Authors: Stewart O'Nan
Opening day was unremarkable, the performances sharp, the weather mercifully clear. The lot had a view of the harbor, two stone jetties tipped with white lighthouses reaching into blue, blue Lake Erie. The tent was air-conditioned, another new-fangled idea of John Ringling North's. After the withering heat of the grounds and the stifling humidity of the menagerie tent with its ripe zebras and camels and elephants, the matinee customers appreciated it. That night the crowd was larger, swelled by families and workers finished with day shift.
The morning of Tuesday the 4th, the dew and the cool fog burned off and the day promised to be sunny. Kids who showed up early enough were hired for the price of a pass to scrounge around under the bleachers and retrieve last night's empty Coke bottles. The lot was too small for the cookhouse, so it was across the street from the big top. As the staff fried pork chops and bacon and eggs and toast for breakfast, cageboys bumped wheelbarrows piled with chunks of horsemeat between the big cats' wagons. The tethered camels and zebras tucked into piles of fresh hay. It was all clockwork, and after Pittsburgh, welcome.
Around 11:30 A.M. the flag on the cookhouse went up for lunch, and the hands left their charges grazing away. The first call for the sideshow was noon. The kid show, it was called, with the Doll Family of Tinytown, Percy Pape the Living Skeleton, and Dr. Mayfield the Fire Proof Man, among others. Pretty soon the towners would roll in, the midway would fill up, and the talkers would have to step out on the bally platform and turn the tip—convince the crowd to line up at the ticket boxes and fork over cold cash to see Mo-Lay the comedy juggler and Egan Twist the Rubber-Armed Man and Miss Patricia the hot-neon-tube swallower. A clutch of spielers and performers were waiting for their lunch orders when someone ran through the doorway and shouted that the menagerie was on fire.
They all ran.
What happened happened fast. As they dashed across the street to the
midway, they could see black smoke pouring up and flames racing along the peaks of the menagerie top. Inside, the elephants were staked to the ground front and back with iron chains. They were trumpeting.
Two men ducked into the canvas marquee and began tearing the steel railings in front of the ticket booths out of the ground. The first came easily. As they tugged at the second one, a giraffe bounded past them and galloped across the lot.
Hands broke out water buckets and fire extinguishers, but the breeze from the lake fed the flames. Scraps of canvas floated free, rose like balloons on the superheated air. Luckily the wind was blowing from the northeast and pushed the fire away from the adjacent big top. Only the poleless gorilla top, home of Mr. and Mrs. Gargantua, separated the two large tents. Their handlers immediately cut the ropes, dropping the untouched canvas over their cages. A circus water truck arrived with a short section of hose and wet the canvas down, allowing a tractor to come in and haul the Gargantuas' wagons off, their air conditioners still humming.
Inside, flaming pieces of the tent dropped into the straw and hay. It went up like dry brush. Cageboys untethered their animals and led them out, then went back for more, hunched over from the blaze above. Big John Sabo, the menagerie super, made three trips before the heat drove him out. One zebra was running around wild, turning circles in the smoke; it shot out of the main entrance and zigzagged over to the grade by the railroad tracks where a number of hands closed in and wrestled it to the ground. An ostrich sprinted out, on fire; it took three men to tackle it and beat out the flames.
The elephants still hadn't budged and wouldn't until the boss of the bull men, Walter McClain, arrived. McClain was a giant of a man with an even greater reputation as a trainer. He knew his bulls would wait for him, so he led his men in even as the roof above them was coming apart. The men scampered around to the rear stakes and unlinked the beasts' shackles. At McClain's command the elephants reached down with their trunks and yanked their front stakes out of the ground. Another word from him and they marched out in procession, trunk to tail. Some were horribly burned, their flesh hanging in strips, peeled off like rind, but they were out.
Three they couldn't reach. One, Ringling Rosie, they freed from her chains, but she was spooked and refused to leave the burning tent. The heat
was down on them now, pushing them out. McClain stayed as long as he could (the right side of his face would be burned pink from his hairline to his collar), then ran. From outside, witnesses watched Ringling Rosie stomping back and forth as the flames enveloped her.
Likewise, the camels refused to move, balked at any effort to save them. They folded themselves down in their straw and the fire broke over them. The canvas was coming down, pieces burning in the dirt. In their cage wagons, the big cats roasted in their bedding, unable to escape.
The fire was mostly smoke now, the poles and wire rigging of the top charred and bare, yet still standing. The top was gone, consumed like tissue paper, nothing but scraps left. It had only been a few minutes.
The circus water trucks and the first Cleveland engine company to arrive played streams of water on Ringling Rosie. As police cordons held back the crowds, workingmen battled the fires inside the cages. Steam poured off of the charred wood. Inside, lions and tigers and pumas squirmed in the cinders, their coats smoking. Some lay still. The cageboys sobbed.
Firemen quenched what was left of the fire—hay and smoldering
rope—while John Sabo and show veterinarian J. Y. Henderson took inventory. Two giraffes had been incinerated in their chain-link partition; how the third had escaped no one could figure out, but it was safe, just bruised and scratched from falling hard as workers corralled it. Another unlikely survivor was Betty Lou, the pygmy hippo; she'd saved her own life by diving into her bathing tank and staying submerged until a tractor driver snaked her wagon out of danger.
Few others were so lucky. Ringling Rosie stood among the bodies strewn through the charred mud and puddles of black water, pink bleeding patches where her skin had been stripped off. Dr. Henderson was hoping to spray her with an unguent called Foille, a new medication invented for industrial burns. When Walter McClain ordered his men to double-chain her for the treatment, she went berserk, and afraid she might break loose, a city detective had to shoot her between the eyes with his .45. The pistol wasn't enough gun. The shot knocked her down but she was still breathing. Dr. Henderson had to ask a police ballistics expert to use his submachine gun on her.
The elephant line stood in the street, quietly receiving treatment. They were burned mostly on their heads and trunks, their thin ears crisped. Trainers daubed Foille on their raw flesh with paintbrushes.
The three other elephants McClain's men couldn't get to were hurting. Later that afternoon another policeman put down Little Rosy, who was just too badly burned.
The camels were the worst, and the big cats. Police and Coast Guardsmen brought over high-powered rifles and ammunition from a nearby armory. One camel handler begged them not to shoot his animals, others cursed them, but it was necessary.
Dr. Henderson went hopefully from cage to cage with his sprayer of Foille. The cats looked up at him, licking their burned paws, wisps of smoke still rising from their fur. The doctor asked a detective for his pistol. The Coast Guardsmen were there with their rifles for the larger animals. Together they had to shoot three camels, three lions, and a puma. The thing he would never forget, Dr. Henderson said later, was how, throughout, the animals were completely silent.
The Cleveland menagerie fire was a shock, even more so because it was wartime and the circus was supposed to be a diversion from that larger tragedy, but anyone who knew the circus knew it had a history of disasters.
From the beginning, American circuses seemed prone to fire—perhaps naturally, considering their early performances were lighted by either candles or oil lamps. In 1799, Rickett's Equestrian Circus, widely recognized as the first in America, lost their Philadelphia amphitheater when it burned to the ground.
P. T. Barnum seemed especially susceptible. Fire destroyed his American Museum at Broadway and Ann Street in lower Manhattan in July of 1865. Hoping to douse the floors below, firemen smashed the thick glass of the whale tank; the tactic didn't work, and the whales burned alive. Barnum quickly rebuilt a few blocks away, but in 1868 fire struck again. In 1887 the Barnum & London winter quarters in Bridgeport, Connecticut, burned, killing most of the circus' animals. It suffered another major blaze in 1900, and, though Barnum himself was gone by then, several minor fires
almost yearly through the teens, capped by a $100,000 loss in 1924. In '27, the Combined Shows moved their winter quarters to Sarasota, Florida, ending his strange legacy.
The Ringling Bros, had the reputation of being ridiculously lucky, partly because of their competitors' perception of them as high and mighty, holier than thou. They ran what was known as a Sunday School show, going so far as to ban swearing on the lot. With no rigged midway games or salacious girlie acts, they continued to outgross other less savory outfits, often by promoting their squeaky-clean image. The Ding-a-ling Brothers, cynics called them, the Five Deacons. The first fire of note that struck them was in August of 1901 in Kansas City, Missouri; the sideshow tent burned, but, as their famous luck would have it, no one was hurt.
Barnum & Bailey—before the 1919 merger the sole and original Greatest Show on Earth—was possibly even luckier. In May of 1910, on a Saturday afternoon in Schenectady, New York, their big top caught fire with fifteen thousand souls in attendance. Fred Bradna, the big show's equestrian director at the time of the Cleveland menagerie fire, was about to blow his whistle for the opening procession when he saw a patch of flame
waving above the bleachers. He asked the spectators to please leave their seats in an orderly fashion, and they did.
There was no panic. The fire looked so insignificant that they climbed down the grandstands and bleachers and stood on the track and in the rings, watching as canvasmen climbed up onto the top and tried to cut out the burning section. A fire station directly across the street laid in hose immediately and focused water on the top, but soon it became apparent that they could not easily contain the blaze, and the crowd scurried out the main entrance and the back door and under the sidewalls, all without injury.
Witnesses at a country club overlooking the lot said they saw great masses of flaming canvas float up into the sky, the fire consuming them as they rose, a magician's trick. In minutes the poles were on the ground, though some of the canvas escaped untouched and the stands were saved. No one was hurt. The greatest loss was loss of face; once the fire was out, the crowd besieged the ticket wagons, demanding their money back. The ticket sellers were saved only when drivers hitched teams to the wagons and dragged them off.
The Ringlings' luck struck again in August 1912, in Sterling, Illinois. The big top was set up on a racetrack pasture. At one o'clock ten thousand people were waiting for the doors to open for the matinee when a barn a few blocks away caught fire. Al Ringling noticed the wind lifting burning shingles into the air and ordered the doors closed. As he feared, a brand landed on the roof of the top and the flames jumped up. The tent burned
in minutes. By this time, Fred Bradna had moved to the Ringling Bros., so he was a witness again. Hook men calmly hustled the elephants away, as everyone feared a stampede. Again no one was hurt. The poles and stands needed only sanding and a new coat of paint.
The next morning the
Sterling Daily Standard
reported that the initial cause of the fire was either a spark from an engine or some boys seen smoking cigarettes around the barn. "The rapid destruction of the big tent has caused much speculation," the
Standard
said, "and people who witnessed it go up in flames today are still wondering what made the big tent go so quickly. The truth is the tent was covered with parafine to keep out rain and when the fire started this to melting it also added fuel to the flame and caused the more rapid destruction of the big tent."
The fire itself was a spectacle worthy of a circus. A picture of the burning tent won first prize in a photography contest held by a national magazine.
No other big top burned in the years between 1912 and the Hartford fire
of '44,
so it's not odd that the Sterling fire and the Hartford disaster are often paired in news stories. Both were matinees and both tops were the Ringling Bros. But the show had two other major fires very shortly after Sterling that are less well known.
The first was in Cleveland, this one also by the lakefront lot. In May 1914, forty-three railway cars went up while sitting mostly empty on a siding. The second was in October 1916, when the baggage stock tent burned in Huntsville, Alabama. Forty draft horses were incinerated; forty more had to be killed. According to witnesses, the fire took five minutes.