Authors: Stewart O'Nan
drew morgue duty at the armory. They would report at 5:30 to assist Dr. Weissenborn at the checkout desk.
It was enough time for Barber to get home and take a bath and change clothes. He came in soaking wet from the heat and the hoses. Once the front door closed behind him, he broke down. It was the first time his daughter Gloria had seen her father cry.
The
Hartford Times
published another Extra, headlined CIRCUS BLAZE KILLS 200, with a photo of the smoking bleachers. The number was an unofficial estimate—by whom was never said. Authorities were taking the bodies to the State Armory. Otherwise the text itself changed little: The detective still gave his figure of "at least 100"; the three performers were still said to be among the dead. The cause was undetermined so far, though there were rumors a cigarette had been dropped on the canvas. And still no list.
This would change quickly. Missing a nephew himself, Mayor Mortensen sent a cruiser to each of the three major hospitals with instructions to bring back rosters of the dead and injured—complete, partial, whatever they had.
In the next Extra, Governor Baldwin gave a telephone number for people with missing persons inquiries to call. SNET had set up a battery of twenty-four phones in a conference room overlooking the drill floor of the armory. Those dialing Hartford 7-0181 reached the headquarters of the State War Council, staffed by women volunteers who took down the names and addresses of both the missing and the complainant.
Even volunteers weren't immune to the tragedy. One man was supposed to be part of Connecticut Mutual Life's Emergency Medical Assistant Corps, but received word that his brother's family was missing and went off in search of them.
A Rockville woman had taken her nine-year-old daughter and a friend to the circus. The friend was the first out, but in escaping, the daughter hurt her back; while her mother tended to her, the friend got lost in the crowd. The woman accompanied her daughter to Hartford Hospital, then headed for the Red Cross to check on the friend, armed with a description. The child was wearing a yellow print dress, yellow hair ribbon and black shoes.
A Plainville woman left the grounds believing her son had died in the
fire. She'd searched and searched, then come home on the bus. There she received a phone call from his grandmother in Bristol who told her a stranger had brought the boy to her. According to her son, the man helped him out of the tent. When they couldn't locate his mother, the boy gave the man his name and address. The man took him to Plainville by car but found no one at home. Instead of becoming frightened, the child gave the man his grandmother's address. The grandmother never learned the man's name.
At Municipal Hospital, a Middletown woman waited for the outpatient clinic to take her. She'd been carrying her four-year-old daughter toward the bandstand when someone knocked into her and she fell, dropping the child. A man reached down and helped her to her feet and out of the tent. She was burned, and the crowd was so large and moving so fast that she never saw what happened to her daughter, whether anyone rescued her or not. Now she didn't know how she would find her. But she would.
The names of the dead
Workers in the buildings downtown could see the olive drab army stake trucks coming south on Main, escorted by motorcycles. The convoy turned right onto Asylum. The odor of the charred bodies was so strong, people could smell it four floors up.
A line had already formed at the front door of the armory. As the trucks rolled by the massive granite and limestone facade, relatives of the missing grimly tracked them. A patrol of soldiers and city police had cleared Broad Street of all civilians below the west entrance and all the way to Capitol Avenue. A truck slowly backed over the bridge to the west archway, an officer waving it in; it stopped and the tailgate banged down.
Used for indoor formations, the drill floor of the armory stretched 185 by 200 feet. The roof loomed sixty feet above, a giant peaked skylight, the windows around the cream-over-forest-green brick walls merely slits, gunports befitting a fortress. The floor was varnished wood, as in a gym. It was actually the second floor of the building; the area beneath contained both a pistol and a rifle range and a complete supply depot.
As the bodies arrived, State Trooper William Menser wired green casualty tags to their wrists or ankles, where possible. Thomas Barber and Ed Lowe helped segregate the bodies by sex and age, laying them out on narrow army cots. The majority were women and older girls; seventy-five of them took up the northeast corner, close by the east archway. The children were set up in three rows by the west entrance, the ten men in the middle. Many were faceless, missing limbs. Since the relatives would cross the long armory floor from the south, Barber and Lowe put the ones in better shape in the front rows; the fewer dead they saw, the better.
Menser went cot to cot with Dr. Weissenborn and Dr. Edgar Butler, a dentist, filling in the tags with the bodies' probable sex and age. He made a sheet for each victim, taking down the height, weight and build, noting clothing and dental work and any identifying marks like scars or tattoos or jewelry. These sheets filled a looseleaf notebook they could consult when trying to guide a searcher.
One of the saddest cases was a woman in her fifties with no eyes and no right forearm, the fragments of a pink corset still clinging to her. A three-year-old girl she'd been carrying had fused to her stomach. This was the pair the Norwalk fireman had discovered under the folds of the tent. As if to comfort himself, Menser wrote of the child: "fear absent."
Clothing was mostly absent as well in the worst burned. Occasionally he'd find the rear segment of a waistband, part of a collar at the nape of a neck, but little else.
The size of the room diffused the smell somewhat, but morticians from the Newkirk and Whitney Funeral Home went around spraying the corpses to make it easier on everyone.
Soldiers draped olive drab blankets over the dead, but in many cases they weren't large enough. The fire caused the bodies to take on what is called the pugilistic posture. Heat makes the muscles contract; the larger the muscle, the greater the contraction. The heavy muscles like the biceps and quadriceps win the tug of war, so the knees pull up toward the body, the arms raise as if to protect the face. Soldiers tented blankets over the dead as best they could, but some lay with their shoes poking out at the bottom.
The governor was there, and the heads of the War Council and the State Guard, but it was Commissioner Hickey who took charge, standing
on a dais in the middle of the makeshift morgue, surrounded by a crowd of state guardsmen, nurses, and Red Cross volunteers. He was in his shirtsleeves, the knee of his trousers torn; he hadn't changed since leaving Barbour Street and he reeked of ashes.
Here's how it would work, Hickey said. Relatives would sign in downstairs and give a description of the person they were looking for. A dozen at a time would come up, each accompanied by a state trooper and a nurse. Depending on the age and sex of the missing person, the relative would look in one of the three areas—or, in the case of someone searching for more than one person, several of the three areas. There would be three first-aid stations in case they were overcome. Nurses would carry smelling salts as well. If a relative could not identify their loved ones after a full pass, they would certainly be allowed to try again. The process would start at 5:45. People were already waiting outside.
In the lobby downstairs, soldiers set up four long tables for the clerks and nurses to work at and made space for the Red Cross canteen and a first aid station. Upstairs, in the War Council's offices, secretaries ran off mimeographed forms to record the searchers' information. The conference room with its twenty-four lines was a beehive.
Dr. Weissenborn was joined by Dr. Henry Onderdonk. The two established a checkout desk by the east entrance with a complement of women at typewriters to fill in death certificates. All bodies would have to pass through here before they were released to funeral parlors. The five in
pristine condition waited here to be claimed. Thomas Barber and Ed Lowe sat on an empty cot, Barber imagining his son Harry under a blanket across the room. Thank God for Uncle Boots—typically, he had forgotten his promise to take Harry to the show.
Before the crowd was allowed in, six priests arrived. They went from cot to cot, lifting the blankets and anointing the dead's blistered skin.
Downstairs, the tall doors were open to let a breeze in, but a heavy wire grate held the people at bay while clerks readied the tables.
Outside, the line stretched from the arched doorway and along the walk and around the corner of the building. Early on it was predominantly fathers, a few mothers, even in one case a little girl. Another sound car with a big speaker aimed at them delivered the newest lists of injured and found. A few relieved parents left the line, but most remained, arms crossed, tight-lipped. The heat was wearing people down; many had just come from work. A nurse stood by, and the Rolling Kitchen was handing out cups of milk and lemonade and ginger ale. For those who could eat, they offered sandwiches and coffee, and cookies for dessert. Across Capitol Avenue, a crowd of onlookers had formed, pointing every time another truck went by.
Upstairs, a police sound car rolled in the west entrance, drifted to the middle of the drill floor by the men's section and stopped. They would use it as a PA system. Now, with everything in place, Hickey gave the sign for the doors to be opened.
A state guardsman unlocked the grate and the lobby filled with the
first wave. For the amount of time they'd waited, and what they were waiting for, there was little pushing, and little noise. Everyone tried to be polite. The clerks registered the missing and then the first dozen went up the twin switchbacked staircases, led by their escorts.
Jennie Heiser was supervising the clerks downstairs when a former neighbor from Storrs came in looking for his wife and daughter. "Jennie," he said, "will you help me find Betty and Mary?" She accompanied him up.
The drill floor was so large that the morgue only took up a small portion along the north wall. As they crossed the polished wood, their footsteps echoed dully, swallowed up in the vast space above. The air was hot and still.
She took her friend to the corner with the women's bodies. A pair of legs stuck from a blanket, one shoe off and one shoe on. Another victim was
covered, her blocky pair of white flats neatly arranged at the bottom. Jennie Heiser started at the front row, hoping it would be quick. The ones in decent shape had been caught in the pile at the track or the northeast chute. Like Jerry LeVasseur, every part not covered by others was burned, the rest of them mostly untouched. They still had some of their clothes, even their rayon stockings.
Jennie Heiser knew the man's wife; she checked the tags until she came to a likely candidate. When she lifted the blanket, she could see it wasn't her. They tried another one—not her. Throughout, the husband was silent, overcome by what he was seeing.
The farther back into the section, the harder it got. The worst were like abstract statues. They'd lost their clothes, their features, even their pubic hair. With each body, the man grew more discouraged. Jennie Heiser
didn't want to show him the few they couldn't determine the sex of— bloated, their abdomens broken open by the heat, their teeth bright against their blackened lips—unless she had to.
She had to, and even then they came up empty.
They went through the women again, this time skipping the better preserved ones, pausing longer at those they couldn't absolutely rule out. Nothing.
Next they tried to find his daughter, going through the rows of little girls the same way. The man couldn't be sure. They were in such bad shape.
Around them fell a reverent silence broken only by the scuff of footsteps, the buzz of an announcement from the sound car. The damage stunned people, yet hardly anyone went into hysterics—possibly because the corpses didn't seem human. The fire had robbed them not only of life but of identity, reducing them to objects to be feared or pitied. Faceless, they were the same, and provoked the same reaction over and over until, numb, relatives abandoned their searches. The man thanked Jennie Heiser and went home, defeated.
For some, the corpses were too much. One young woman felt positive her mother and father were here, but after four bodies she turned and hurried downstairs again.
Det. Sgt. William Dineen hadn't been able to locate his son Billy or his daughter Marion at the grounds or any of the hospitals. He listed them
missing at the Brown School, then climbed the stairs to the drill floor like so many others. In the children's section he found an eight-year-old who fit Billy's description. He knelt and inspected the boy's teeth and then his toe-nails. Yes, it was him, he was positive. The trooper took down his information and revised the green casualty tag. It was 6:20. The first identification had taken thirty-five minutes. Dineen watched the soldiers lift the cot and haul it to the checkout desk where Barber and Lowe waited, then went to see if he could find Marion.