Authors: Stewart O'Nan
Their seats were in row 18, all the way up. Impossibly, it grew hotter as they climbed, until they reached the breeze slipping through the dropped sidewall. As they were shuffling in sideways, trying not to drop their hot dogs or step on their neighbors' feet, the top of Hickey's head bumped the angled canvas of the roof. Finally they were seated and he could eat. A question from down the row: Could the boys take off their T-shirts? The commissioner gave them permission, and they balled up their shirts and stuffed them into the back pockets of their jeans.
Again, Fred Bradna blew his whistle, Merle Evans cued the band, and the announcer introduced the cat act. Those following their programs read some of Roland Butler's typically mellifluous prose: Display 2. Natural jungle enemies educated beyond belief performing together in new and exceptionally exciting exhibitions. Great New Mixed Groups of the Most Treacherous and Ferocious Wild Animals Ever Assembled, Presented Under the Direction of ALFRED COURT, Master Trainer of the Ages. Berber Lions, Abyssinian Lions, Royal Bengal Tigers, Berber Tigers, Siberian Tigers, Polar Bears, Black Bears, Black Jaguars, Sumatran Spotted Leopards, Himalayan Bears, Black Leopards, Pumas, Ocelots, Black Panthers, and Great Dane Dogs.
This was not exactly what they got. The trainers listed in caps at the
bottom included May Kovar, Joseph Walsh and Harry Kovar, but May's husband wasn't working today. When the show opened in New York, they'd shown three cages of animals, but since leaving the big arenas they'd cut back to two and Alfred Court hadn't performed. He was sixty-one and not as strong as he'd once been. Damoo Dhotre, his number one understudy, was off in the army. Court's specialty was mixing species that were natural foes, a very risky business. He'd never been hurt in the ring, but the trainers who worked under him sometimes weren't as lucky.
The year before, May Kovar had been badly mauled at Boston Garden by a jaguar. In the middle of her mixed act of jags and leopards, one leapt from his perch, going for her throat. Equipped with just a light bamboo wand, she fended him off with one arm. The crowd thought it was part of the show. Only when he backed off and charged again, snarling, ripping her costume, did they scream. The jag knocked her backwards, digging its claws into her chest. By then, attendants entered the cage and drove the cat back with clubs, but May Kovar would need dozens of stitches. It was the second time that season she'd been attacked, the first during a practice ses-
sion at Madison Square Garden. A trouper, she saw the circus doctor and made the late show, replacing the bad jag with one from the menagerie and playing with her arm bandaged.
While the circus pushed May Kovar as exotic and glamorous, she was just one of several women trainers following in the tradition of the great Mabel Stark. For years Harriet Beatty had trained cats alongside her more famous husband, and this season Dolly Jacobs regularly stepped into the cage for the pick-up Victory Circus. May Kovar was not as well known as either of them, partly because, being English, she'd been working in Europe and had only recently come over. Today, as the announcer boomed to the crowd, she would be in the west cage with her small cats and Joseph Walsh in the east cage with his bears and lions and Great Danes.
As the handlers prodded the leopards and panthers and pumas through the northwest chute, Thomas Barber watched them, trying to match a face to that of the picture the parole officer had passed around. As each cat came in, a handler slid a board through the chute so it couldn't back up, separating it from the one behind. When the lead cat moved for-
ward, the handlers lifted the boards and the rest moved up. To cover the progression, a bear lumbered out from the entrance between the north grandstands and into the center ring on its hind legs, guzzling a bottle of milk and stumbling around as if drunk as the band played a wobbly melody. The crowd ate it up yet never fully took their eyes off the cats, wondering what would happen if Walsh's bears and dogs and lions got into it.
The acts were mostly posing, the animals changing places, moving from perch to perch in measured steps. Walsh's Great Danes were in the east cage very briefly, pretending to herd the lions onto their various stands before going through the chute to a relieved hand from the crowd. The polar bears, black bears and lions did nip-ups together in pyramids, sitting erect on their haunches, front legs up and pressed to their chests as if begging. Walsh sent the bears off—more applause—then set to work with just six lions.
In the west cage, May Kovar wasn't alone. Standing by the junction of the chute and the cage proper, an assistant waited to send the cats off when she was done with them. All told she had fifteen, the choreographed routine breaking them into different pyramids, running them up and down the perches, the tallest of which was twelve feet high. The cats hissed and bared their teeth at one another as she maneuvered them through their paces, armed with just her trusty wand.
Though the two cat acts received equal billing, Walsh's, with its big cats and audacious combination of different species, was tacitly featured. May Kovar finished first and then waited as he wrapped up the lion act with his third pyramid, kneeling gingerly astride a lion while the other five held their poses above him.
Hartford police officer George Sanford, on the south side of the tent, had the day off and decided to take the family. He had his 8mm movie camera rolling as the cat acts closed, hoping to catch something special.
Under the front end blues, John Cook had joined William Caley. Cook was a First of May—a greenie in his first season with the show—and had just been given the position of seatman; today was his first day. Before this he'd been a stakeman, driving stakes for the big top, and was now laboring under the misapprehension that his new job consisted mainly of stopping kids from sneaking in. No one had told him to look out for fires.
Just before the end of the cat act, Caley left his position under the
bleachers, Cook following him across to the northwest blues. They stood there between the bleachers and the chute, waiting for the cat act to break. As a rigger, Caley needed to watch the propmen tear down the chutes and make sure they didn't bump the jacks as they dragged the heavy sections out. Cook officially had no business here, but with manpower short the propmen were understaffed and paid 50 cents to anyone who would lend a hand.
Kneeling in the east cage, Walsh had the cats hold their pose until the applause had peaked. Merle Evans switched tunes, and Walsh stood and took his bows. The spots in the west end caught May Kovar. She acknowledged the applause in all four directions, smiling wide.
As the ovation disintegrated, the lights dimmed, and in the dusk the announcer introduced the Wallendas, world famous yet still touted in the program as if they needed the publicity: "The Last Word In High Wire Thrillers. New, Hazardous and Hair Raising Feats By World Acclaimed Artists Who Shake Dice With Death At Dizzy Heights."
A beam captured a group of four above the center ring in their leotards, the last still hustling up the rope ladder hanging from the north platform thirty feet up—Helen, Henrietta and Herman Wallenda and Joe
Geiger. With them they had three long balancing poles, a specially designed chair and a bicycle with wheel rims designed to cup the wire and no handlebars. Karl Wallenda waited on the opposite platform with a similar bicycle. The heat of the tent had gathered here near the peak. The wire was temperature sensitive, and Karl checked the tension with one foot. Merle Evans and the band started the first bars of the lilting waltz from Gounod's
Faust.
Afterward, witnesses would come forward and claim they saw strange things here. One man high in the southwest bleachers noticed dark pieces of broken glass—possibly from a Coke bottle—lying on top of the canvas above him. A woman not far from him saw two birds walking on the tent.
Outside, a motorist driving by on Barbour slowed and stole a glance at the big top, only to see "a shimmering appearance such as the sun on frost. It was not fire. At the top of the tent there was a haze that looked like heat waves, appeared like heat rising from pavement. It was not smoke."
Not all of these last-second stories were bizarre. One man sitting near the top of section A said he'd smelled rags burning. He looked out over the sidewall and noticed smoke rising between the elephants and the houses on Barbour Street. He thought someone was burning papers and had a rag among their rubbish and paid no more attention to it. Another man in the bleachers beside him smelled "something like paper burning."
A vendor went through the aisles waving a fistful of paper fans, chanting, "It's going to get hotter and hotter." At the foot of the southwest bleachers a Coca-Cola vendor was stopped, making change for the crowd around him, his tray jutting from his waist like a cigarette girl's.
The waltz went on. High above center ring, Herman and Karl Wallenda carefully placed the front wheels of their bicycles on the wire. Below, already forgotten, May Kovar sent her cats through the chute one by one, the cageboy prodding them on, propmen working the boards. Joseph Walsh broke down his last pyramid, the lions leaving their perches like clockwork.
It's rare that people witness the beginning of any fire, even in a crowded place. Accidental fires, by their very nature, are always sudden, unexpected
events, and catch people unawares. They can't be anticipated and therefore initially elude detection by the simple mechanism of surprise.
Psychologists who have studied disasters talk about the difficulty of breaking out of patterned behavior and responding to a new situation. One natural reaction to a fire is to flee, yet often people will look right at a fire and not register the information, simply because their minds are on some other task or caught up with some other expectation.
One surveillance videotape from England shows a small fire near the entrance of a corner shop, set by petty thieves as a distraction; while the flames jump from a foot high and then up to the ceiling, customers calmly walk in, select their merchandise and stand in line by the register, some even pointedly glancing over at the fire yet doing nothing. Only after two customers notice they've both marked the blaze—agreeing by a nod that it does in reality exist—do they alert the clerk. Though no one was hurt, the shop burned to the ground.
On the sidewall behind the southwest bleachers, a flame sprang up. Absolutely new and therefore invisible, unnoticed for a few precious seconds.
The fire was small at first, about the size of a silver dollar, depending on who you talked to. Nearly everyone who was there that day would claim they were the first to see it. As with the Cocoanut Grove even the people closest to the point of origin disagreed as to precisely where it was, either on the sidewall or the roof.
The fire was the size of a baseball, a football, a basketball, a dishpan, a briefcase, a small window, half a tablecloth. It was circular, it was triangular, it was shaped like a horseshoe.
One thing people agreed on was that it was small at first, so small that most people beyond that corner of the tent didn't see it. Detective Paul Beckwith, standing beside Thomas Barber, saw it beginning. "I remained silent," he said later, "hoping that no one else would notice the flame before it was extinguished, as I had no doubt that it would at that time. I had every confidence it would be put out."
The detective's lack of reaction fits with the rigidity of patterned behavior. He was there to catch a parole violator and was working hard at staving
off all distractions. Once he realized there was a fire, he assumed someone else would put it out—an irrational assumption psychologists say is shared by most of us (not having the means ourselves of stopping a fire), but one which a police detective, trained to respond to emergencies, would be more likely to overcome.
Across from the detective, a girl in the bleachers felt heat behind her and turned around. She turned back to her mother and asked if the tent was supposed to be on fire.
An usher in front of the bleachers saw the blaze and pointed toward it—as did a man coming back up the bleachers with a Coke he'd just bought from the vendor. Pointing with his bottle, the man yelled, "Fire."
Some twisted around to see, but most people kept their eyes glued to the Wallendas high up in the spotlights. They didn't want to miss one second of their death-defying act.
The point of origin
The fire was still on the untreated sidewall behind the southwest blues, directly in the center, right where the men's toilet abutted the big top, about six feet off the ground. It hadn't involved the roof yet. There was a chance if people got water on it, they could stop it here.
A trio of ushers from the north side cut behind the bleachers and grabbed the fire buckets underneath. There were four in all; each held four gallons of water, filled before every performance by a guy named Chief. The buckets were full. The first usher there hefted one and chucked it, the water splashing across the bottom of the flames.