The Circus Fire (42 page)

Another, more positive legacy of the fire was the Aetna Ambulance Service. When the co-owners of the Aetna Florists came back from the navy they both had first-aid certificates. They purchased a used ambulance from

a Manchester undertaker and started their own company. Fifty-five years later it was still serving Wethersfield, Rocky Hill and Newington.

July 6, 1945, Thomas Barber and Ed Lowe visited 1565 a third time, laying a bouquet of flowers on her grave. A
Courant
photographer accompanied them. The photo of the two detectives ran on the front page, along with a joint statement. "Somebody, somewhere, must have cared enough for that little girl to take her to see the circus. In her own neighborhood, there must have been playmates, milkmen, grocery clerks, mailmen and adults who noticed that some little girl was missing from their everyday lives. It just doesn't seem possible that a child like that little one could disappear from her own small world without somebody noticing that she had gone and never come back." They'd checked with the families of the six unidentifieds, but had come up with nothing. For the sake of completeness, they named the missing and gave the descriptions of the unidentified, in case some reader had information.

The response was immediate. The wire services ran with the story, eliciting letters from across the country, some including money for more flowers. One memorial company in New Jersey offered to carve 1565 a proper headstone. When Ed Lowe went out to the grave a few days later and found the flowers and flags they'd left had been stolen, he and Barber and Godfrey put together a committee to decide how best to permanently commemorate all six. Eventually three Hartford companies as well as the New Jersey firm donated uniform markers.

Each wanted their stone to be Little Miss 1565's, so the committee came up with a fair way of choosing which it would be—in the process devising a ceremony to promote their cause. They would line up the six on the ground and a girl the same age who'd survived the fire would circle them three times, holding a white rose, then select 1565's by placing the rose on the stone.

Patty Murphy was the obvious choice to do it—the right age and the last to go home, and also a darling of the public like 1565- Apparently her aunt and uncle had no qualms with the ceremony, because in mid-August she charmed everyone with her curls, her white dress and her corsage of sweet peas, curtseying to lay the flower on a marker. The photographers blasted away at her.

In prison, James Haley received a parade of visitors. Edward Rogin re-

lied on the vice president to keep him informed—to teach him, really, the money side of the circus. Mayor Mortensen went out of courtesy. Haley pulled work detail on the Enfield Prison Farm, bending his back as he hadn't in years, his fingernails packed with dirt. If he expected Robert Ringling to stop in and thank him for taking the rap, he was disappointed. His brother-in-law never even wrote him a letter.

Ever scheming, John Ringling North attempted to visit him. Haley refused at first, then relented, meeting North in the warden's office. The two discovered they had much in common, and much to offer the other, regardless of their differences.

William Caley, having begun his sentence immediately, earned parole first, in September. He hadn't planned on rejoining the show, but the front office thought it was important—so important that they dispatched him by train and then tracked his progress by telegram all the way from Hartford to Chicago to Dallas, where they were playing.

Days after he signed on, a twister hit the big top during a matinee. In the stampede for the exits, patrons knocked Fred Bradna to the ground, badly fracturing his hip. At seventy-four, the equestrian director wasn't coming back. He'd ruled the show for so long with his whistle and perfect posture that the rest of the season seemed strange, missing a key ingredient. They closed November 3rd in Charlotte, the same day workmen installed a large slab at Northwood for the six nameless victims. Beneath a carved wreath, the inscription read:

THIS PLOT OF GROUND CONSECRATED BY THE CITY OF HARTFORD AS

A RESTING PLACE

FOR THREE ADULTS AND

THREE CHILDREN WHO

LOST THEIR LIVES IN

THE CIRCUS FIRE

JULY 6 1944

THEIR IDENTITY KNOWN BUT TO GOD

Just before Thanksgiving, newly reelected Governor Baldwin remembered the fire in a different manner. In a ceremony at the State Capitol he awarded Donald Anderson the Connecticut Medal for Distinguished Civilian War Service. Without his quick thinking, the citation read, the death toll would have been much worse.

But as a reminder of the fire, no day in 1945 approached Christmas Eve. That morning, James Haley left prison after serving eight months; that afternoon, Thomas Barber and Ed Lowe kept their vigil at Northwood Cemetery; and late that night, as a final, inescapable echo of last year's disaster, a fire tore through the Niles Street Convalescent Home, killing nineteen senior citizens. If the rest of the country had forgotten, Hartford still remembered.

1946-1950

All five men who served time for the fire went right back to work for the circus—out of loyalty or perhaps a lack of options. A grand homecoming banquet greeted James Haley on his return to Sarasota, but at that point nothing could have placated him. He'd lost weight in prison, and lost patience with his position in the show. No one had looked out for his interests, or those of his wife, and he let Robert and Edith Ringling and the circus attorneys know it in no uncertain terms. Among themselves, they decided that his months in Wethersfield had affected him, and that in time he would return to the reasonable man they knew.

In April, Haley arrived at the annual stockholders' meeting without Aubrey, who was supposedly sick. Though Edith voted her shares for Robert as president, Haley broke the Ladies' Agreement and voted his wife's shares for himself, and for John Ringling North as vice president. Victorious, Haley and North didn't wait around to discuss the legality of the matter; they got up and walked out of the room.

As the show opened in Madison Square Garden, both factions made an appearance. Edith and Robert had challenged the election in the Delaware courts, but the wheels of justice turned slowly; it would be another full year before the judge ruled. Till then, they had to stand on the sidelines and watch Haley and North operate.

Again, the route purposely skipped Connecticut. The state had passed such stringent fire laws governing tent shows that other circuses also stayed away. The only show that regularly played the city of Hartford in those years was the Shrine circus. While well attended, and for a worthy cause, their appearances made some people queasy, for good reason. They played in the State Armory.

The Barbour Street grounds underwent another change. Now that the war was over, returning soldiers needed a place to live. The mayor's Emergency Housing Commission approved a plan to move empty barracks from Bradley Field to the lot and subdivide them into ninety-six single-

family apartments. By the second anniversary of the fire, the city had laid out two intersecting streets ending at a cul-de-sac back by Sponzo's property. Carpenters banged away inside the wooden shells. For protection, the city installed three fire hydrants, one where the front door of the big top had been, another near the bandstand.

North End residents considered the Barbour Street Veterans' Housing Project sacrilegious, in bad taste. When the workmen were driving the foundation piles, a neighborhood woman served them sausage-and-pepper grinders for lunch and listened to them talk about the things they found. "Every time I went by," Thomas Barber's daughter Gloria Vieth said, "I'd think, how can they live there? They said the odor was there for a long time—the odor of smoke." Stories went around that the place was haunted, that the city couldn't keep their tenants because of the unearthly screaming; eventually, people said, so many of them left that the project was a ghost town, and they tore it down. This may be a legend in itself. The project was always meant to be temporary, there only until builders could meet demand, which they soon did.

The second anniversary also brought the first major lead in the case

of Little Miss 1565. The
Courant
ran the morgue photo, along with a capsule of facts. After reading a wire story on Barber and Lowe, a Michigan woman thought the description of the girl matched her granddaughter. The woman's daughter had divorced the girl's father. She was a wanderer, and the two had last been heard of four years ago in South Bend. The girl would have been six at the time of the fire.

Though Lowe doubted "very seriously" that this was her, he provided the grandmother with the photo. A comparison with an early picture of the girl convinced the woman. Her two sisters agreed; they were all positive she was Little Miss 1565.

The identification meant that either 2109 or 4512, both adult women, was probably the woman's daughter. Her mother would have to locate her latest dental charts; the last dentist to work on her in Michigan had moved to another state and for some unknown reason had discarded her records.

The
Detroit Times
story that broke the news said, "The Hartford detectives are certain that is the answer to the mystery," an assertion Barber vehemently denied. He also seriously doubted the woman's story. Chief Godfrey backed him up, saying 1565 was in all probability from the Central Connecticut area, her family mistakenly claiming the wrong body and leaving her at the armory.

In Portland, Oregon, the girl's mother read the story about herself in the newspaper and immediately wrote her mother a letter. She and the girl were fine.

The woman from Michigan chalked it up to an honest mistake, and it was true, the two pictures were an uncanny match. Lacking forensic evidence, the identification probably would not have gone through, but she still would have been satisfied. This was even better. "If the story had never run in the papers," she said, "I might never have heard from my daughter and granddaughter." The case remained open.

The circus had burned down over two years ago. WTIC's Fire Prevention campaign kept the issue in the public eye. A reporter who'd been on the grounds that day chaired the effort. The station sponsored a poster contest for area schoolchildren, with savings bonds as prizes. Billboards along the shore reminded beachgoers that
FIRE
TAKES NO HOLIDAY

and asked, HAS YOUR CIGARETTE CAUSED A FIRE LATELY?

But much of the circus fire's true legacy was private. Well after they'd left Municipal, Barbara and Mary Kay Smith regularly returned to Hartford Hospital for X-ray treatment to stop keloid tissue growth. Barbara's grafts grew so rigid she couldn't bend her arms. She had to travel to Mass General, where doctors broke the tissue at her wrists, grafting more skin from her stomach, legs and rear to form pliable joints. It worked, yet she still walked with her arms oddly bent.

Their mother took the deaths of the Norrises hard. She passed the empty hours sewing the girls long-sleeved dresses, though no one stared at them. As time passed, they wouldn't wear the dresses anymore. The kids at St. John's treated them just the same.

Donald Gale wasn't so lucky. The doctors took the bandages off his hands, but he couldn't do much. Now he had to wear shoes, so his feet, with which he'd learned to manipulate objects, were useless too. His parents had to dress him. He returned to the hospital often for therapy, and did his exercises at home, but at school he was an instant freak, an outsider. He couldn't do anything to risk hurting his hands, and turned into an easy mark, the other kids beating him up. At Mayberry Village, his mother came outside to find other boys sitting on top of Donald. She chased them home, scolding their mothers as well. Eventually, Donald's parents took some of the settlement money and moved him from public school to Suffield Academy, where he discovered a godsend—soccer. The school was all boys, which was easier. He was self-conscious, and it would be a long time before girls would even associate with him.

Jerry LeVasseur wore a hat to cover the burns on his head. The other kids made fun of him, and Jerry ended up getting into fights and into trouble. He spent several summers at Presbyterian Medical Center in New York where the doctors fixed his left hand so he could grip objects. The settlement money covered the bills. While he was recuperating, a nurse there took him under her wing, easing him through therapy. By the end, they were playing tennis. Back at school, Jerry rediscovered baseball, wearing his glove on his right hand and taking it off to throw.

Elliott Smith's mother wore a full wig to hide her bald spot. Monthly Elliott went back for X-ray treatments like Barbara and Mary Kay's. He was frail, and the kids in the neighborhood treated him more gently than before. His family spoiled him rotten. One thing that bothered him was be-