The Circus Fire (35 page)

2200—55 to 60 year old male, white (probably), 5'3", 170 lbs. (approximately), short moderate build, head circumference 20". Well kept, regular dental care; good deal of gold work and bridges.

4512—30 to 35 year old female, Black (probably), 5'2", 160 lbs. (approximately), short stocky build, wide hips, head circumference 21", married and probably a mother. Wears ornamental ring on right ring finger, wedding ring on left ring finger. Very good teeth; all teeth present except lower left first molar.

While the photographer popped away, Dr. Weissenborn filled out the death certificates. Where the form calls for "Name of Hospital," he filled in "Barbour St. Circus Grounds" for all six, though at least 1565 had died at Municipal. He gave all six the same cause of death: "Burns by fire, 3rd and 4th degree."

Six different funeral homes had offered their services free of charge. At 10:30, as planned, Weissenbom turned the bodies over to them.

At noon, on orders from Commissioner Hickey, Adolph Pastore gassed up the Cadillac and set off for Rochester with Hartford police officer George Sanford. Hickey trusted only Eastman Kodak themselves to develop Sanford's 8mm film.

The police photographer followed 1565 to the Taylor & Modeen Funeral Home, unwilling to give up so easily. The undertakers there touched up her face and combed her hair back, and he took two more shots for future identifications, one head on, one a profile.

Apparently Robert Ringling was worried about the possibility, as president of the corporation, of being arrested like James Haley. Circus attorney Dan Gordon Judge checked with associates at his New York firm, one of whom wrote back: "Dreyfuss has found authorities (both New York State and Federal), indicating clearly that Mr. X is not subject to extradition." Rumors placed Ringling in New York City, holed up in the Plaza Hotel under an assumed name, but of course these were only rumors.

The cortege left Hartford Hospital shortly before 3:00, six hearses escorted by city police and firemen behind Chiefs Hallissey and King. The procession turned from Jefferson onto Main Street, private cars falling in behind, rolling slowly through the canyon of office buildings and department stores. Around them, traffic stopped; men on the sidewalk doffed their hats. At city hall Mayor and Mrs. Mortensen joined the mourners. The cortege proceeded up Main and through the North End, passing within blocks of the circus grounds before turning into the iron arch of Northwood Cemetery.

The cemetery was the city's Soldiers Field, its veterans from the Spanish-American War and Pershing's Mexican Expedition and the Great War laid out in neat rows, the identical gravestones even as teeth. A small private corner backed up to Keney Park. Here the city had selected a plot large enough for all six. The graves were open, framed by boards crossed to hold the coffins. 1565s was conspicuous, the only white one; even the two other children had adult boxes.

It hadn't rained, but the air was thick. A reverend read the 23rd Psalm. The rabbi from Emanuel Synagogue read the Kaddish and the Mole Rahmin. Finally Father Looney read in Latin the committal service and sprinkled the graves with holy water. The crowd joined in prayer.

As the last cars filed out, gravediggers lugged the coffins aside and jumped down into the holes. They hadn't finished digging. On the grass lay six stakes, each bearing a number.

By the cemetery entrance stood the nameless dead's opposites—rows of graves with no bodies. Headstones commemorated local men killed in faraway places or buried elsewhere: Manila and Tunisia, Belgium and Honolulu. Killed in Action, one said, the location insignificant. Lost at Sea. Missing in Flight.

In Center Cemetery in Southampton, Massachusetts, a cenotaph would remember Eleanor Cook, her brother Edward's stone right beside it. The children held their own memorial service. Rev. James Yee led a procession from the town center, gathering neighbors and friends from Eleanor's grade and Edward's Sunday school class as they moved down East Street toward the Parsons' house. The boys wore church clothes—slacks and a shirt and tie—the girls their best dresses. Edward's casket was in the Parsons' three-season porch, a long room with a hardwood floor and windows on

three sides. On the lid stood a picture of the Cook children, a flower arrangement blocking Donald. Rev. Yee conducted a full service for the town's children; later at the Congregational Church he would perform another for their parents.

Thomas Barber missed the services for the dead he'd watched over for the past four days. He had to give his daughter Gloria away. Because Orville Vieth was going overseas, they couldn't postpone the wedding. Father Looney married them in St. Michael's before a small crowd of family and friends. They needed to cut the pictures short and head off to the reception; the church had a hectic schedule with all the funerals. Immediately following the ceremony, the hearse from Farley's rolled up with Billy Dineen's coffin.

The Barbers and Dineens were good friends. Last Friday, knowing they wouldn't be able to make the boy's funeral, Barber and Gloria had visited with them to pay their respects. The Dineens apologized for having to miss the wedding.

Cities as far away as Houston held services for the dead. Hartford's namesake in England, Hertford, sent its official sympathy. Telegrams rained in from across the country. Hartford and St. Francis Hospitals had to ask well-wishers not to send any more flowers, citing the extra heavy load on maintenance workers.

In Chicago, where the circus had an office, the
Tribune
noted that "a report by Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey investigators, prepared independently of the official inquiry, said that sisal hemp, a product of the Yucatan and as combustible as dry kindling, was employed for the lacing which held the six-sectioned big top together. Flames raced along the shoestring fashion lacework of these seams to reach the center pole bail rings supporting the canvas, the report said."

The vault at police headquarters reeked of the fire. Among the items still unclaimed: a child's shiny black patent leather sandal, a Glastonbury Fire Department badge, draft cards, blankets (taken from car trunks to cover the dead), checkbooks, snapshots, and several yards of "summer cotton dress goods." Police were especially impressed with die honesty of people turning in ration coupons for food, shoes and gasoline.

Not everything could be replaced so easily. One daughter wrote to the coroner looking for a sizable diamond ring and large emerald her mother

wore. Circus performers The Four Macks beseeched the police; they needed a new table built for their roller-skating act but weren't allowed back on the lot to measure the old one.

The lot itself was becoming cluttered—specifically the backyard. The mayor met with health department officials, hoping to find a solution. A homeowner at 95 Cleveland Avenue made a complaint about the latrine behind the cookhouse. Its six toilets, servicing several hundred workers, stood just thirty yards from his back door. The circus cleaned it twice daily, but inspectors said their sanitation was only fair. The health department discussed it with the chief steward.

Worse than the toilets for some neighbors were the smells and sounds of the animals. The elephants and big cats were loud, sometimes in the middle of the night, and with the heat, Sponzo's meadow was decidedly aromatic. And who knew how long they would be there?

On their end, the circus was running out of supplies. They were supposed to be long gone by now, finished with Springfield, doing tonight's show in Albany, then heading for Schenectady. Instead, they were stuck on Barbour Street, paying inflated prices for ice and meat and hay, and no end to it in sight.

The crackdown on tent shows didn't let up. At the city's insistence, the Colored Elks Club on Bellevue Street removed a tent from their lot, and the building and fire departments refused a permit for a revival show hoping to set up in the North End. Yet somehow Dick's Paramont Carnival met Commissioner Hickey's strict criteria. They opened that night in Berlin, under the lights, playing through the 15th with a fat lady as well as snake, posing and ape shows.

At Hartford and St. Francis, the night was quiet, but early that morning the halls at Municipal were suddenly busy. The boy who'd shared a bed with Jerry LeVasseur right after the fire weakened after midnight. He hung on through the early morning, the doctors working elbow to elbow over him until he was gone. Down the hall, his mother slept, her face and arms scarred. She had another son, but this was her baby. The doctors wouldn't tell her for months.

July11-July 15
,

1944

Tuesday at 10:00 A.M. Coroner Healy opened his formal inquest, calling six ushers and seatmen first, hoping to discover the fire's origin.

One seatman offered his opinion: "Probably somebody was sitting on the back row of seats that struck a match on the tent, or maybe it started at the men's toilet. . . . That is about the only two ways I could say."

Head usher John Carson testified: "I think probably somebody lit a cigarette and threw the match out the other end and it caught that way. They never do burn with a cigarette."

Witnesses mentioned the Spanish web fire in Portland and the pin-hole in Providence, yet none brought up a more serious blaze. In Philadelphia, their first stand under canvas, flames had broken out on the sidewall of the dressing tent. Oddly, this incident never came to light in any of the Hartford investigations.

Commissioner Hickey continued to gather evidence, corralling as many photos of the fire and its aftermath as he could find.

He resumed his hearing by recalling James Haley and asking him again about the show's fire and liability coverage. Haley had the facts now. Five different companies carried their fire insurance for a total of $578,000, Lloyd's of London their liability at $500,000. The answers satisfied Hickey; he dismissed Haley after five minutes.

City detectives visited witnesses at their homes to take their testimony. William Dineen spoke to families in the North End. Ed Lowe handled mail about missing children. Thomas Barber interviewed people who'd been in the southwest bleachers, including one man who sat seven rows up and said he "smelled something like paper burning" minutes before the fire started. Another man in section B had heard a combustion engine running just outside the tent, right where the fire started.

That afternoon the
Times
ran photos and the story of the burial ceremonies at Northwood on page 2. Directly across from them an article headlined GIRL STILL MISSING SINCE CIRCUS FIRE described Eleanor Cook. She was "tall for her age, was dressed in a blue and red plaid playsuit, red

socks and white summer shoes. Her hair is light brown and bobbed and her eyes are blue. She was first reported in the hospital with her mother and brother but this proved to be untrue. ... A member of the family said the little girl who was buried yesterday among the unknown victims was not Eleanor."

Children who'd survived the fire unharmed—and there were thousands—became neighborhood celebrities, telling their tales of escape over and over. For some, it was an adventure, the first big event they'd been a part of. It was exciting to see their own names in the paper. "In our innocence," one said later, "we didn't have a clue." For the same reason, many never had bad dreams.

The aftermath could even be comic. One girl's father had been burned on his bald spot, a blister rising like a tiny cap. One evening while he was reading the paper, the blister broke, the water trickling down over his brow.

Others like Betsy Kurneta couldn't sleep for weeks. When they did, they dreamed of the fire, waking bolt upright in the dark, screaming.

Wednesday the
Courant
brought up the issue of Unidentified #1: "Parts had been cremated immediately after the fire because of the absolute impossibility of identification." The author didn't commit to whether #1 represented a seventh unidentified person, but later that day the
Manchester Evening Herald
built on his lead, saying, "The remains of one body, entirely indistinguishable, had been cremated earlier."

This description may be a gloss of Weissenborn's write-up on #l's death certificate. After the fire, "dismembered parts of a body were found. Left hand, left foot, part of skull and brain and right hand. These rapidly deteriorated and were destroyed. It was impossible to determine what sex from these. It is my impression that this body was crushed by a falling pole and the rest of the body burned and trampled beyond recognition. Was disposed of by incineration at the Hartford Hospital on July 7, 1944."

Weissenborn called #1 a single body for convenience. The pieces came to him in different containers, and not all (if any) came from the same person. The state police list of the parts—given to them by Weissenborn

himself—included three left feet, one of which came from a child. So many bodies lost hands and feet that these could have easily been from them, and the piece of skull fit with the description of the unidentified woman in the morgue on Saturday whose head was almost entirely missing. #1 had no torso and no limbs, just the very extremities.