes. Cageboys had slept on the ground under the menagerie wagons but were up at dawn to water and feed the animals. The elephant men tossed hay to their charges, staked in two lines in Sponzo's meadow. Police ringed the site, keeping the public out yet letting the press in.

Inside the black oval of ash, a United Press reporter turned up pieces of stories: "The woman's blue straw hat with the large flower ornament hardly touched and surrounded by ruins. The child's shoe over in one of the worst burned sections of seats, crushed but not burned. The burned remains of a woman's pocketbook. Police said the owner was on a cot in the Armory, dead."

Bored, one worker tipped over a charred shoe with his toe. Others sat in the shade of the wagons—more than 35 wagons were singed, their Ringling red paint bubbled and blistered. "I found a ten-dollar bill," one man said. "Burnt in half."

Clown Felix Adler scuffed around the site, staring at the blackened planks and chairs and poles as if to convince himself it had really happened.

Scattered about the ground were hard, dirty puddles that had been Coke bottles. Adler made out a perfect circle in the dirt, a coin. He bent over and pinched it up and thumbed the soot off—a Buffalo nickel, turned purple by the heat.

Gawkers filled the front yard, peering past the police lines with morbid curiosity. One woman described the scene as quiet, as if a giant had come along and pressed everything flat.

Hands had circled the animal wagons so none of them faced the wreckage. Inside, the animals were lethargic from the heat, panting as they lay on their sides like dogs. The United Press enlisted them in getting the story across: "The big cats whined like lost kittens." "Gargantua's screams turned into wailing that echoed across the Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Circus grounds where death scarred the ground." "One lion refused to eat. A tiger crouched on the floor of his cage and mewed mournfully." "A roustabout explained the strange quiet of the menagerie which was broken only by the crying sounds. 'The animals just know when death is near,' he said."

Performers took the early bus up from the train yard. They were all worried about their trunks, some of which were burned on the outside, their costumes safe within. Exactly when they were getting back on the road was the hot topic.

Not long, they thought. In Sarasota, retired hands were reopening the dosed-up barns and buildings of the winter quarters, sweeping out the per-

manent animal cages in anticipation of the show's return. The old-timers remembered other fires and blowdowns and train wrecks, even waging pitched battles with townsfolk, but none of those tragedies approached this one.

At the
Times,
the man who usually wrote the obituaries was in his eighties. Today the sheer volume overwhelmed him, and a cub drew the assignment. Aside from the spelling, which had to be perfect and often wasn't, the funerals were simple. The city was segregated into tribes by mortuaries. All the Irish were at O'Brien's, Farley's or Molloy's, all the Jews at Weinstein's, all the Italians at Laraia-Sagarino's, all the Poles at Talarski's. The phone rang and rang. The difficult thing was the number of children. One undertaker called and said, "I have a beautiful little girl for you."

In Bristol, a sixteen-year-old war worker read the morning paper and found out that she was dead. Her brother had somehow identified her at the morgue, checking the body out to a local undertaker. The girl called the Bristol Police and explained she'd attended the Wednesday night show. Yesterday she'd put in a regular shift at the ordnance plant. Everything checked, so the funeral home had to rush the body back to the armory and set it on a cot again.

In the women's section, Ludger LeVasseur, Jerry's father, identified his wife Marion. He managed a First National grocery store; she'd been a nurse. He needed to tell her parents. After he gave his information at the checkout desk, he headed for Providence by car. How he would tell Jerry he didn't know. He was still on the critical list; when he was strong enough the doctors wanted to cut the loose skin from his arms.

Joseph Budrick was the projectionist at the Eastwood Theater, Frank Locke his assistant. The two East Hartford men had married sisters and lived right down Hill Street from each other. Now they came to the armory together to claim them, as well as their children. Joseph Budrick had already lost his daughter Edith; she'd died overnight at Municipal. He was looking for his wife Edith and seven-year-old Joseph. Frank Locke's son Lawrence was the sole member of the party to escape. His wife Viola and six-year-old Elaine were still missing. In quick succession, with the aid of a dentist, the two men found all but Mrs. Budrick.

She should have been easy to identify; her platinum wedding ring bore their initials and the date of their marriage. Mr. Budrick checked all

the cots in the women's section—once, twice, three times—until he was satisfied she wasn't there. Then where was she?

A detective compiling the official list of the dead for the city police wrote on his original: "Albert Toth previously reported dead on page 11 at Municipal Hospital is alive." The list is creased (still, after fifty-five years), as if he had it folded in half in one hand as he moved through the rows. Another handwritten note from Friday the 7th reads: "11:50 A.M. 18 children, 4 male adults, 1 baby, 21 female adults" (this just crossed off from 22). On the back of the next page, he scratched: "Elwyn Wakeman suspects wife here—Virginia Wakeman—not able to identify until after 6 P.M."

Blocks away, Commissioner Hickey interrupted his interrogation of six ushers to send a trooper down to Davis Field in Waterford. The World of Mirth carnival was playing there under tents treated with the same paraffin and gas waterproofing. Hickey wanted them shut down.

As undertakers drove one boy's body back to Lakeville, his mother was giving birth at Canaan Hospital to what would have been his second brother. The other brother had also been born on July 7th. The mother wondered how they would ever celebrate the day again. Her father was failing fast at Municipal Hospital; her mother was still missing.

In the middle of the afternoon an older woman died at Municipal. A maiden aunt, she was the third and last of her party to die. A native of Thomaston, for years she'd worked at Seth Thomas Clocks and been a communicant of St. Thomas's Church. She would be buried in St. Thomas's Cemetery a day after the feast of St. Thomas More.

Friday was hotter than Thursday. At 3:30 the temperature peaked at ninety-two degrees. Two grass fires broke out in Bristol. At Municipal, fans blew hats off nurses turning corners, lifting them on their bobby pins like sails. At Hartford the stench of the burned was so overpowering the Airwick Company donated hundreds of bottles of their liquid industrial deodorizers to be set out all over the wards and ORs.

South Building 1 was the new home of a brother and sister transferred last night from Municipal. The children were already familiar with a number of hospitals. In April, while riding the school bus, the boy opened the rear door and fell out, landing on his head; he spent most of May in the hospital with a fractured skull. In June the children were riding in a car with their father when they were involved in an accident. The father suf-

fered a concussion, the girl a leg injury and severe lacerations, and the boy just some bad bruises. The family had been hoping July would be an easier month.

In a way, it was. Both children were alive, and neither was burned half as badly as Donald Gale or Barbara Smith at Municipal. There, nurse's aides changed the ice in Elliott Smith's oxygen tent, their hands beet red, freezing. Bluebirds cruised the rooms with trays of juice and Jell-O for their patients.

Word of the fire intrigued the nation, so newsreel crews showed up at the lot or outside the armory or on the lawns of the hospitals, shooting footage. Metro News of the Day and Paramount scooped the competition, buying fifty feet of 8mm film of the fire taken by a man from Bristol.

At city police headquarters, survivors came by to claim their wallets and glasses and compacts. One mother had shoved a bag of circus peanuts in her handbag as she ran from the fire; now her son cracked the shells and gobbled up the nuts. Some came looking for lost objects that would never be found: money, a dental bridge, a thermos of milk brought along for a toddler.

On Barbour Street, Mrs. Howrigan returned from her errands to find the Buick gone. The owner would certainly miss the blanket and umbrella she'd taken for safekeeping. She decided to call the police and let them know about the Chevys. It had been more than twenty-four hours.

Police succeeded in tracking down the missing West Simsbury family. Relatives thought they might have gone to New York to visit friends. A call located the family, all of them safe. For the sake of the neighbors, the relatives brought the dog in.

The
Times
editorial that afternoon weighed in with their take on the fire's origin: "A moment of carelessness, a cigarette butt tossed aside, and someone has on his soul and conscience today the death of at least 139 persons, largely innocent children." The paper announced the formation of a Circus Fire Victims Fund to help the families of the injured and the dead. They chipped in $500 to start. Mayor Mortensen, acting as honorary chair, gave Si00, the circus employees $445.