Authors: Stewart O'Nan
The
Times
Wall Street edition came out, promising "Complete Stocks." The new headline read: CIRCUS FIRE KILLS SCORES. "An indeterminate number of persons were killed," the story began. It quoted a county detective estimating the number of dead as "at least 100," and said, "the State Police announced an hour after the disaster that the State Armory would be opened as an emergency hospital, because the scope of the disaster was beyond the capacity of local hospitals." Also that: "In the pandemonium, the crowd surged forward against police lines as each body was carried out, vainly trying to learn the victim's identity." And still no list.
Afraid their relatives would worry, troupers gave more than seventy telegrams to a local member of the Circus Fans of America to take to the Hartford Western Union office for them.
At police headquarters, officers gathered the missing children on the main floor, then led them upstairs to a courtroom. One by one a policewoman took their names, addresses and telephone numbers. Volunteers from the American Legion tried to keep them all amused. Another officer returned from the circus grounds with a carload of mothers hoping to find their children, which they did, tearfully.
At the armory the teenager and his boss rolled up in their Brown Thomson ambulance. They had to wait while some other trucks backed up to the west entrance, then got out and unloaded their bodies. The place was crowded with help. Bodies on cots lined the back wall of the cavernous drill shed; another row ran down the center. It smelled like hell.
Done, they hopped into the truck. "You want to go back?" his boss said.
"No," the teenager said, "I don't."
"I'm glad you said that, because I don't either."
His boss stopped outside a local gin mill by Bushnell Paik. The teenager was underage and didn't want to get him in trouble.
"Come on," his boss said, "you're old enough."
They went in and sat down at the bar. The bartender looked hard at the teenager.
"Give the kid a drink," his boss said. "He needs it."
There were no questions. They had a couple of whiskeys and returned to the store by quitting time. Then they went home.
A G.I. party
At 3:50 police dispatchers sent all available cruisers to the lot. Officers coming in from Barbour Street drove over the hoses, then bottled up on the midway and behind the sideshow top. Headquarters instructed all units to use the dirt road off Hampton Street. They inched through the woods on Sponzo's property, pulling off to the side to let the trucks and ambulances by.
Cops on Tower and Main set the stoplights on caution and did traffic by hand. The luckier survivors squeezed into what buses were left, but many ended up hoofing it, some of them shoeless. One man found a shoe store and bought his wife a pair and the two of them kept on walking.
One girl had gone to the circus with her best friend. As they turned onto their street, they noticed their neighbors lining the sidewalk in front of their houses. A cry went up, "The kids are coming."
"Run home quick," someone said to the friend, "your mother's hysterical," so she crossed the street and ran.
Farther down the street, the other girl's parents saw the first girl running by herself and thought their own daughter had been killed. When they saw their daughter, they hugged each other and cried.
The girl was surprised they knew about the fire. Her mother explained: An uncle in St. Louis had heard it on the radio and called them. She took the girl into the kitchen and gave her ice cream and listened to her story.
Ice cream was a common welcome-home treat. One girl's parents were so grateful they served her five bowls.
Anna Cote and her sister Iva had been calm for the entire ordeal. When they finally dragged themselves through the front door, their father asked how come they were home so early. Anna burst into tears. Neither her father or Iva could get her to stop.
Other survivors were fine, then broke down when they heard over the radio how many had died. Most got home okay, maybe a little bruised, a little dirty, but basically unharmed. Mothers insisted children take baths before supper. One father had the entire family kneel down on the carpet and thank God. Only in a few rare cases did husbands come home to empty houses, neighbors debating who should go over and tell them.
The missing children were about to move. The phones were so overtaxed at police headquarters that parents couldn't get through. Headquarters put a lieutenant in charge of the operation, at this point rather small; at 4:30 the officers only had ten children in the courtroom. But as the crowd on Barbour Street dissipated, rescuers found more and more. Soon several cruisers full were en route.
The lieutenant had the numbers of some of the ten already there, but the circuits were so deluged with incoming calls that he had to walk up Market Street to Weiner Fruit and Produce and use their phone. The rumor had somehow gone out that the missing children would be at the armory; it was soon mobbed with frantic parents. To alleviate both problems, headquarters ordered the children taken to the nearby Brown School.
The officers walked the children up Market Street. Two workers at the nursery school opened the main hall, three classrooms and the playground, giving the kids something to do. Volunteers from the Red Cross, the American Legion and the Blood Donors League helped set up a checkpoint to take names and addresses. From now on this would be the clearinghouse for any missing persons. Dispatch ordered all cruisers to drop children off at the Talcott Street entrance.
Among the police ordered to the grounds was Det. Sgt. Edward Lowe. He arrived by radio car at 4:30. The prosecutors' office had already begun investigating the cause of the blaze. Lowe was supposed to keep watch over the officers and department heads of the circus so they couldn't get together on a story.
Marine James Kinsella had come from Bradley Field to help police the bodies. The army lieutenant in charge of the detail said, "We are going to
have a G.I. party." Kinsella had no idea what that meant because it was an army term and he was a Marine. He soon learned. It meant Graves Identification. It meant hauling bodies in the hot sun.
Reports circulated that victims had run flaming into the woods on the north side of the tent—human torches setting the underbrush afire. An officer and a squad of MPs searched the area, lifting branches and poking under shrubs with their nightsticks. They found nothing and no one.
The G.I. party lasted until 4:45- At the east end, Medical Examiner Dr. Walter Weissenborn released the last of the dead, then he and Commissioner Hickey left for the armory, following the procession of trucks downtown. James Kinsella went back to Bradley, got drunk and threw up.
Outside on Barbour, a police sound car eased through the crowds, asking them to please clear the area, advising them that the armory would be used as a morgue, and the Brown School for missing children. Transportation would be provided, they said, for those who wished to go to the armory. But many onlookers refused to leave. They lined the ropes and temporary fences holding them back, gawking at the remains of the big top.
Strangely, the southwest bleachers where the fire had begun were the least damaged. The entire south grandstand had burned to cinders; the
skeleton of the north still stood. Between them lay a herringbone pattern of quarterpoles fallen to the east, the outer poles reaching over the railings and into the seats. The centerpoles had come down plumb, neatly bisecting the stages and rings and bent animal cages—in which, amazingly, most of May Kovar's and Joseph Walsh's perches still stood in formation, untouched. A quarterpole leaned against the bandstand with its metal chairs askew; on the top tier stood the burned-out shells of the kettle drums and the organ.
The Wallendas' platforms now rested on the ground with their bicycles, as did the heavy rigging from the aerial acts. One of the first props to burn was the cardboard house the clown firemen saved twice daily, and blistered among the wreckage tilted the squashed box of a clown's hot dog machine, the secret compartment of which turned his live dachshund into a string of prop wieners. Near the bandstand sat an aerialist's wash bucket, forgotten during the rescue efforts.
While camels and donkeys hitched to trees munched at the grass, police and MPs scoured the area, hunched over like beachcombers, filling pails and steel garbage cans and cardboard boxes with articles. At the railings they found a number of pocketbooks, some just metal frames clasped
shut, their contents in small charred piles: compacts and lipsticks and cigarette cases, coins warped and colored from the heat, bills burned to worthlessness. One officer discovered a half dollar curled like a dry leaf.
By the northeast chute sat a pile of shoes large enough to fill a bushel basket—women's high heels, children's sneakers and sandals. Shredded clothing stuck to the iron bars. A smashed umbrella anchored a swath of flotsam. In the debris police found a tiny silver cross on a chain, probably clawed off in the struggle, and under a layer of shoes and pocketbooks, shiny with flies, the skin from a pair of hands.
The fire was so intense it burned the hands and feet off people. Chief Hallissey discovered some and put them in a bag. Another officer found a small hand. Sergeant Spellman, who reported the fire, picked up a variety of parts.
Another policeman returned to the lot after taking the bee-stung officer home and driving some nurses to a hospital. He came back at just the wrong time. "Chief Hallissey told me he had a job for me. He told me to take a bag to the State Armory for the Medical Examiner which contained pieces of arms, legs and parts of skulls of small children. I drove to the State Armory and gave the bag to the Medical Examiner."
Police gathered all the pails and bags and boxes of salvaged articles in the superintendents office at E. B. McGurk's, then took them downtown to the property room in the basement of headquarters, hoping they might aid in the identification process.
In the backyard, barred from the tent, show folks were taking care of their own. The doctor treated band members and some workers whose hands and arms had been burned while helping people out. Casualties were light—a fact the papers would make much of, implicitly accusing circus employees of saving their own skins and leaving their customers to die. But the shock and strain on troupers couldn't be overstated; the big top was their home. Without the next show to prepare for, they sat around in a daze. One bally girl collapsed hours after the fire and had to be taken to Municipal Hospital.
Another circus employee was already there, Harry Lakin of the lighting department, suffering from what he thought was a broken leg. Lakin was new, just signed on in Portland a week ago. As the stretcher bearers brought him in, he called over a Red Cross volunteer. "You, come here.
Will you take hold of my hand?" The woman thought he was hysterical or drunk and decided to humor him.
He said he was an electrician and worked with the spotlights. "I'm not squealing," he said, and started crying. "I'm not yellow, but I'm not going to talk."
The woman told him to buck up, that there were lots of people hurt worse than he was.
He asked after the bally girls, then said, "You will never get another girl like Lydia."
The woman could only agree with him.
"I never knew it would be like this," Lakin said. "I don't know if I can take it."
Two volunteers lifted the stretcher and took him off to X-ray, leaving the volunteer confused and suspicious.
Back at the grounds, one concessionaire told police he saw a drunken circus employee exit the men's toilet and totter toward Barbour Street as the fire started. Hailed by the concessionaire, the man said, "Get the hell out of here. This place is going up in a blaze in a minute." He ran down the street as the flames ate the big top.
Police arrested drunk roughneck Ernest Westgate after witnesses claimed he said, "Okay, let it burn down, I know all about it," as the tent went up.
The crowd still pressed against the fences, but it was different now, mostly curiosity seekers. The survivors were on their way home.
"But I've got to get through!" one father pleaded. "My child was there!"
"Now take it easy," a patrolman said. "There's nobody there now, they're all gone."
A sound car crawled by, booming out news from the Brown School: "If the guardian of Danny Dawson is in the neighborhood, will he please call for the boy immediately."
Across Barbour, a handmade sign in a tenement window advertised "There is a phone on the third floor," but the lines had vanished.
Engine Company 16 finished overhauling the last batch of embers and rolled up its hoses. The city police shifted their personnel, leaving the state troopers and MPs to watch the site. Thomas Barber and Edward Lowe