Authors: Stewart O'Nan
The Cooks' tickets were in the south grandstand, a few sections in. They walked the track, on this side free of any chutes. In the exit between the southwest bleachers and the grandstand sat a soldier in a wheelchair. Beside him, filling the first two rows of section A, were a group of twenty or so fellow convalescents from Bradley Field Station Hospital, all in uniform, some wearing slings. Escorted by a Red Cross volunteer, they were recovering from combat injuries—and one of them from a dose of malaria
picked up in the South Pacific. The Cooks passed them and then another section before Mildred Cook handed their tickets to the gateman. They sat near the top with a good view of the west animal cage. They'd just gotten themselves settled when Don realized he had to go to the bathroom; luckily they were sitting on the aisle. He gave up the popcorn and headed back toward the main entrance.
The Norrises and Smiths from Middletown were a few sections over from the Cooks, Barbara Smith still gloomy and unimpressed, her sister Mary Kay and Agnes and Judy Norris fidgeting in their chairs. Michael Norris basked in the atmosphere—the cages and rings and stages, sawdust powdering the ground. Propmen were scurrying about, making last-second adjustments. Candy butchers plied the aisles, waving boxes of Cracker Jack. It was definitely worth taking a half day away from the store.
At the east end of the south grandstand, a few reporters in suits and ties dotted the sparsely occupied press section, sweat pouring down their foreheads. Yesterday the circus had been news, but tomorrow the show
would be gone, and these unlucky cubs had been stuck with the mop-up assignment.
At the end farthest from the front door, marooned on their eight-foot-high island in the middle of the performers' entrance, Merle Evans and his twenty-nine-piece band waited like the rest of the tent. A few years ago they would have struck up a tune, the horns and drums punchy, almost martial, but the pre-show concert had gone the way of the old living statues act back in 1941.
Merle Evans was circus through and through. He'd briefly been bandmaster for Buffalo Bill with the 101 Ranch Show, and in the twenty-five years since the 1919 merger, the Greatest Show on Earth had known no other conductor. Legend was, he'd never missed a performance, even when hit with ptomaine poisoning. He had a weakness for popcorn, and publicist Roland Butler loved to claim he could play his silver cornet while chewing a mouthful.
One of his favorite stories was from when he was a young man playing the Midwest with a medicine show. Near their gig, a tent revival had set up. After his show, Merle hid in a ditch near the meeting, and when the preacher said, "The world will end when Gabriel blows his mighty horn," he let loose a blast. The sinners knocked over their chairs and ran, the tent coming down right on top of them.
When the show started, Merle Evans would turn away from his windjammers to check with Fred Bradna and watch the rhythm of the acts, conducting with his left hand and playing with his right. Each performance there were more than two hundred cues, many of them split-second and crucial to directing the audience's attention to a new act or away from one just finished. The cat act itself was a quilt of rumbas, fox-trots, marches, cakewalks, vamps—anything that fit the particular movements of the animals. Trickier were the horse acts in which the animals supposedly danced to the music; the illusion actually worked in reverse: the horse led while the band followed. Entrances, exits, segues—they all had to be on the dot. And if something happened, if a liberty horse should stumble and miss a trick or a clown discover a wonderful ad-lib, Merle Evans and the band were there to punctuate or save the bit with some improvisation. Once the show began, they were on alert, but now they were just part of the crowd, bored and hot in their white-and-gold uniforms, passing the time.
Behind the bandstand, in the performers' entrance, or back door, Hartford police officers James Kenefick and Henry Griffin stood guard, detailed to provide that afternoon's protection for the dressing tent.
All the way across the big top, by the front door, Thomas Barber and two other detectives waited with a state parole officer, outwardly joking but all the while scanning the rings for a parole violator who was rumored to be a helper in the cat act. Barber's six-year-old Harry was supposed to be here with his uncle Boots, using free tickets Barber had been given for working the circus—possibly from the same batch Herbert DuVal had given Chief Hallissey—but so far there was no sign of them. The wedding was on his mind; he couldn't help thinking of giving his daughter away. She had kept the family together, stepping in for her mother, and the loss seemed double to him. Mary, now Gloria. Before he knew it the boys would be gone too, and he would be alone. The way of the world, he supposed.
Beside Barber, the two old police chiefs, John Brice and Hallissey, were cutting up jackpots—swapping their favorite stories, telling them better every time.
Outside it was blazing, eighty-eight degrees, anything metal left in the sun painful to touch. An attendant roamed up and down the midway, hollering that the show was going to start in five minutes, and new lines formed at the front door.
Commissioner Edward J. Hickey waited on the porch of his sister-in-
law's house on Barbour Street, wondering what was taking Adolph Pastore so long. The residents were cleaning up their orangeade stands, stacking the cups and counting their pennies.
Under the big top, the crowd was restless and loud. Mothers checked their watches; it was past starting time. From the top of the southwest bleachers people could see over the dropped sidewall the menagerie elephants lined up along the fence in front of the victory gardens. Below, straight down between the planks, a full fire bucket sat in the grass. One boy was tossing peanut shucks between his feet, trying to hit the water. A man near him dropped his sunglasses and couldn't catch them in time; they tipped off the shoulder of the person in front of him and fell into the shadows below. Seconds later a hand holding the glasses reached up from beneath, almost giving him a heart attack.
The man under the bleachers was William Caley, seatman. His job was to watch the jacks that held up the stringers and make sure the structure was solid. The bucket was there in case anyone dropped a cigarette and caught the grass on fire or made a glowing pinhole in the sidewall. A pin-hole wasn't quite a fire, just the orange embers slowly eating the canvas, spreading like a grease stain. They'd doused a fair-sized one in Providence, no trouble. Occasionally a lady would drop her handbag or a child might lose a souvenir—or like this fellow and his glasses—and Caley would retrieve them. Mostly though, he squatted there among the hundreds of calves hanging down like shod salamis, watching the slow snow of popcorn and trying to avoid getting hit with pop bottles and wads of gum. Compared to Caley's recent experience in the dangerous, sometimes explosive coal mines of Pennsylvania, it was not such a bad job.
The show was going to start, everyone hoped. The band was in position, the rings and stages were clear, but there were still people streaming in. The northwest bleachers where the Eppses and Goffs were sitting were jammed tight, the southwest too, even some kids sitting on the ground out in front. But it wasn't a complete sellout. Though the circus said afterward the reserved tickets had all gone, the very last grandstand sections down at the east end—Y on the north side, K on the south—had rows that were close to half empty.
Most papers nowadays quote the attendance as 6,789, the figure given by circus vice president James Haley at the commissioner's hearing, though
Haley, being relatively new to the show, was consistently sketchy on other details of the setup. Head usher John Carson estimated 6,000, but one longtime local circus expert called it "a sellout, a packed house." Contemporary accounts placed the crowd at somewhere between 4,000 and 10,000. Commissioner Hickey cited 10,048 as capacity "from information and records that were furnished me at my hearing," yet in his testimony General Manager George W. Smith stated that typically with this setup they sold 6,048 grandstand tickets and 3,000 general admission. Smiths math was off on both counts, but just barely. The official physical capacity of the grandstands (twenty sections, eighteen rows, sixteen seats per) was 5,760, the bleachers (thirty-four lengths at one hundred customers per) 3,400, for a total of 9,160. Of course, the house for the Fourth of July Providence show under the same top was widely publicized as a nice, round 10,000, and the Ringling program itself bragged that the World's Largest Tent sat 11,000. One survivor remembered numerous empty reserved seats, with ushers near the center ring selling these at a discount. Another woman in the southeast bleachers thought section K was empty.
The true attendance, like so many other things about the circus fire, will never be known. From the capacity, the few existing photos, and numerous eyewitness accounts, it seems the house that day was near but not quite full, with approximately 5,500 fans in the grandstand and 3,200 on the blues, for a total of 8,700.
All of them were getting impatient in the heat—the children for the show, the parents with the children. As Don Cook returned from the men's room, George W. Smith did one last reconnaissance of the midway. He came back through the front door, past Thomas Barber and chiefs Brice and Hallissey, and gave Fred Bradna the high sign to start the show. It was 2:23 Eastern War Time, only eight minutes late.
Over the PA, the announcer asked the crowd to please stand for our national anthem. As the grandstands rose, the unattached chairs scuffed and squeaked against the risers. All faces turned to the flag, way down at one corner of the bandstand, hanging limp on its pole right beside Merle Evans. The planks of the bleachers were so narrow it was hard to stand on them—especially for pregnant Mabel Epps. At both ends, people sang along with the clear brasses of the band, swaying, knees locked, a hand on the shoulder of those in front of them.
Out on Barbour Street, a man and his son were late. The man swung his car into the sole available parking spot, right across from McGovern's, thinking he was lucky. He'd killed the engine and started rolling up his windows when someone on the sidewalk called, "Hey. Back up. You're too close to that fire hydrant." The man backed up.
Not long behind him came Adolph Pastore in Commissioner Hickey's big black Caddy. From the porch, the commissioner called inside to Isabel, who grabbed Billy. Pastore popped the back door and the kids scrambled out, the whole crew headed up the street, double-time—all but Sergeant Pastore, who stayed with the car. They were late but none of them had eaten; it was for just this reason that the circus strategically placed the grease joints along the midway, the scents of frying wieners and bubbling caramel impossible to ignore. Hickey dug his wallet out and sprang for hot dogs and Cokes all around.
Inside, everyone had sat down, the legs of the chairs protesting again. Fred Bradna strode out in his huntsman's red tailcoat and white jodhpurs and black plug hat and blew his whistle to open the show. Merle Evans cued the band.
Some people remember a clown driving around the track squished into his tiny car, or an endless succession of clowns bounding out of one, but that never happened. Others say that the usual first three acts were canceled because of the threat of bad weather—that's false also.
The show followed the program exactly: "Display 1. Novel and highly amusing introductory presentation in which the art of wild animal training is given a reverse twist. A Frolicsome Forerunner of the Magnificent Display of Perfectly-Schooled Man-killers Which Immediately Follows."
To a flourish of trumpets, a man dressed in a lion suit bounded onto the west stage, follow spots from both sides picking him out. He turned somersaults and prowled the edge of the stage, menacing, jabbing his paws at the crowd. After him came a dozen bally girls made up as lion tamers in skimpy yellow dresses and high boots, their skirts showing a generous length of thigh, their hair tucked severely under black Cossack hats. They circled the lion as he turned, the music murky, dangerous, until with a clash of cymbals the lion produced a whip.
He flung it about his head, feisty as Clyde Beatty himself, running the girls through a number of acrobatic tricks and poses as the crowd laughed
and the band broke loose with a goofy vamp. The burlesque was just a short warm-up to catch the crowd's interest and build tension for the real cat act, the shift from silliness to real fear that much more breathtaking.
As the girls were going off to applause, Commissioner Hickey and his brood handed their tickets to the ducat grabber at the front door and went right, along the south side, the children clutching their hot dogs and Cokes. They turned into section G, just past the side exit halfway down, and clumped up the aisle.
The commissioner was surprised to find his dear old friend and associate, former state's attorney Hugh M. Alcorn
St.,
also seated in G. Back when Bull Hickey had been county detective, he'd been an expert witness for the prosecution, his memory perfect, and together the two of them had convicted hundreds of suspects. Now Alcorn's son, Hugh Jr., had taken over as state's attorney. Today Alcorn was with another son, Harold—a judge— and his wife and two children. Seeing Hickey was busy, he gave him a wave, figuring they'd catch up later.