The Circus Fire (18 page)

The police had arrived in force now, patrol wagons swinging up in front of the grounds, squads of officers hopping down out of the back. Hickey had them clear the midway and set up ropes to keep people out.

Inside the ropes there was just as much confusion. One distraught woman walked around holding her arms outstretched. She kept saying over and over again, "He's only this big—have you seen him?" She peeked under scraps of canvas, repeating her plea.

Another woman knelt down in prayer with a man. In minutes the woman's two children, faces smudged and clothes torn, emerged from the crowd and sprinted into her arms.

One bally girl had rescued several children during the fire. Now she tended to the wounded, tearing off strips of her slip to bandage the arm of a woman whose hair was burned to a cinder. Next she tried to help a father carrying his badly burned son. The man was hysterical, laughing and crying at the same time.

People keened and prayed out loud. Women roamed the grounds, shoeless, stockings ripped, weeping and calling for their children. Terrified children flitted about blindly, crying for their mothers.

Don Cook stood outside the east end with the couple and their two children, waiting, until it was clear no one else was coming out. Then he walked back with them to their car.

David Curlee had made it to their car. The metal was hot in the sun, and there were people everywhere. Finally his uncle showed up, leading the other children.

"Where's your dad?" he asked.

David pointed back toward the big top. "He's in there."

Bringing out the dead

The man with the mustache carried Elliott Smith outside and lifted him into the back of an army truck. A G.I. was kneeling there, tending two other wounded. The man with the mustache banged on the side of the truck and shouted, "Go, go!" and the six-by-six rolled over the grounds. Every bump hurt.

Another soldier helped Donald Gale onto the white circus bus, filling with burned survivors. The bus had a bad spring, and leaned, higher on one side. The soldier held him all the way to Municipal Hospital.

A cab full of mothers and children took Jerry LeVasseur. They were all crying except Jerry. He felt it wouldn't do any good.

Mae Smith found a man to drive her girls, the three of them in his backseat.

Another man drove Mildred and Edward Cook to Municipal. Edward whimpered from his burns. In bad shape herself, Mildred had him on her lap, trying to soothe him. When she touched him, his skin came off in her hands. He moaned and moaned. With the traffic and all that had happened, the driver snapped, "Can't you keep him quiet?"

Stanley Kurneta discovered his nephew Raymond Erickson among the injured, lying on a board in the shade of a circus wagon. Raymond's face and neck were burned brown and his clothes were soaked; he'd been in the pile against the chute. He was sobbing quietly, his eyes rolling from side to side. His uncle gently picked him up and carried him to an army truck filled with victims. He climbed in after him, and they were off.

The Red Cross Motor Corps cars in which the convalescent soldiers from Bradley had come were pressed into service. A few of the men had suffered minor injuries escaping from the big top, but even those who were unhurt weren't allowed to help. They were patients. They stood there in the middle of all the chaos, frustrated.

The emergency plan worked. On Barbour Street, trucks from Pratt &

Whitney and Colt's waited for the cars and six-bys to leave so they could bring in their loads of stretchers and blankets. All war industries had their own plant protection squads and medical departments—some with ambulances fashioned from station wagons—and these arrived in force, the doctors, nurses and guards spreading throughout the grounds.

The Connecticut Company offered its buses to the police and the Red Cross. There were enough trucks for the dead and wounded here, but the hospitals would need extra help. The War Council sent the buses to Trinity College to pick up one hundred fifty naval cadets trained in first aid.

At the east end, outside the back door, casualties overflowed the circus doctor's medical tent and lay strewn about the ground. There was no room so he set up an emergency hospital in the partly burned dressing top. Hands brought in four victims on a wide board—two men, a woman and a child. The men were dead, the child tucked in a fetal position, its face bloated with fluid. The woman moaned, her skin a rusty brown, eyes thin slits. A man who witnessed this found his way out to Barbour Street where his family was waiting at their car, completely unharmed. He walked by them, looking all around as if they were lost. "We're right here," his wife called.

One woman had worn plastic combs in her hair. They melted, blistering patches of her scalp.

On the sidewalk a mother holding an infant to her chest was crying.

A man went over to help her. He took the baby from her and saw her chest and the baby's stomach were burned raw.

Another mother came up to a man on the sidewalk with a terribly burned child in her arms and asked him what she should do. The man directed her to a house up the street where they were taking in victims. The man knew at a glance yet couldn't bear to tell the woman that her child was dead.

Back at the east end, Thomas Barber and his partners were still bringing out the bodies. A Wethersfield woman saw them carry out a stretcher with what she thought was an animal, because its paws were sticking up in the air. They put it in the trunk of a police car and closed the lid. Then she realized it wasn't an animal. It was a person.

"They looked like gelatin being carried out," another woman recalled. "All gush. All I could think of was they looked like black Jell-O."

The worst resembled dried relics or lumps of coal, charred logs, chunks of black pumice. Rescuers covered them with horse blankets from the ring stock top and some others with Pratt & Whitney stencilled on them.

As they turned onto Barbour, the teenager from Brown Thomson and his boss could smell the fire. They drove their truck over the sidewalk and right up onto the grounds. My God, this can't be real, he thought. There were bodies everywhere and people walking all over. The ruins were still smoking, and the smell of the dead was inescapable, stronger than rotten eggs-

They jumped down from the truck. People were picking up bodies. Some lay on stretchers, uncovered, frozen in grotesque positions. One woman, colored a golden brown, lay naked on her back, rigid as a statue; her bladder let loose and a stream of urine arced straight up from her.

One man told the teenager that he'd tried to pick up a body and his hands had gone through the flesh right down to the bone. The bone was hot and he'd burned his hand, jerking back as if he'd touched a hot stove.

The teenager and his boss were anxious to get out of there. He held his breath and swallowed a couple of times. He didn't want to do this, but it had to be done; it was what they'd gone up there to do, to help where they could. They lifted one blackened body very carefully, set it on a stretcher and placed it in the truck. They did another one, and one more

after that. Then they got back in the truck and headed downtown for Broad Street and the armory, trying not to think of what was bumping in the back on every turn.

Another man from Hartford brought a truck from Colt's. The bodies he had to deal with were hidden under a big piece of canvas, probably the sidewall of the dressing tent. The stench was like burned chicken. At one point he went off into the woods and vomited. The firemen and cops pulled the canvas back; underneath were sixty or seventy of the dead. Their clothes were gone, and their hair. The heat had dehydrated their tissues so their skin split apart, their organs boiled hard and protruding. They all looked like they were nine months pregnant—men, women and children.

A young woman was running the Aetna Florist Shop for two uncles away in the navy. They'd fitted their delivery truck for emergencies, and the woman ferried the injured to hospitals and families to the morgue in search of loved ones. "You saw people burned so bad it was sickening," she recalled. "I couldn't eat for days."

A mortician from the O'Brien Funeral Home in Bristol had his ambulance on the scene early and took five bodies to the armory. Very plainly, the undertaker said they were in the worst shape he'd ever seen.

In the middle of this, mothers and fathers stalked the grounds, searching for their children. One man's three-year-old son had become separated from him as they left the tent, and he feared the child had been trampled. The father finally found him in a yard on Barbour Street, every stitch of clothing torn from his body, including his shoes.

Commissioner Hickey's nieces and nephews were safe back at Aunt Isabel's house down the block—all but one, who for some reason chose to walk home. The boys had gone over the snow fence into the victory gardens and cut through a yard to Barbour Street. Aunt Isabel took care of little Billy and the girls. When they had everyone together, Adolph Pastore fit them all into the Cadillac and drove up to the grounds to let the commissioner know everything was okay.

In the backseat with the other boys, one of the nephews wasn't sure everything was okay. In the scramble his shirt had somehow fallen out of his back pocket. His mother was not going to be pleased.

Girls lost their hair ribbons, women lost their purses. One older gentleman lost his upper denture.

A child of five was upset because he'd lost his program. A woman came up to him and said, "Here, little boy, you can have mine." Her arms were burned from her wrists to her shoulders, but she handed him the program as if nothing was wrong.

The police collected lost children, sitting them in their cars for the time being.

The man from Wallingford who'd seen the smoke downtown screeched up and ran for the midway. He'd had three miles to imagine the worst, but the scene was beyond his comprehension. The police at the ropes wouldn't let him in to look for his children and mother-in-law. They restrained him like anyone else. One cop finally convinced him to wait, that there was nothing he could do here. He padded back to Barbour Street, his mind still flying, only to find his mother-in-law and the two kids waiting for him. His daughter had recognized their car.

Another woman spotted her missing daughter on the street and made her way through the crowd, eyes locked on the girl, afraid she'd disappear again. A fire engine swung between them, nearly hitting the mother.

The grounds were a maze of bystanders, cars and fire equipment. Through it snaked an endless procession of trucks and buses and makeshift ambulances filled with burned survivors. The trucks bumped over the dirt laid across the sidewalk and turned onto Barbour, headed west to Municipal or south to Hartford Hospital. Behind them came a convoy of the dead, slower, though their sirens were just as insistent, spreading across the city like an invading army.

Triage

At 2:45, as soon as they heard from Sergeant Spellman that the big top was on fire, police headquarters called Municipal Hospital and asked them to send doctors to the grounds. The call also served as an alert. Municipal was only a few minutes from Barbour Street. They'd see the brunt of the casualties.

Also known as Hartford City Hospital, Municipal would never be mistaken for their much larger, private cousin, Hartford Hospital.

Municipal was the charity hospital, the place you went when you couldn't pay. Its clients were the poor and indigent, and in the last decade the hospital had come to resemble its patients. "It was a dog," said one nurse who worked at both Municipal and Hartford. There was no money for upkeep. The equipment was old and there were holes in the floors. It was a place no one wanted to be, and now everyone was coming here.

As the ambulances rolled, Municipal scrambled. Each floor sent their spare nurses downstairs to admitting. The switchboard called back all off-duty personnel and requested extra internes from Hartford and St. Francis Hospitals. Nurses prepped the four operating rooms. The staff gathered morphine and plasma and bandages and rushed them downstairs. Janitors set up extra cots and mattresses in the wards and halls.

Downtown, Hartford Hospital had a few more minutes to prepare. The chief of staff put all personnel on alert, addressing them over the PA system. After Pearl Harbor, the hospital had drafted an emergency plan for civilian disasters. They'd run a drill the previous fall so everyone knew their battle stations. They'd also designed a large triage room on the ground floor of their brand-new South Building capable of handling one hundred patients, outfitting it with lockers full of equipment and laying in direct oxygen, suction and electrical lines. An overflow maternity ward happened to be empty, and by chance a large surgical ward had recently been cleared for painting. Minutes after the call, Hartford Hospital knew where their wounded were going to go.