The Circus Fire (40 page)

It was true. The company had time sheets to prove Welch had been at the wheel July 6th. After all of their legwork, the state's best suspect turned out to be a dead end.

Labor Day, more than forty patients still lingered on the wards, none of them critical. Dr. Burgdorf at the Board of Health released his final figures: 487 people had been injured, but only 140 required hospitalization. (In the future, the number of injured would commonly be quoted as 655— the incorrect total of the dead included—and sometimes as high as 1,000.) Burgdorf broke down the dead statistically. Of the 167, just 10 were men between the ages of fifteen and sixty. The small number was not due to their ability to escape more easily, but to the fact that, as the show was a matinee, most of them were at work.

As school started, teachers made up their seating charts, the gaps from last year apparent. In Wethersfield, one had to explain to her puzzled first-

graders: "Judy's not coming back to school again." Thomas Barber and Ed Lowe were relying on some teacher out there noticing an empty seat and letting them know. But none did.

For one girl, school became a stage to tell her story of the fire and show off her scar. Don Cook took the opposite tack, withdrawing from his playmates, not talking about what happened.

In the North End, students traditionally went from Brackett to Northeast and then to Weaver High. Everyone knew someone who'd been in the fire. In gym, burns were a common sight, unremarked upon, understood.

One girl's family saw a father-and-daughter team of dentists. The father took care of the parents, his daughter the children. She kept an album with pictures of all of her patients. The children would go downtown to J. J. Newberry and use the photo stall, smiling hard; the daughter picked the best one of the strip. After the fire, these dentists helped identify the dead by their charts. In the album, the daughter drew a border around their pictures and a tasteful notation giving their age. "It was sad to see those smiling faces," the girl recalled, "and also to realize it could have been me too."

A tutor schooled the children left in Municipal Hospital, but the age difference between the youngest and oldest was so broad that the job was impossible. The kids gave her a hard time. No one did their homework; they were too busy getting better.

Once the doctors got Donald Gale's hands started, they grafted skin from his legs onto his arms. When the new skin took, it welted and raised up, turned fibrous and tough, shrinking so it tugged at the untouched skin. The doctors bombarded the patches with X-rays, smoothed lanolin on the grafts to soften them, and still the skin cracked and bled, pulled drum-tight.

Both Mrs. Smiths went home in September. Between grafts, Barbara Smith read a lot—the whole series featuring nurse Cherry Ames. Her classmates from St. John's sent cards and letters; her pastor sent a big doll; people she didn't even know sent fudge.

Elliott Smith had established a bond with his nurse, Becky Beckshaw. "She was my guardian angel, she could get me to do things that the others couldn't. She just had that knack of cajoling a child to eat, to take the shots and drink the potions."

His father played a game with him. Elliott closed his eyes and Mr. Smith rolled his wheelchair through the winding hallways, into and off elevators, to some far corner of the hospital. Then Elliott had to guide them back to his room.

The doctors splinted Donald Gale's hands to flat paddles, wiring his fingers to evenly spaced brads so they'd remain separate. Donald learned to use his feet. His father dropped coins on the floor; Donald could keep everything he picked up. Soon he could manipulate a wheelchair; Municipal still had the old-fashioned kind with the big wheels in the front. He and Elliott Smith staged races in the hallways, both of them pushing the spokes with their feet. Occasionally a door unexpectedly swung open in their path and they crashed, sending a nurse's tray clattering, both of them tearing out of there.

The staff let them roam around the other departments. Donald Gale's favorite place to hide was the lab downstairs, watching the old men play cards. The elevator operator let him work the switch. He went up to the polio ward and visited.

Elliott, Donald, Barbara, Mary Kay and Patty Murphy formed a core. Together they made it through the painful Friday sessions and choked down the Amigen and hid from mean Mrs. Amari. They played a game in which they lowered the shade and turned the lights out in the room; one person sat on the bed while the others tried to creep up on them in the dark. The person on the bed threw things—pillows, wadded paper towels. Donald once whipped a blackboard eraser and hit Mary Kay square on a graft and tore the skin. The doctors threatened to suspend the game entirely, and didn't only after the children promised to use softer objects.

The mayor visited, and people from the National Red Cross. They had assemblies in the cafeteria—a clown act, a three-piece band. The nurses took them out on the roof overlooking Keney Park and let them color.

Mostly it was boring. Elliott and Donald couldn't use their hands, so cards and board games were out. They even needed help reading. Donald's father came every day and read Edgar Rice Burroughs to him, slogging through the entire Tarzan series. Like William Dineen, he brought a daily treat—milkshakes. When Donald got sick of them, he switched to sundaes, until Donald got sick of them too. It was no fun being in the hospital, but then, as his hands slowly healed and he progressed through his exercises—

squeezing rubber balls, touching his thumb to his pinkie, his index finger, his middle finger—he began to worry about what it would be like on the outside.

Like Jerry LeVasseur at Hartford, they'd been bedridden so long they had to learn how to walk again, and they hadn't been around other children for months. Their parents and the staff couldn't help but pamper them. The world, they feared, would not be as kind.

The circus had discovered much the same thing. Chicago had been a disaster, with rainouts and skimpy crowds. One night show under threatening skies drew only fourteen hundred to massive Soldier Field. During a matinee, a veteran clown had finished the walkaround with his fox terrier—the dog jumped through a door in the front of the clown's barrel-like costume, then leapt out the rear—and was walking to the backyard when he dropped dead of a heart attack. The doctor tried to revive him, but there was nothing he could do. High on their 135-foot platform, fliers Victoria and Torrence watched the scene below, then answered their cue.

Haley felt it was hopeless. The heat didn't quit; in Toledo it was over a hundred. They were losing money on a daily basis. They'd gone out without enough lead time for their publicity, so there were no advance sales, no guarantees. It was his opinion they should fold up and go home.

The rest of the Midwest was better, as temperatures cooled, as was Texas. Karl Wallenda was upbeat: "The awful fire has called up in all of us the spirit of the circus trouper." Originally they'd planned on staying out until November, but the front office, heeding Haley, decided not to do the deep South. Citing the heavy college football schedule, they canceled their last three weeks, finishing in the rain and mud at New Orleans's Pelican Stadium on October 8th. For the whole open air tour, the show managed to turn a profit of just $100,000.

On the legal front, Rogin, Schatz and Weinstein cobbled together a draft of an arbitration agreement for claimants to sign. A panel of hand-picked arbitrators would set the amount of the awards, the receiver then paying the claimants. Survivors would have until July 6, 1945, to file. If the lawyers could produce one hundred signatures from claimants involved in death cases, the court would enforce the agreement. Rogin himself vowed not to accept a penny until all claimants were paid in full—a position he would come to rue.

Mayor Mortensen's board of inquiry reported their findings in November. There was practically no communication between different city departments, it said. While critical of the manner in which its government operated, the report—mostly by omission—implicitly absolved the city itself of any true wrongdoing. The board recommended setting up a coordinating authority between all departments and adopting a standard safety and health code then under preparation in Washington. For the short term, it urged that the building, police and fire departments adopt stopgap measures concerning temporary public structures.

For Thanksgiving, Elliott Smith's doctors let him go home. Just overnight; the next day he'd have to come back. After being in a huge institution for so long, he found his house tiny and confining, the rooms airless, the ceilings lowering over him. He went out in the backyard and walked around by himself, kicking through the leaves. At supper the family said a prayer.

The next week, police supervised workmen as they removed the ruins from the circus lot. All that fall, cops had stood on guard night after frosty night, protecting the grounds from ghoulish souvenir hunters. Days ago Chief Hallissey had pulled those officers back to first shift. Now they watched for any stray effects or human remains. "Nothing of any note was found."

At the end of the day, the workmen piled all the loose wood in a bonfire. A flame rose up and gave color to the gray light. They stood around it with their gloves off, warming their hands, watching the sparks corkscrew into the winter sky.

Christmas Eve, all the Municipal children had gone home except Donald Gale and Patty Murphy. Around the city, parents who'd lost sons and daughters prepared to celebrate the day.

At Northwood Cemetery, Thomas Barber and Ed Lowe laid a bouquet of flowers at the grave of 1565, both of them squatting on their haunches by the numbered stake. If it had been their daughter, they would have wanted someone to remember her. They were surprised they were the only ones there.

1945

Once the press got ahold of Barber and Lowe's visit to Northwood, the story shot across the wires. Interest in the case revived. Papers across the country published not only the morgue picture but artists' sketches of an idealized, living 1565. Leads poured into Hartford, and Barber and Lowe chased them down. Not one panned out.

People wrote to them with baroque theories. Her mother was killed in the fire—at precisely the same time her father died fighting in Europe. She was the illegitimate daughter of some prominent family. She was actually a midget. It was all right; her face was out there now. Surely someone would come forward.

In mid-January, the city passed all the stopgap legislation recommended by the mayor's panel. Days later, Commissioner Hickey finalized his official report. Like Mortensen's board, he found the coordination between departments deplorable, but as state fire marshal he also concentrated on the origin of the fire and the charges pending against the six show folks.

He set the stage, noting the grass fires and lack of inspection, then repeated in full the officer's tale of the man informing him that "that dirty son of a bitch just threw a cigarette butt." Beyond the obvious problems of the inflammable canvas and the animal chutes, Hickey blamed the accused individually for contributing to the circumstances that led to the catastrophe. Blanchfield's drivers were untrained and unprepared. Versteeg never distributed the extinguishers. Aylesworth noticed them missing but did nothing, then the next day took off for Springfield, leaving no one in charge. Smith knew and approved of Aylesworth leaving. Caley and Cook abandoned their posts.

As for the origin, Hickey quoted one usher as if he were a forensic expert: "I couldn't see what caused it; the only logical thing would have been a cigarette or throwing the match down without putting it out. A cigarette would have smoked for a while, but this came all of a sudden and it evi-

dently was a match." He cited the Portland and Providence fires, saying there had been a dozen pinhole fires so far that season. He could find no evidence of arson and no plausible suspects after the bus driver Welch. "All information reported from various sources relevant to this inquiry, concerning discharged and/or disgruntled circus employees, was fully investigated with the assistance of local and state police officers within and beyond the borders of Connecticut."

Therefore, Hickey concluded: "I find this fire originated on the ground in the southwest end of the main tent back of the blue bleachers about fifty feet south of the main entrance and was so caused by the carelessness of an unidentified smoker and patron who threw a lighted cigarette to the ground from the blue bleachers stand." He backed this up with photographic evidence—shots of the jacks behind the men's room. "It indicates this ground fire at the point described above burned the immediate grass area, the wooden supports for the blue bleachers structure, the sidewall canvas upward, then the tent top."

Hickey felt satisfied that the fire did not start in the men's room, though he never explained his position. Likewise, he quoted but then ignored testimony like the usher's (and a New York fire chief's) that favored a lit match over a smoldering cigarette.

The results of Healy's inquest were nearly identical, except the coroner named a different seatman and not John Cook derelict in his duties. He also found that Blanchfield allowed his wagons to block the exits.