The Circus Fire (11 page)

An older gentleman sitting alone on the bleachers kept repeating, "If everybody would only keep their seats, we'll all be all right"—a denial of the reality before him, but, according to psychologists, a common reaction when presented with an unchangeable situation and no immediate options.

As the fire ate its way east, more people scrambled, bunching up, the bottom of the grandstands mobbed. One mother took her young son and wrapped his arms around her neck, his legs around her waist, and told him not to let go. Another man had his daughter stand on the riser above him and climb on his back. In S, Stanley Kurneta held his son Tony's hand and led his family down into the crush. Behind him followed Mrs. Kurneta and Betsy, Mary Kurneta and Raymond Erickson.

Outside of the tailings, on the hippodrome track, it wasn't so bad early on. Folks going out the east entrance from the low rows in the middle of the south grandstands said the shoving was less than they'd experienced at baseball games. Mothers and aunts and grandmas hurried their charges along, strong-arming them when necessary.

In this first wave, the Red Cross volunteers started to move their convalescent soldiers out but then turned back to help. The canvas above the front door was fully involved, heat radiating down on top of people leaving. The men, while hampered by their injuries, could not be stopped from leading at least thirty children to safety, many of them burned. Dressed for the weather, the children were mostly exposed, their skin the bright red of sunburn. One soldier took a boy by the arm and made him cry. His hand came away wet. The child's skin had blistered; in gripping him, the soldier had ripped the blebs so they wept fluid. Outside, the Red Cross volunteers had to restrain their patients—even some in slings—from running back in.

An East Hartford mother was the beneficiary of similar heroics. She lost her six-year-old, knocked from her arms as they ran for the exit. A sailor scooped him up and carried him out, barely bruised.

There were rescues throughout the top. In the southwest bleachers, an older woman had somehow fallen through and gotten her foot caught so she was hanging upside down, her face a foot from the ground. Thomas Barber and another detective freed her and helped her outside.

On Barbour Street, Sergeant Spellman saw a woman on the far sidewalk and called to her. Where was a phone? Who had a phone around here?

There was one next door, she told him, pointing to the house on the left, 345 Barbour Street. He ran past her for the porch stairs.

In the tent, the main entrance was flooded with customers. Afraid they'd injure themselves at this rate, a ticket seller tried with some other circus employees to control the flow of people. They barreled him over, knocking him clear of the marquee.

One West Hartford father was leading his two daughters and his grandmother's nurse out the southwest exit between the bleachers and the grandstand. Several hundred people had already gone out that way. When they were about twenty-five feet from the exit, a man dressed in a circus uniform held up his hands to the crowd and shouted: "You'll have to go out another entrance." Scraps of flaming canvas were falling now, and there was

a fair crowd behind them. The father realized that to go back might mean death. He shoved to the front and told the worker, "You damn fool, we're going out this way," and pushed him aside. Fewer than twenty-five people followed him, assuming perhaps that worse disaster lay that way.

In the south grandstand, George Sanford's movie camera continued to roll.

The roof over the main entrance was driving the crowd back now. One man sitting in the southwest bleachers made it to the track before the swell swept him out the northwest exit, dragging him along the animal chute that ran through there. When he got outside, he stood there watching other people come out. Two little boys asked if he was hurt badly, and he discovered blood on his sleeve. The back of his shirt was covered with it. He felt himself for a wound, but the blood wasn't his. Someone must have rubbed against him in the crush.

The fire burned eastward, the band playing over the shouts and screams, the crashing of grandstand chairs. Everyone was getting out now;

there was no more heed for authority, no more waiting—even if there was nowhere to go but down into the piles at the railings. One woman pitched her high heels, dropped her pocketbook and headed down, hanging on to her son's belt. A man wrapped his daughter in his jacket.

They had to climb over piles of seats. The chairs collapsed as people tried to step on them, the wooden legs bruising and cutting shins. A foot caught in a seat, and people tripped and fell. Some stepped on the thick Coke bottles and twisted their ankles. And still there were people behind them, and more behind them, all coming down. A Hartford man explained: "There was nothing we could do. Others just walked over them in the rush."

The larger the crowd, the quicker panic spreads. Group ties in a random gathering like a circus audience are tenuous at best, and under stress people tend to react even more so as individuals, in this case with, perceptually at least, mutually exclusive goals. To the person trapped in the mob and barely moving, it seems certain that not everyone will get out. As the possibilities of escape visibly diminish—as the threat becomes larger, all-engulfing, and as more people join the crush—the more violent some people become. Those in the way become not merely obstacles but deadly enemies.

Men were flinging chairs out of the way, the discards hurtling down to strike others below. The chairs seemed deceptively light and flimsy; they each weighed eight pounds and were built to last. One husband wielded one like a machete, swinging it to clear a path to his wife. Someone surged out of the crowd and pushed him down.

Donald Gale wanted to run for it, but Hulda Grant told him to stay with her. She took his hand, and the two of them made their way down through the chairs. The boyfriend had Caroline. The crowd funneled everyone into the aisle, pushing and shoving, but they got to the bottom of the section all right.

Here the wave of people smashed against the railings, a wrack of chairs tossed off to one side. They were going nowhere when a husky sailor in a blue uniform broke through, beating his way to the front. He punched Hulda Grant in the jaw and she pitched into the chairs. Donald lost his footing, and then the people were on top of him, heavy, and he couldn't see anything.

Blue sky

The same thing was happening all over the tent. Someone bowled an elderly man over from behind and he landed in a tangle of seats. He got up only to be knocked down again. The younger and stronger pushed the older and weaker over chairs, knocked them down and stepped on them. As one witness politically admitted: "It is fair to say that many people were trampled by those who had the brawn to carry it off."

Yet some did look out for others. A young mother from Hartford hit the railing of section C with her two-year-old and couldn't break loose. A thin, thirtyish man in shirtsleeves reached over from the track and lifted both of them out so they could escape. He seemed calm, and his calmness heartened her. As she ran off, he stayed there to help those remaining.

In another section, the aisle had jammed up. Some man at the bottom was holding everyone back until his wife could work her way down to him. He wouldn't let anyone out; he just kept calling to his wife. A girl ducked under the railing and gave him a good shove, and everyone started to come out.

A man from Middletown described a similar incident from a strikingly different point of view: "The people in back of us were surging down from the higher seats and I had to hold some of them back to let [a neighbor's wife] get out. This was when I hurt my leg." Once the woman and her daughter reached him, he put his elbows out like a blocker and cleared a path for them to the exit.

Don Cook took his sister Eleanor's hand and began down, but his mother caught her other hand. Now she had Edward and Eleanor. I'm going to be very calm, Mildred Cook thought, I'm going to take my time. "You go along," she told Don.

He dashed down toward the crowd but they were running over each other, and he didn't see an easy way around. He headed back up the grandstand and to his left—east, away from the fire, skirting islands of wrecked chairs.

Mildred Cook hesitated before following Don's initial move downward and lost him in the throng beneath her. "We waited a minute," she

would say, "and I guess we shouldn't have." She led Edward and Eleanor down; as Don came across the top of the grandstand he looked back and saw them, part of the crowd now, surrounded. And then they were gone, lost among the others.

Across the tent, Joan Smith noticed all the seats behind her were empty. She told her mother she was going
up
the grandstand, not down. Joan was twelve and her mother trusted her. Go ahead, she said. The last Joan saw of her mother and Elliott, they were struggling down the aisle. She was halfway to the top when she realized she still had her Coke.

She tossed the bottle away and scaled the risers. The top edge of the sidewall hung right in front of her, partly slack from being let down for the breeze. She took hold of it with both hands and pushed off, swung clear and hung there a second before letting go.

She was a country kid, a tomboy who knew how to climb trees. When she hit the ground she relaxed, knees bent, and went with the impact. She was fine.

In G, Commissioner Hickey jumped up at the first sign of fire and hollered, "Be calm." Of course, no one paid any attention to him. One nephew responded by throwing his hot dog up in the air. Hickey quickly got the children under control and implemented a plan. The four boys would go down the sidepole right behind them. The two nieces and Isabel and little Billy he would accompany down the aisle and through the middle entrance on the south side. They started off, but one niece refused to move, evidently paralyzed with fear. Isabel came back and slapped her face. The girl moved.

The Alcorns chose to go over the back, the seventy-two-year-old former prosecutor leaping first, then catching the children as his son dropped them down. They met up with the Hickey party outside, Hugh Sr. realizing he'd forgotten his jacket in the rush. He'd had his wallet with $ 150 in it.

Going over the back of the grandstand was the best chance for those in the top rows. Parents tried to make it a game, and some children laughed as they shinnied down the poles and ropes. Adults at the bottom held the sidewall like a slide so kids could jump into it.

In the west end, the flames were overhead when one man, his wife and their five-year-old daughter jumped down. Impressed, the little girl kept saying, "It's a shame, it's a shame. The big tent."

Some people tried to catch others jumping. One terrified woman leapt from the top; her body caught a man across the head and shoulders, toppling him, almost knocking him unconscious. "If she had been a bigger woman—she weighed only about one twenty-five—I'd have lain right there and probably have been burned to death."

The Eppses and Goffs went over the back of the northwest bleachers. Mabel Epps told her older son William to climb down a pole, then dropped Richard to him, then little Muriel Goff. Once William had the two children in hand, Mabel Epps shouted, "Go! Get out of here!" He lifted the folds of the sidewall so the other two could crawl out.

Another mother was with five children in section H. Three men below caught the children as they dropped. Thinking they were all safe, the mother leapt, but outside, counting noses, she discovered she only had four. She ran back into the tent and found one boy sitting on the edge of the grandstand, stiff with fright. She ordered him to jump, and he did, but there was no one to catch him, and he injured his back.

Outside, another man had been strolling around the grounds while his wife and two kids were inside. He saw the flames and ran for the big top.

Molly Garofolo ran a beauty salon a couple of blocks south on Barbour Street, on the corner of Westland, right beside Jaivin's Drugstore. She was giving a customer a perm, the heated rods in her hair, when they saw black smoke rolling up outside. "My two boys are at the circus!" the woman screamed, and ran out the door. The hairdresser caught up with her and made her sit on the curb while she removed the rods—another few minutes and her hair would have burned.

Inside, the band played "The Stars and Stripes Forever" over and over, as if the song might calm people knocked through the bleachers or buried under chairs. Fred Bradna pleaded with the people in the east end to leave through the side flaps, but they all clotted helplessly at the bandstand exits. Children fainted in the crush.

All the while the fire was crossing the top of the tent. It spread like a grass fire, a haystack fire, a giant orange wave. Central Connecticut residents were familiar with shade tobacco tents, how a blaze on the sheer canopies could outrun the fastest man; it was like that.