The Circus Fire (21 page)

The details were sketchy, even contradictory. "One eyewitness said he thought that everyone must have escaped before the tent collapsed because the fire spread so slowly." But then, in the next paragraph: "It appeared that a considerable number of persons died in the flames or in the rush to leave the tent."

The story went out over the AP wire, making papers across the country. The
New Britain Herald
printed the very same copy. Directly beside it—as if to put it in context—ran an article headlined: HAMBURG DEATH TOLL REVEALED AS 41,385. While the firebombing of the city had taken place the summer before, the German press chief had just released the figures— he conceded—to counter Churchill's outrage at their use of V-2 rockets against civilian targets.

In Bristol, people crowded the Press office, relying on the speed of the AP wire to bring them news of their families. They scanned the teletype for casualty lists.

When word reached Sarasota, the home of the circus, the city virtually stopped. The
Herald Tribune
was overrun with friends and relatives of the circus employees. They'd heard that three performers had been killed. Like the people of Bristol, they were waiting for names.

The news crossed the world by teletype. One woman's brother, in New Guinea with the Army Air Corps, heard the report and had the feeling someone in his family was at the fire. He stopped what he was doing, went back to his quarters and prayed the rosary.

Downtown, Spencer Torell walked into the State Street offices of the
Courant,
sweaty after his long trek. He had some pictures of the fire they might like, he said. A man in the photography department said they'd have to develop them and take a look. Fine, Torell said; he'd wait if that was okay.

While he was sitting in the lobby, a couple of reporters came back from the grounds. Since he was an eyewitness, one of them interviewed him. While they were talking, Torell asked if anybody had been hurt. The man's answer shocked him. He and Wally had been sitting so far down in K, away from the fire, so low and close to the exit that all they had to do was stand up and turn the corner and they were safe. He'd just assumed that everyone else had gotten out.

The photographer came back from the lab with the prints. These were the best shots he'd seen so far; maybe they'd use them tomorrow if nothing better came in. The
Courant
paid Torell $25. He left feeling lucky—unhurt, with some extra spending money in his pocket. He walked across the street to the Isle of Safety to catch the bus back to New Britain. For him the day was just beginning. He still had to go to work.

We can't reach you, Hartford

Half an hour after the fire, hundreds of relatives crowded Municipal Hospital's lobby, searching for loved ones. The odds of finding anyone at this point were slim, since admitting had not had time to compile a list. One grandfather, after checking everywhere, discovered his granddaughter standing outside on the walk, still clutching her circus program.

A force of thirty auxiliary police from New Britain moved in to clear

the area. Along with a clutch of Bradley Field MPs, they stood guard on the front steps and the lawn while air raid wardens directed inessential traffic up Coventry and down Holcomb.

Inside, the burned and injured filled the wards and lined the hallways. Empty, Municipal had a maximum capacity of 145 beds. That afternoon they saw 143 patients, many of them critical.

An anesthesiologist from Hartford Hospital visited Municipal. "People were dying in the corridors," he said. "The staff was overwhelmed. No one seemed to know who was in charge, and those in charge didn't seem to be sure they were."

One nurse also worked at Hartford Hospital but ended up helping out at Municipal. The place was chaos, all the crying. Some children didn't know their own names. A doctor asked her if she had any operating room training; she said yes, she'd been a scrub nurse once. It was good enough for him. She walked into the operating room. On the table was a girl with dark hair, about fifteen, lying on her side. The woman recognized her—it was a neighbor of hers. The doctors pulled a sheet over her. They rolled her out and brought in the next one.

The janitors were so busy carting stretchers they didn't have time to clean up the mess. In a corner of the lobby sat a heap of torn paper cartons labeled: Plasma—For Human Use. Down the hall a priest with a purple stole around his neck bent over a bed and quietly recited the last rites. A nurse waited until he was done, then asked, "Can you come up to the fifth floor, Father? There's a woman."

The hospital assigned a nurse's aide to every patient. One aide drew a badly burned woman. "The woman said, 'I had a permanent and they cut all my hair off.' And I said, 'Oh, that's all right. When it comes back it'll come back naturally curly.' She was so sick. She threw up all over me."

The aide had to take a gurney down to the morgue. "When the elevator doors opened in the basement and I went to push the stretcher out, there were a lot of men down there. There were bandages all over the floor. They didn't let me in, I just stayed on the elevator. I didn't want to go in there anyway. I just handed them the stretcher and went back upstairs."

The men she saw were soldiers. The trucks that had brought Elliott Smith and Raymond Erickson now shuttled the newly dead downtown to

the armory on Broad Street. Five came in DOA. Another six succumbed within the first hour.

By now the alarm broadcast over the radio had mobilized an army of nurse's aides. Bluebirds, they were called, after their blue uniforms. They streamed in from the surrounding towns and went to work setting up extra beds, taking patients from admitting up to the wards, passing out cups of orange juice, rolling bandages, applying dressings, administering plasma—anything they were asked to do. Sometimes they were more of a comfort to the injured than anything, sitting with children and holding their hands so they wouldn't be alone.

Hartford Hospital saw fifty-one patients, nineteen of whom they treated as outpatients and released. The others they stabilized with fluids, swathed in gauze bandages and sent up to their respective wards.

A brother and sister sat in the lobby of the old Brownstone Building, waiting for their parents. Both were staff doctors, their father a urologist, their mother a pediatrician. They'd taken the day off and gone to the circus, only to wind up back at work. Across the courtyard, in South Building, they were seeing victims with black eyes and broken ribs from the struggle at the chute. The children would be here for hours.

While Hartford Hospital had far fewer casualties and much more room, they still had to deal with the same flood of relatives Municipal was seeing. The chief of staff had to go on the radio and make the following statement: "The public are urgently requested not to visit or make telephone inquiries about disaster victims in the Hartford Hospital. Not more than two members of the immediate family may visit disaster victims during the next twenty-four hours, and this visit will be limited to ten minutes. Patients in critical condition may be visited by the immediate family at any time."

This might have worked if people knew where their relatives were or whether they were in critical condition. As it was, all that many knew was that their loved ones had gone to the circus and not come home.

At St. Francis, nurses cut clothing off the victims and gently peeled the fabric from their skin, then soaked the open burns in tannic acid baths. They dipped their surgical masks in wintergreen oil to camouflage the stench.

An elderly doctor from Meriden and his female companion were

burned on the head, arms and hands, but chose not to go to Municipal or Hartford or St. Francis or even tiny Mt. Sinai. Realizing that casualties would overtax the city's hospitals, the doctor decided to drive them home to Meriden.

As word spread, the preparations Connecticut had made for the war started to pay off. The county blood bank that opened weeks after Pearl Harbor was fully stocked with frozen plasma. For years now women's church groups had gathered monthly to fold bandages, proud of reaching their quotas; because of them, all the hospitals had an ample supply on hand. Plants sent stretcher crews trained for air raids. The War Council stoked up its Rolling Kitchen and headed for the armory.

The country was in a state of general readiness, and after the Normandy invasion morale was high. The ideals of shared toil and sacrifice were almost second nature by this time. On hearing of the fire, many people left work early to help out, unasked. Donors overran the Red Cross blood center on Pearl Street.

From New York, Mayor LaGuardia pledged the full support of his resources. In Boston, Mayor Tobin dispatched the team of experts that had successfully identified all 492 victims of the Cocoanut Grove in just four days.

Also catching the first flight out of Boston was the national chaplain of the Circus Fans Association of America. He'd just left Barbour Street at noon. One of the circus girls had been run over by a truck during their Boston Garden stand, and the troupe had collected $300 to help with her medical expenses. The Father had just delivered it to her in a Boston hospital when he heard the news. "It's terrible," he said, and then, reacting, it seems, to early reports that three performers had died: "They were all my friends."

In Waterbury a machinist heard at work. His supervisor told him that his wife and three-year-old daughter were unhurt but that his mother-in-law was still missing. He jumped in his car and tore for Hartford.

It was futile to call. All long-distance connections had to be made through an operator. Coming in, going out—the switchboards were jammed. At Southern New England Telephone's headquarters on Trumbull Street, operators watched their boards light up solid. They jabbed their jacks at the open holes. Operators from out of town broke in and scolded, "We can't reach you, Hartford."

"That place was lit up like Merry Christmas," one operator said. "The sirens were screaming around the building. Some of the girls on the board got upset because of the tension. One girl broke down crying; they had to relieve her."

Neighborhood exchanges were especially busy. Around town, company switchboards were clogged with outbound calls. Between 3:00 and 5:00 P.M., incoming and outgoing calls were impossible at the State Capitol and the State Office Building; eventually they cut their trunk lines to lighten the burden. The
Courant
and
Times
didn't waste their circuits; they greeted all incoming calls with busy signals.

For sheer volume, it was the greatest number of calls since the '38 hurricane. SNET reeled in as many extra operators as they could, even calling people back from vacation. By Thursday night they had two hundred fifty instead of their regular one hundred fifty. For supper the company gave each one half an hour and a voucher for the cafeteria.

People from outlying towns unable to break through called their local papers, desperate for news. In Winsted families tried the offices of the
Citizen,
in Willimantic the
Daily Chronicle.
So far no one had a list of the dead.

On Blue Hills Avenue, getting information was simpler. Groups of children waited at the bus stops. When a boy who'd been to the circus got off, they asked him a million questions, then shut up to hear what happened. "All of us kids cried," said a ten-year-old.

In West Hartford, the boys of Linbrook Road were playing ball in the middle of the street when one of their friends wandered up, disoriented and covered with soot. He couldn't find his mother, and his father was working, so a neighbor took him in.

The mother who was eight months pregnant and couldn't celebrate her daughter's birthday with her at the circus heard the news on the radio and called her husband. He was waiting at the stop when the bus pulled up with the girl. He lifted her into his arms and carried her all the way home.

Dorothy Bocek got home and asked her mother if she'd heard from her sister Stella yet. She hadn't.

The family who'd found the little blond girl drove her back to their house. The daughter washed the girl's face, then took her outside and read to her while her father called all the police stations in Connecticut. In the

end it turned out the girl was from Springfield, Massachusetts. Later that night her family drove down to pick her up.

In Southampton, Massachusetts, the woman renting half a house from Mildred Cook's sister Emily Gill heard a bulletin over the radio. The woman knew the children were at the circus. She ran across the hall and found Emily. "Did you hear what happened?" she asked.

Emily Gill went straight to her brother-in-law Ted Parsons's place. Marion Parsons was off in the eastern part of the state. There was no time to wait for her, so they left together for Hartford.