The Circus Fire (16 page)

Death by fire

The ones on top burned. Trapped by their weight, flat on his stomach, Elliott Smith could hear them screaming. He could breathe all right, he wasn't suffocating. He could see the reflection of the fire on the ground directly in front of him. He spat at the sawdust, trying to put it out.

He felt short stabs of pain in his back, like being jabbed again and again with a knife. Above him, the screaming stopped.

Donald Gale gathered his strength and forced his hands free, and then his arms, his face—just as the fire roared over the track. He saw a flash of light and pulled back, trying to hide in the pile, but it was too late. The burns were like being pinched hard all over, like someone was sticking pins in his hands. The heat fused his knuckles into lumps, seared his arms up to his shoulders. After a minute he passed out.

The pile at the northeast chute only covered Jerry LeVasseur from the chest down. The fire tore at his head and hands and shoulders, turning his skin into fuel, then moved on.

In a typical structural fire smoke is the killer because it has no place to go—as in the Cocoanut Grove. Trapped victims fall unconscious, like Mildred and Edward Cook. They involuntarily breathe in superheated air which scorches the lungs, and poison gases. The body responds by dousing the lungs with fluid, and the victims either asphyxiate or drown in their own juices. In an overwhelming percentage of cases, fire victims die before the flames touch them. Here was the exception, and on a grand scale.

Those who'd jumped off the top rows of the grandstands and bleachers and broken their ankles or legs and couldn't run were helpless, trapped and tangled under the burning canvas. The fire ate their clothes and then their skin and then their tissues, the fat raging like gasoline.

The stands burned, the bibles and bleachers—everything. This part of the fire was probably the hottest. The circus painted their grandstand chairs with a dip method, hanging them on hooks and lowering them into a bath of that year's color. Over the seasons, the chairs built up thick layers, all of them volatile. Nearly fifty years later, when a Hartford detective touched a match to a paint chip taken from one lucky chair, it flared up like a chunk of Sterno.

The heat withered trees, sent people fleeing, afraid the woods might catch fire. Deacon Blanchfield directed his water trucks. "I started the trucks over to protect the wild-animal cages, and someone told me there were people in there burning, and I countermanded the order and put the trucks to work. . . . They told me there was a little boy burning in the exit, and when the trucks came to the exit, I stopped them at the exit, and had them play water onto these people."

The wagons to the south side of the tent were burning, and some concession tops. A circus hand jumped in a Coca-Cola truck and backed it away from the tent.

The flames were dangerously close to the light plant and its generators, which were filled with diesel. In his Weary Willie costume—complete with huge shoes—Emmett Kelly came rushing over with a wash bucket full of water, his painted frown a perfect expression of dismay and helplessness.

Hands filled buckets from a canvas trough on wheels near where the menagerie had been. Gangs of roughnecks strained to push the light wagons away from the tent. Their tires were burning. Deacon Blanchfield had tractors come in and drag them out, water truck 133 spraying them as they rolled.

Engine Company 7 was the first unit to arrive. As they neared box 82 at Clark and Westland, they slowed. Two boys in the road pointed toward the circus, and they accelerated. The tent was down on the ground, the fire confined to the east end. At a glance, 7's captain saw that despite George W. Smith's efforts they couldn't fit the truck along the south side. They'd have to lay a line in. There was a hydrant right by the grounds, but still it would be a ton of hose. The captain called on the civilians standing there to lend a hand. Young John Stewart stepped forward and volunteered.

They laid nine hundred feet, then had to add another one hundred fifty. It stretched down to the southeast corner where the Coca-Cola top was now a puddle of glass and ashes. "That's not water," someone warned the firemen, and they detoured around it. By the time they reached the east end there was no tent left, only the bleachers burning, so they directed their attentions to the wagons.

Commissioner Hickey hustled down the midway and found a policeman. He asked the officer to see that all cars with stretchers went to the east end, and as soon as possible, even if they had to run over the hoses. He slid into cruiser number 8 where Chief Hallissey was sitting. After a brief conference, Hickey got on the radio and called Governor Baldwin, a friend and fellow Republican. They would need to mobilize all civilian defense forces within reach of the city. Immediately. Yes, it was that bad. Transportation was going to be a problem, and crowd control.

"Listen," Baldwin said, "I'll go on the air and tell them not to go out there when they hear of the fire but to communicate with this office."

Hickey agreed.

Mayor William Mortensen arrived minutes after the first fire crews. He saw the bodies at the chute and conferred with Hickey, then used the phone at McGovern's to call the State Armory. They would use the huge floor of the drill shed as a makeshift morgue.

The governor contacted the state police and asked the Connecticut State Guard to alert their reserves. Baldwin then enlisted all the doctors, nurses and medical supplies he could get from the Veterans' Home in Rocky Hill and the Veterans' Hospital in Newington. He mobilized a corps of state employees there at the Capitol to take care of the clerical duties at the armory, then set up his emergency broadcast with WTIC.

A popular governor, Baldwin had recently announced he would not seek reelection. State's Attorney H. Meade Alcorn and some other Republicans had drawn up a petition urging him to reconsider—for the good of the state, not just the party—but Baldwin was firm. He was supposed to be taking it easy, cruising through his last months in office. Now this.

He wasn't alone in his efforts. The state and the city were fully prepared for a disaster of this magnitude. After the flood of '36 and the great hurricane of'38 and the Charter Oak Bridge collapse in '41, both had de-

vised wide-ranging organizations capable of responding to any catastrophe in a concerted manner. After Pearl Harbor, the State War Council added thousands of volunteers to the mix and a level of vigilance that would never be duplicated. On the heels of the Cocoanut Grove, Dr. Donald B. Wells of Hartford Hospital coordinated all these agencies with the state police, the Red Cross, and Hartford County's seven civilian hospitals.

A major air raid, a tornado, a munitions explosion—the plan and the equipment were in place, right down to dozens of department-store delivery trucks fitted with special racks to accommodate stretchers. Bandages. Blood plasma. The new wonder drug penicillin.

They would need all of it.

Alive, alive, alive

The elephants were just coming out onto Barbour Street as Engine Company 2 pulled in. Their handlers lined them up side by side by the far curb.

They trumpeted and swung their heads and tried to circle, making everyone nervous. 2 hooked a double-gated connection onto the hydrant across from McGovern's so the other units could use it, then laid in a thousand feet of line, snaking their way through the crowd, knocking into people, weaving around clumps of bystanders.

Engine Company 4 arrived right behind them, and Deputy Chief of Police Michael J. Godfrey in his cruiser. The elephants were blocking the street, and their handlers turned them south down Barbour, trunk to tail, past 345 and 337 and the city's Maternity Home and into a grassy lot at the corner of Charlotte and Barbour vacant except for a billboard. 4 fought its way up the midway, following 2's line, shouldering people aside.

Commissioner Hickey saw the difficulty the firemen were having maneuvering through the confusion. He gathered some policemen and formed a walking picket, herding the crowd back toward Barbour Street.

On the south side of the lot, the fire from the grandstands was so hot that the light crew had to take cover. The wind was like a blowtorch. Stakes in the ground were burning, guyropes catching the dry grass. Wagons forty feet from the tent caught fire—two of them diesel plants. A circus water truck turned its hose on them, but a man ran up and wrestled the nozzle away, trying to get water on the still-burning canvas. The workers manhandled him, flinging him to the ground.

The man was a Hartford fireman on his day off. He'd attended the show with his wife and three children, and he knew there were still people inside. He later reported the incident and the city issued warrants for the men involved. The crews of all four water trucks reported for a lineup, but the man couldn't identify anyone.

Meanwhile, Chief John C. King and his driver piled out of his radio car and ran toward the smoke. King later said: "Truck crewmen attempted to rescue the panic-stricken women and children that were caught in the path of the onrushing flames. Several ran toward us with their clothing ablaze and they were writhing in pain. As I pulled one elderly woman from under the tent, the woman fought with me to allow her to go back and get her little boy. The firemen kept her on the outside as it meant another life saved. If she had returned under the tent she would never come out alive."

A cruiser stuffed with beat cops picked up on the way bumped across the lot. The men jumped out and headed for the tent. Among them was

Det. William Dineen, whose two children had been at the show with their uncle. He ran like the rest of them.

Engine Company 16 set up shop, tying into 2's double gate and laying their line with the help of civilians. They were stunned to see the tent already on the ground. It had only been minutes since they received the alarm. They turned their water on the seats and bleachers, mopping up.

On the north side, the cat wagons were scorched but not on fire. Lions roared as teams of workers muscled the cages away from the tent.

One circus performer recalled a doctor's assistant, his arms and hands raw, carrying a burned child out of the wreckage. The child looked up at the man and said, "You aren't my daddy."

"I know I'm not your daddy," the man replied, "but I'm going to take care of you." Just as he got her inside the doctor's tent, the child died.

At the east end, by the chute, flames snapped and danced over the pile of bodies. Thomas Barber and John Stewart watched as firemen played water on it.

William Cieri was working Truck 4 out of Engine Company 14, a hook and ladder. He was new. His primary job was rescue, and when they reached the grounds he jumped off, looking for someone to help. The first person he saw was a woman running with her dress on fire. She fell to the ground, the fabric burning off her back. He wanted to turn her over to smother the flames and went to pick her up by one of her biceps. Her flesh felt like putty; it had been cooked. She stiffened up right there in his hands.

Oh my God, Cieri thought, from now on I'm wearing gloves. He turned her over and discovered she was pregnant and a feeling of uselessness came over him. He kept moving.

Inside the tent—where the tent had been—he found a boy by May Kovar's ring. He was kneeling as if in prayer, his hands clasped in front of him, his head resting on the ring curb. He wasn't charred but the heat had cracked his skull like a boiled egg left too long in the pot, his brain sticking through the fissures. If Cieri hadn't been so anxious to help, he would have gotten sick.

He went on. The stages had hardly been touched, but on the ground nearby lay a woman, her arms and legs sticking up like a cartoon of a dead animal. Beyond her, in the center ring, lay a middle-aged man cut in half by a pole, one half here, one half there. Cieri kept walking.

Under the pile on the track, Donald Gale came to, cold water shocking his skin. It came fast, cascading down through the layers of bodies above him. Donald cupped a hand over his mouth and nose so he could breathe. He could feel people pulling the bodies off him, and then a pair of hands gripped him and lifted him up. A soldier in uniform took him in his arms and carried him to the chute and handed him across to another soldier on the far side.

The pile at the chute took longer to untangle. At the bottom, firemen found Jerry LeVasseur, badly burned but still alive, not even crying.

Elliott Smith never lost consciousness. After the screaming stopped he lay there waiting, the pain constant but dull. All he could see was the ground in front of him. Eventually he heard male voices and then the stream of water splashing over the bodies on top of him. Some of the water trickled down onto his back, cool and soothing.

"Hey, that's good," he said. "More!"

The firemen heard him and poured it on, but so much that the water pooled on the ground in front of him and began to rise. Elliott couldn't lift his chin out of the mud because of the weight pressing down. "Cut it out!" he yelled. "You're gonna drown me!"