The Circus Fire (15 page)

John Stewart, the neighborhood boy who helped feed the elephants that morning, reached the grounds and saw the fire. His first reaction was to run away. He backed across the street and stood on someone's lawn. By E. B. McGurk's the neighbors had arranged a staging area for the burned. In the distance, sirens rose and fell, closing. People were draining out of the midway holding their heads, their clothes smoking. John Stewart felt overwhelmed by his inability to help them, paralyzed, and then—he couldn't explain why—he walked back across Barbour Street and began leading the injured to McGurk's.

In the big top, things seemingly hadn't changed. The band played, the people screamed. Emmett Kelly held the canvas aside so folks could get out at the east end. But the fire was closer now, the heat down on the crowd. The very air burned people's ears; women raced about with their hair afire.

A West Hartford man had his daughter and a neighbor's son with him. They were caught in the south grandstand behind a piled-up aisle.

The man had recently graduated from the army's survival school. When he saw the fire coming he pushed the children down, knelt on top of them and cupped his hands over their mouths. His daughter bit him so hard he would carry her teeth marks the rest of his life, but he never let go. "We were hit by a terrific wave of heat. I could smell my hair burning and the heat through my shirt. I got to my feet and by that time the grandstand was sufficiently emptied to see the seats and get down in the ring. The grandstand was starting to smoulder. We went straight off the grandstand and we went headfirst through the iron fence [the railing]. I have a bum leg so we went through headfirst. When we hit the ground, the grass in the ring was burning. The kids fought to get away from me. If one got away, I would never have gotten it back again. The only way for us to go was the whole length of the tent. I started to run and by that time the crowd was milling around in the ring. I did more or less [open] field running, and I went down on my knee but I got up and kept on going. I seemed to travel in a pocket, and the flame was right behind us. The heat was ahead of us. While I was running I could see the sky and see the flames going through. Also there were pieces of canvas coming down burning."

Barbara and Mary Kay Smith and their mother followed the same route, staying away from the animal cages. Barbara had lost her shoes; her mother prodded her along across the straw and matted grass. Somewhere near the east cage they saw Eva Norris, caught in the mob. "Eva," Mae Smith hollered, "we've got to get out of here." The girls were already burned, every inch of exposed skin roasted, their summer clothes no protection. The crowd surged and turned, taking the Norrises away.

The heat made people faint. They dropped, and the swarm stomped on them.

Bill Curlee, whose mother had told him he'd go home in a coffin, led his son David to the northeast chute. David was crying; his father told him to stop because it wouldn't do any good. "Go to the car," he said, "I'll meet you there," and tossed the boy across.

Curlee climbed onto the bars as if to follow him, but stopped. He saw another boy behind him and reached back and grasped his wrist and pulled. It worked. There were more hands, more kids, mothers holding toddlers up for him. Curlee stood atop the chute, throwing children to safety, one after the other. He was a big man, and young, a rarity in this audience. Dozens

at the chute watched him in awe; later they'd relate their admiration to reporters, and his story made the front page. But, unlike Donald Anderson and May Kovar, Curlee would be a tragic hero. As he was lifting yet another child over, his foot slipped between the bars, he fell, and the crowd dragged him under.

The fire had spread down the sides now. One woman was in charge of a girl who refused to jump from the top of the grandstand even though the fire was right overhead. Her arms burned from shielding the child, she tossed her over the sidewall and followed.

Outside the northwest corner, Thomas Barber turned away from the cat wagons just in time to see two boys scramble through Donald Anderson's slit in the sidewall. He shouldered through the opening and carried some smaller children out near the wooden part of the chute. Farther in, he found a woman lying on her back with her clothes on fire. He took off his jacket and smothered the flames with it, helped her out by the arm and set her down by the tree line.

The flames were above section H, the centerpoles beginning to sway. The tent was almost gone, only the east end still standing, the flags on top burning. Great sheets of canvas rose in the smoke.

Mae Smith and her girls ran past the bandstand. The skin hung off Barbara's arms.

Inside, the northeast chute was a nightmare. Marion LeVasseur and her six-year-old Jerry waited as Officers Griffin and Kenefick lifted over the friends the LeVasseurs had come with. When it was their turn, Marion reached out her free hand. The officer on top of the bars leaned across to take it, but the crowd cut her legs out from under her and she fell, taking Jerry with her.

Stanley Kurneta threw his son Tony over the chute, then helped his mother and his niece Betsy up. When he turned back for his sister Mary and nephew Raymond Erickson, they were gone. He hauled himself over and ran.

Behind them came Elliott and Grace Smith, holding hands. The crowd was packed, and all Elliott could see were people's waists and backs. The Smiths weren't moving much, but the constant crush, the insistence of bodies, separated them. Jostled, lost, Elliott swung his fists, hitting people, trying to break clear. The crowd pushed him along. He had no idea where he was, he was just trying to keep his feet. People were screaming, he couldn't hear the band, and then someone knocked into him and he felt himself going over, those closest to him folding, falling on top of him, and he was flat on his stomach, his chin on the ground.

Somewhere behind Elliott Smith were the four Norrises, driven north between the animal cages in the tumult but sticking together.

On top of the chute, Officer Kenefick felt a gust of heat. "Run!" yelled Griffin, and Kenefick looked up to see the roof above them in flames. He dropped down on the far side and sprinted out the northeast exit by the cat wagons. One of the circus water trucks was there but having trouble getting pressure.

Everywhere around the tent there were last-second rescues. A clown dragged a ten-year-old boy to safety. A man picked up a thirteen-year-old girl and carried her out, the girl tearing madly at his face. She'd been trying to find her brother.

The last out were the worst burned. One woman's back was raw from her hips to the top of her head. Another man who was helped out was blackened from the waist up, his lips puffed to twice normal size.

People leaving couldn't help but look back at the less fortunate. As one man swung down a rope he saw bodies of victims trapped in the stands. Another on his way to Barbour Street said, "I hated to think of what went on behind me."

One older fan helped save a woman whose arms were burned to the shoulder, her skin hanging down like empty sleeves. She cried that her three children were lost. The fan and another man supported her out the performers' entrance.

About the grounds, survivors wandered barefoot, clothes in tatters, choking up sooty mucus. Some fainted. There was no water to splash on their faces, so rescuers used pink lemonade.

Stanley Kurneta made sure his mother and Betsy were far enough from the tent, then put Tony over a fence and told him to keep moving. Mary Kurneta and Raymond Erickson were still in the tent, and Stanley was responsible for them. He went back in the same way he'd come out. The heat seared his face and hands and he had to retreat, bleeding.

One young woman in costume ran into the tent three times, twice coming out with children. The third time she returned empty-handed and fell to the ground.

A New Britain man guided his wife and child down the sidepoles and then went back in to save a woman and two children who were lying on the ground and screaming. As he left he saw at least fifty people piled up at the northeast chute.

Commissioner Hickey witnessed it from the east end. "I saw people

trying to climb over the chute cages in the track on the north side, and when I left the tent, owing to the heat and fire settling there were people piled alongside of this chute cage, and these folks were flaming and burning, and shrieking and hollering. On the ground at that point I saw a number of people who were afire and were rolling themselves on the ground. I saw from that point looking in, there were people still lying on the ground at the track at the east side whose clothing was afire, and under the stands I saw bodies on fire."

He ran to call for more help.

Ten more bars!

The band blasted it, sat there while the fire came straight at them, the crowd splitting like a river around the bandstand. The flames were above the end grandstand sections, not far to go. It was snowing fire. Hot cables were falling, cinders, embers.

The kettle drums exploded from the heat.

"Jump!" Merle Evans directed, and the band bailed—like true musicians, taking their instruments with them. A flaming quarterpole toppled, dropped onto the stand like a hammer.

Faces smudged, white uniforms scorched, they regrouped outside and serenaded the dazed crowd that stood there watching the drums and the organ burn.

A man leading two children straggled out. "By the time we got to the end of the tent we got out the door on the right of the bandstand. I do recall going outside of the tent, and the bandleader was standing there blowing his trumpet, and there were a couple of bandsmen around there. They were playing right at the entrance to the tent." Both children had third-degree burns all over, the man second degree burns on his lips.

By the southeast exit, a Coca-Cola top caught fire, flames enveloping tiers of empty deposit bottles in yellow wooden crates. The glass melted and pooled like water.

Inside, in the withering heat, a twelve-year-old boy and his mother reached the top of the stands. She dropped him down and told him to go. He did what she said.

High up, the guyropes parted, the rigging gave way, and the poles by the northeast corner slumped inward, then the center of the canvas. The tent sagged—slowly, not all at once, the flags on top bending almost horizontal—and then with a hissing, swishing sound, the big top collapsed on itself, the heavy centerpoles falling one after another, smashing the animal cages, crushing people. The quarters—thick as phone poles—banged into the grandstands, denting the railings.

Robert Onorato caught it on film, shooting from atop an embankment at the east end. Slowed down on video, the fire licks up the visible tip of the eastmost centerpole and wraps the flag. The flag catches and drops as if it's melting, falls, and immediately the tent collapses, softly, belling like a ball gown when its wearer curtsies, like a sail emptied of wind.

Around the south side, Spencer Torell got off shot after shot, the series showing the fire eating the tent's skin away, leaving the skeletal rigging, the quarterpoles still vainly linked by wires.

As the canvas fell it pushed the heat beneath out through the side-walls. The blast of hot air almost knocked people down.

A woman burst from the back door, badly burned on her face and arms, crying "Find my child! Find my child!" A policeman hurried her to the doctor's tent. She kept asking about her son, where was he, was he all right.

Another mother crawled out from under the sidewall with her son, striking daylight just as the tent collapsed, a Samaritan pulling them free.

The last dashed out with their arms and legs and bodies raw and bleeding, heads and necks grotesquely blistered. The smell of burned hair turned stomachs.

Not everyone escaped. The tent fell on those unlucky enough to be inside. A lot of people outside watching it fall had no idea where their loved ones were. Don Cook watched it fall, and Joan Smith, and Stanley Kurneta, and Barbara and Mary Kay Smith, and Mabel Epps.

The burning tent settled on top of those left, pinning them. Under the pile by the northeast chute, Elliott Smith could hear people above him moaning and praying. At the bottom of the mound on the track, Donald Gale thought his leg was broken. He tried to push himself up and discovered he couldn't budge.

The fire came crackling over the paraffined canvas, a soft rushing
whoosh
like the approach of wind.

The praying stopped, and then there was just screaming. People outside were stunned to hear women and children moaning and crying for their lives. Like howling, witnesses described it as. Terrible, eerie screeching.

Several survivors said the one thing they will never forget about the circus fire as long as they live is the sound of the animals as they burned alive. But there were no animals.