The Circus Fire (14 page)

The show elephants were in the backyard, getting ready for the spec. The bull men shouted "Tails! Tails!" and the herd formed the familiar trunk-to-tail queue, one attendant for every two animals, and lumbered around the south side, squeezing between the light plant and the victory gardens. When they hesitated, their handlers whacked them with their hands and prodded them with bull hooks.

In the tent the tops of the bleachers were crammed with people. Some had fallen through the boards and gotten caught; the crowd rolled over them, pressing for the edge. Not like lemmings but
against
instinct, people jumped. Some refused to, unsure where their children were. The surge from below pushed them over. It sent one teenaged girl toppling. She fell twelve feet to the ground, breaking her back.

Waiting for a little girl in front of her to jump, one woman witnessed

a man shove the child off from behind. She hadn't been going fast enough for him.

Some jumped and broke their ankles and then were unable to get up before others landed on them, knocking them out, hurting them worse. One girl remembered lighting beside a woman who couldn't move; she watched as the girl ran off. People jumped over the heads of the fallen, or climbed over them once they reached the ground. Another man recalled a lady in her thirties in a red dress whom he had to crawl over. She looked right at him, yet said nothing.

Don Cook finished his sprint across the top of the south grandstand and swung down over the railing at the end of section K. The sidewall here was loose and he slipped underneath and outside easily. People with seared faces ran choking into the underbrush. Unsure where his mother was, Don went around the east end of the tent where the biggest crowd was flowing out around the bandstand. He stood there watching everyone funnel past.

Another boy and his family ran. His father had the boy's little sister under one arm and the boy clinging to his belt. They jumped a shallow ravine where an elderly woman lay facedown in the muck. His father, never letting his sister go, reached down with one hand and pulled the old woman up and out by the back of her dress.

Another woman tore her dress going over the snow fence protecting the victory gardens. Just slats and wire, it was surprisingly strong. One young mother unable to scale the fence handed her daughter over to a man and told him to meet her on Barbour Street. "Yes," the man said, "of course I will." He ran, but once he reached the sidewalk he stopped and looked down at the girl in bewilderment. He'd been so intent on his goal that he didn't remember taking her.

And then a crowd broke out of the south side, roared across the scattered hay of the menagerie and hit the snow fence in force, bending and then flattening it, sweeping across the gardens, trampling the vegetables to mush.

Everywhere there were obstacles—wagons and stakes and crates, buckets and kegs and bales. A mother fleeing the east end tripped over a coil of rope and fell on the son she was carrying, bruising his forehead. There was chaos here with people careering out, tractors dragging wagons off, and the circus water trucks finally rolling up to fight the fire.

For people coming out the east end there was nowhere to go except down the road into the woods where there was a dump. A boy and his mother came across two older ladies sitting down, exhausted. "I wouldn't sit there," the mother said. "What if some of the animals got loose?" The ladies jumped up and took off, outstripping them.

In the confusion, rumors took on the weight of truth. The elephants were on a mad rampage. The state police had come with shotguns to hunt the lions down. Survivors pitied the animals that died in the fire; in actuality, there were none.

But, running, having just come from watching two full cages of jungle cats, naturally people assumed the worst. At this point, having escaped the tent, they were more afraid of the lions than the fire. When they finally stopped and took stock, they found they were bruised and burned and bleeding, the luckier ones just missing pocketbooks and shoes, perhaps a hat or a wristwatch. The woods were full of mothers searching for their children, the badly burned crying for help. Some didn't stop running until—blocks, neighborhoods, miles later—they made it home.

Don't look back

Sergeant Spellman ran out of the house and told an officer to move the cruiser on the lot by McGovern's out of the way, down the street. Spellman himself stayed on Barbour, herding the crowd away from the pavement. They needed to keep the road open for the fire trucks and ambulances.

Most people were out now, stunned, unsure what to do or where to go. They wandered around, watching the spectacle of the big top being consumed. One woman recalled: "I stood transfixed and saw one woman outside the tent. Before my very eyes a burning piece of canvas ignited her dress and then flame enveloped her. It all happened so fast. It was like a nightmare, unreal."

George W. Smith had caterpillars pulling menagerie wagons away from the southwest side of the tent so fire trucks could get in. Engine Company 16 was en route. The station was only a mile and three-tenths from the circus grounds. As they turned from Blue Hills Avenue onto

Tower, they saw the flames and smoke in the sky. The huge drift was so dark the men were convinced it was an oil tanker, maybe a gas station. They raced down Coventry Street and took the turn around Municipal Hospital onto Vine. Vine to Westland, Westland to Barbour—all the while glancing up, wondering, unable to make the connection.

A group of kids up on Blue Hills Avenue thought the smoke was coming from the dump, since there was always smoke coming from there. Then a pair of state police cars came roaring past, lights and sirens going, followed by two cruisers from Bloomfield.

John Stewart was walking down Barbour Street, headed back home to clean up after all his hard work, his six free passes from this morning in his pocket. He was hoping to go to the show that night. He saw the smoke and ran back toward the circus grounds.

Southeast of the tent, Spencer Torell had lost his friend Wally. He looked back at the big top, the fire licking up the centerpole toward the flag, and instinctively raised his viewfinder to his eye. Flames covered the top. The smoke billowing off it was eerily reminiscent of Pearl Harbor, the listing battleship
Arizona.

Torell took the shot and backed off. Bits of burning canvas floated down around him like confetti, nothing but ash by the time they hit the ground. Women fainted from the shock and the heat, and people gave them first aid. Cageboys fastened the shutters of the animal wagons before the tractors dragged them off.

Outside the northeast bleachers, ring stock hands led their horses farther northeast, toward a grove of trees on Sponzo's property, then, afraid they were still in danger, down the dirt road toward Hampton Street, warning people out of the way. A boy stood there holding a plumed pony. The boy was crying. He said his uncle was one of the Wallendas; he didn't know if he'd gotten out.

At the back door, Dorothy Bocek waited for her sister Stella and her nephew Francis. They'd been right behind her at the chute. She had no way of getting home because they came by bus and Stella had all the money.

Inside, by the northeast bleachers, the crowd threw one boy to the ground. To escape the stampede of feet, he crawled beneath the bleachers. Under the boards, among the programs and smashed Coke bottles, sat a

baby. The boy picked it up and carried it outside. The father rushed over to him. Nearby, a barefoot woman was crying for her baby.

Two girls from Plainville jumped from the bleachers and ducked under the sidewall. Outside, they came upon a little girl who'd become separated from a neighbor. At first the child believed it was just a "play fire," then became frightened when people bolted from the tent. By luck, she'd been pushed to safety. After quieting her down, the girls found out her name and went off to call her parents.

Another boy and his mother and sister had been in the north grandstand and had gotten separated at May Kovar's chute. The boy found his way out using a big man in front of him like a blocking back. He waited outside the main entrance for them among hundreds of others. The family was Catholic, the boy in parochial school. He was wearing a scapular under his T-shirt and in the rush one end of it had come out. His mother recognized him by it. The story at Immaculate Conception was that the boy had been saved by wearing a scapular.

As one father herded his family out the east end, they came across a boy of nine. The boy was crying; he'd lost his mother. The man took him by the hand. "Come on, we'll try and find her." They searched the grounds, going from group to group, but no luck. He spotted a police lieutenant radioing from his cruiser and handed the boy over to him.

The lieutenant's car became a clearing house for children. After the first child, "a little boy of three was turned over to me by some unknown man. I put both in my cruiser. The little lad fell asleep. I told the older boy to stay with him."

Don Cook stood outside the back door, looking for Edward and Eleanor and their mother. A couple with two children noticed him and said he could stay with them until his family came out. And he could have missed them, there were so many people. They would stay with him and try to help find them.

A distracted father wandered aimlessly about the grounds, saying over and over that he thought he'd rescued his son but when he got outside he found he had a different child by the hand, one he'd never seen before. Police and circus hands restrained him from plunging back into the flames.

Children were calling for their mothers, mothers calling for their children. And still people ran past the raised bandstand on both sides, stream-

ing out as the music played. Clowns and other circus folk urged people to keep going. "Don't look back," one was saying.

A four-year-old boy from Windsor Street had seen the circus train with its animals pass by the day before. Now he was running out of the tent with his grandmother. They'd stayed too long; the heat from above their section had burned his arms from the elbows down. "My hands and arms were like peanut butter." His grandmother suffered burns on her shoulders. She wanted to go back in because she'd lost a shoe, but the boy clung to her and she came to her senses.

Those coming out collided with others rushing back in to find loved ones. One woman spotted a little blonde girl trying to get back into the tent, crying for her grandmother. The woman held on to her. She was only four or five.

A Middletown man saved his children, but his wife was still inside. He set the children under a concession tent and ran back in. The children sat there in the shade until, minutes later, he returned with their mother.

"Keep moving!" Emmett Kelly was shouting. "You can't get back in there!"

But people could.

One woman emerged from the crush and didn't see her niece. She fought her way back through the people streaming out and inside again. Unbeknownst to her, the girl had already made it out. The woman didn't. Later her brother, a doctor, identified her at the State Armory.

A mother reached the fresh air and discovered her son and daughter weren't right behind her. She dashed back in and burned to death with her daughter. The son escaped untouched.

Caught in the confusion by the front door, William Epps could feel his grip on his cousin Muriel Goff slipping, but he had younger brother Richie in his other hand and couldn't let go to get a better hold of her. Bodies jostled them from all sides, hips and shoulders and elbows. And then his hand was empty and he only had Richie.

Mabel Epps jumped from the bleachers with no one to break her fall. She tried to turn in mid-air to protect the baby and landed hard. She dragged herself under the canvas and out, but something was wrong with her legs, they pained her with every step. Later the doctors would tell her

she had a broken pelvis, but for now she just wanted to get away from the tent.

Her sister Maurice Goff made it out unscathed, but when she couldn't find Muriel, she became hysterical. "Where is my baby?" she screamed. "Where is my baby?" William and Richard were nowhere to be seen. Someone told her the child had run back into the tent—in all probability searching for her. Maurice Goff believed them and went in after her.

The Stars and Stripes Forever

The wind took the fire east, burning embers settling on the women's dressing top, treated with the same paraffin mixture. An aerialist climbed a rope hand over hand and someone passed him up a bucket to quench them.

Each performer had a wash bucket. Some of the bally girls were taking bucket baths when the fire broke out; a few ran out into the backyard stark naked. Troupers gathered their costumes, threw water on their trunks and slipped under the sidewalls. A bucket brigade formed—the wardrobe mistress, two midgets and a whiteface clown—and soon they had the situation under control.