Authors: Stewart O'Nan
Maybe the lack of manpower was the reason they were late getting into Hartford, or maybe it was the Christmas celebration. It was only a matter of time before they missed a show. They'd been doing more evening-only dates since the beginning of the war, often performing just a late show on the day they arrived or just a matinee on the day they had to jump to another city. But the jump from Providence to Hartford was only ninety miles, and their schedule gave them more than six hours to cover that distance. It's possible that the circus fell back on its usual excuse of the trains out of sheer habit.
It was bad luck blowing a show, and show folks were notoriously superstitious. Since the great aerialist Lillian Leitzel's fatal fall, Merle Evans, the conductor of the band, refused to play "Crimson Petal," her theme music. Scranton, where the show closed in the strike year, was a jinx town. Whistling in the dressing room was bad luck, and peanut shells on the floor, and the old camelback trunks, but blowing a show was the worst.
The first section arrived at the Windsor Street siding at 9:45 Wednesday morning, nearly five hours late. The Flying Squadron, it was called, and it carried the menagerie cages and cookhouse wagons and the trucks and tractors and elephants to move them. A crowd of towners— adult circus buffs and children—watched the razorbacks unload the flats. Most followed the procession of elephants and wagons up North Main and across Cleveland to Barbour Street. People waved from their porches.
On the lot an even larger crowd waited, and the bosses of each department pulled stacks of passes from their pockets and hired on as many
able bodies as they could find. The cookhouse went up first, with its long picnic tables and red-checked tablecloths, and then the horse tent. Hammer gangs drove stake lines for the big top, and for the sideshow, dressing and shop tents.
The second section had arrived by now, and the six poles of the big top were going up, fifty-seven feet tall and capped with flags. Roughnecks rolled out the canvas sections on the ground and began lacing them together with rope from the centerpoles out to the stake lines. The sun was higher now, and the men smelled like work.
Around 11:00 A.M., city building inspector Charles Hayes arrived on the lot but saw the big top was nowhere near ready. The city didn't legally require Hayes to inspect the tent; it was a custom. He left, saying he'd return in a few hours.
The crew finished lacing and inserted sidepoles around the edge of the tent, then with the help of two elephants straining against their padded harnesses hauled the canvas to the top of the centerpoles. Inside, in the suddenly welcome shadow, teams placed two rows of shorter quarterpoles around the oval and a half-dozen elephants working solo raised them, shoring up the roof. Once done, the canvasmen came back outside and tightened or guyed out the ropes holding the sidepoles.
The big top that was now up was new this year—the largest tent in the world, the circus claimed. It had come out of the sail loft the first week in May, and like its predecessors had been waterproofed with six thousand gallons of white gasoline and eighteen thousand pounds of paraffin. Seventy canvasmen had helped to melt the wax in cauldrons, thin it with gas, stirring it with paddles, and then sprinkle the mixture on the laid-out sections and spread it with brooms. The process was cheap and effective. The show had treated their tops like this for years.
Now that it was up, John Carson's ushers started setting out the jacks and stringers and bibles for the red grandstand chairs, the planks of the blue bleachers seats. In the grandstands they marked the row numbers on the risers with chalk, 1 through 18.
As the circus worked, city police nosed around the lot, searching for runaways, eyeing the teenaged hands. A detective collared one boy and hauled him away. He'd just signed on in Providence; now he was going back home. The cops were also looking for a runaway from Portland with a history of mental problems. Roy Tuttle, his name was. It didn't mean anything to the men they asked; there were too many transients coming through, and some of the hands prized their anonymity. One man knew his longtime partner on the canvas crew only as Reefer and liked it that way, the fewer questions the better. The cops kept wandering, leaning in to show the picture of Tuttle.
Even more annoying to the men were the towners who turned up to watch them sweat, getting the most out of the show without spending a penny. They saved a special name for these rubes: lot lice.
Meanwhile, out on Barbour Street, Department of Health officials were checking the hot dog and orangeade stands residents had set up on the sidewalk. The North End was solid blue-collar, Italian and Jewish families crammed into three-story tenements. People turned their yards into parking lots for a few extra bucks. It didn't look like the circus was going to make the matinee, and everyone was disappointed, not just the kids.
Downtown, the ambassadors of the circus were taking care of business. Legal adjuster Herbert DuVal called on the superintendent of buildings at city hall and paid the $500 rental fee in cash. John Brice met with Hartford police chief Charles Hallissey and arranged for both uniformed and plainclothes protection on the lot and a traffic detail on Barbour Street. He informed him that the matinee had been canceled because of a detour they had to make leaving Providence.
No one made arrangements with the Hartford Fire Department; neither did the department send anyone to inspect the grounds. Executive officers of the department would later say they could not recall nor produce any records to indicate ever providing protective measures at any circus showing in Hartford over the past thirty years.
Later, Herbert DuVal also met with Chief Hallissey, paying him $300 for a license (two days at $ 150 each). The form was not dated. It had spaces for whom the license was granted to and for what type of event, where and for what period, but the spaces were left blank. At the very bottom the form said: "Subject to the direction and control of the police department and to the laws and ordinances of the state and city covering such performances." The only ink on the entire thing was the signature of Chief Hallissey. DuVal gave him forty or fifty passes, which he distributed to his associates.
Back on the lot, the ushers were fitting the stands together. Leonard Aylesworth's canvasmen fastened the sidewall around the edges of the top like a curtain. It was not treated with the paraffin mixture, and the upper part could be lowered to let in the breeze. John Brice walked around the outside, making sure the bottom was tied down tight to the stakes so no one could wriggle in for free. If some determined person did, there would be seatmen under the bleachers to catch them.
The tractor or cat drivers were spotting the menagerie wagons, getting them into position to the right of the main entrance. There wasn't room to raise the menagerie top, so they snaked the cages in along the back of the
sideshow tent and circled them with a sidewall. Deacon Blanchfield explained: "You can honeycomb the cages in but you couldn't line them up in their respective order under a top." They "did what's called corralling the menagerie."
At the runs, the performer's section had arrived. They came up on the circus bus and made straight for the cookhouse. With no matinee to get ready for, they stayed in the backyard, writing letters or catching up on wash, hanging their wet clothes on guyropes. Chess was the rage in the dressing tent, and there was always checkers. Some of the "bally" girls from the aerial ballet were knitting. Jugglers and tumblers practiced in the grass. The Wallendas checked their rigging. May and Harry Kovar inspected their cats. The heat was awful and there was nothing to do.
People turned up expecting to be let in. Some had come in special from the outlying towns, driving in or sitting on hot buses, and now they had to tell their kids there was no show. The bosses said they were sorry. Come back tomorrow, they said.
The health inspector poked around the juice joints in the front yard,
making sure the orangeade was covered and that they were using paper cups. He'd been waiting all day to check the men's toilet, and finally it went up, a khaki tent just to the right of the main entrance, one wall butted up against the big top. There were three toilets to the right of the door, and a trough like a halved hot water heater for a urinal with solid disinfectants hung from wires. It passed.
Traffic on the lot had been heavy for hours now, the grass crushed and matted. The elephants tromped up dust, and a crew went around spreading wood shavings, followed by a water truck trailing thin, even streams from its sprinkler bar, darkening the ground. The layer of mud created was so thin it would stick to your shoe and leave a perfect footprint of dust behind.
At 3:45 Charles Hayes the building inspector returned as promised and found work progressing on the big tent. He stayed for about an hour, walking the track around the rings, checking the bleacher sections at the ends. When he left, everything wasn't complete, but he was "satisfied that the erection of the tent, construction of seats and exits complied as in previous years." There was nothing unusual, nothing new that he could see.
The circus missing its show was front-page news. Just the circus being in town was front-page news. In the age of radio, during a war that limited not just travel but the everyday amenities, the circus was a diversion all of Hartford looked forward to, a hardy perennial. The
Times
and the
Courant
gave it space, aping the stories they'd received from publicist Roland Butler's pressbook. The band was all brass this year, the oompah of the tubas replaced by the much classier, more exotic Bayreuth tuben—invented, Robert Ringling said, by Richard Wagner himself.
The ballyhoo was unnecessary. Hartford had always loved the circus. The first, Rickett's Equestrian Circus, had shown here in 1795; the first elephant in 1826, for a steep I2V2 cents. P. T. Barnum exhibited his Wild Men of Borneo in 1855. For the rest of the century Hartford was considered Barnum territory, being so close to Bridgeport, but there was room and time for Dan Rice's Circus and Melville's Australian Circus and Nixon's Royal Circus and Old John Robinson's Circus and the Hippozoonomadon Circus and Nathan's Big Bonanza Circus and the Great Forepaugh Show and even Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Hartford had seen Jumbo and the Sacred White Elephant and Barnum's $25,000 Behemoth Monster Hippopotamus; they'd seen Grizzly Adams in his cage of bears and Tom Thumb and Alice Montague the $ 10,000 Beauty and Chang the Chinese Giant and Zip the What Is It? and come back for more.
Tickets were on sale at McCoy's Music Store, 89 Asylum Avenue, and at the circus grounds—at "Popular Prices," the ads bragged. The cheaper grandstand tickets were $1.20, the most expensive $2.20. And the bond campaign was still on, a $100 bond entitling the buyer to excellent seats.
Mildred Cook bought four reserved tickets for Thursday's matinee, one for herself and one for each of her three children. She and her husband had separated, and the children were living with her brother and his wife back in their hometown of Southampton, Massachusetts. She figured Donald and Eleanor and Edward needed a stable home with two parents. Mildred worked two jobs—days as a claims adjustor at Liberty Mutual insurance and part-time as a housekeeper at the Hartford seminary—and rarely had time off. She'd invited the children down, and the circus was part of the lure.
They'd come down earlier in the week. Wednesday the four of them went to the duckpin lanes on Farmington Avenue and then to Church Hill
Park in Newington. While they were there, another little girl drowned. The lifeguards lifted the body out of the pool and laid it on the hot concrete in front of everyone. The next morning Eleanor Cook, who was eight, would write her aunt Marion Parsons: "Dear Mom, We are getting ready to go to the circus now. When we were at Newington a girl got drowned. We just got to the bus in time." Tonight, though, Mildred Cook just wanted to get her children dinner and forget all about it. The circus would help.
The evening show went on as scheduled. The crowd was large, partly due to the matinees cancellation. Hartford police detective Thomas Barber drew his usual assignment, mingling with the midway crowd and keeping an eye out for pickpockets. Barber was a widower and a single father—an anomaly for the time. His daughter Gloria watched the two boys while he worked the night shift. On Monday she was getting married; her fiancé Orville Vieth was in the service and shipping out, so she'd still be home to help, but the war would be over soon and he'd be left with the boys. His youngest, Harry, was supposed to go to the circus with his uncle Boots tomorrow, and Barber had taken the day shift so they'd be at the same show.
As the performance started, the lighted midway cleared out, and Thomas Barber noticed fellow detective William Dineen waiting by the marquee. MAIN ENTRANCE, it said. THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH. They passed
through the iron railings leading to the ticket boxes, flashing their badges at the sellers. It was even warmer inside, the scent of so many people and animals cloying. The kids were in shorts, and Barber was hot in his jacket. The two stood there in the shadows between the bleachers, hands folded in front of them, watching the crowd, only peripherally taking in the show. At the rear entrance by the bandstand stood another pair of detectives doing the same.