The Circus Fire (17 page)

They stopped and clawed the bodies off. The last body they lost their grip on and it fell back on top of Elliott. They reached down and grabbed it with their bare hands, but again the body slipped, thumping against him. The third time they dug their fingers in and hauled it off. A man with dark

hair and a mustache picked Elliott up and cradled him in his arms. He wore a bright white button-down shirt. Elliott looked down and saw what had been on top of him.

The bodies on the ground were black and featureless, arms drawn up as if to protect their faces. Human in shape, missing hands and feet, they seemed to him like rag dolls.

The man with the mustache carried him away. Elliott was burned and wet and bleeding. In the man's arms, the pain a continuous presence, Elliott Smith thought: He's going to ruin his shirt.

Have you seen him?

There were bodies on top of the chute and back along the track, but those were mostly scattered and obviously charred, beyond help. Firemen and show folks dug at the main pile beside the chute—seven or eight deep, Thomas Barber said—hoping to find more people alive beneath it. The bodies on top were fused together like cooled lava; rescuers had to crack them apart to reach Jerry LeVasseur and Elliott Smith.

There were more. Firemen discovered four or five at the very bottom.

At the inquest, Deacon Blanchfield remembered: "There was two ladies on the bottom that was alive, and one of them only had a little hole burned in her stocking, and all the other bodies there wasn't a stitch of clothing on. I carried one of these ladies out."

They separated the living from the dead. Clowns in sooty greasepaint helped lift the injured over the chute. Men swore, shaking their heads. An officer carried out a horrifically burned girl in a blue pinafore. He was crying but the child was mute, too hurt for tears.

The rescuers improvised stretchers from wagon sides, ladders wrapped in blankets and large squares of canvas, hauling the few injured still living out the back door. The hero Bill Curlee was among them, crushed under a quarterpole, badly burned yet miraculously still alive. They rushed him outside.

The rest were dead, sixty or seventy matted at the chute, some burned so severely that longtime firemen couldn't determine what sex they were.

Officers Griffin and Kenefick returned to help carry out those they'd failed to save. Thomas Barber pitched in, lugging out eighteen bodies by his own count. It was a mess; they were all baked. Another detective had two nephews in the tent and didn't know if they made it out. He knew they wore brown shoes. He saw his partners carrying out kids with brown shoes, but the children were so badly burned he couldn't tell if it was them or not.

John Stewart had heard the screams from the street; now he stood by the pile and saw what fire could do to a person. Around him, firemen were overhauling the bleachers and seats. The ground was hot; a doctor called to the scene from nearby Municipal Hospital had rubber-soled shoes on, and they melted. The smell of cooked flesh was heavy.

Farther in, charred bodies lay beneath the rear of the grandstands and under the bleachers—people who'd fallen through or passed out. A fireman from Norwich had come to the circus, and naturally he helped afterward. Kneeling by the sidewall, he reached for the hands of a little girl lying under a fold of canvas. For some reason the body was stuck. He raised the canvas and discovered why. The child was clasped in the arms of her mother.

The rescuers moved the bodies from the chute to a plot of ground outside, covering them with several panels from the sidewall of the dressing tent. Commissioner Hickey made sure no one removed the dead to the armory until Medical Examiner Dr. Walter Weissenborn—already on his way—had a chance to inspect them.

Headquarters had called not only Weissenborn, the Red Cross and the state's attorney's office (whose three prosecutors were en route), but also nearby St. Michael's Rectory. With so many dead and dying, he figured they would need priests.

The first to arrive was the young Reverend Joseph G. Murphy of St. Justin's, a five-minute ride away. Father Murphy had only been ordained in May. As a seminary student, he spent his summer vacations overseeing neighborhood playgrounds in Waterbury. St. Justin's was his first parish; he'd been named curate just a month before. He came upon the rescue efforts at the chute as they were breaking the bodies apart. The first victim he approached seemed to have died in a terrible struggle. The remains hardly resembled a human form. There was no chance of performing the full last rites on the corpse, anointing all five senses; there were no eyes or ears or hands. And, truthfully, who knew what faith this person held in life?

Surely though, in the end, they must have been contrite and desired absolution from their sins. He could safely say that at least.

Father Murphy took a vial of oil from his pocket. "By this anointing may the Lord forgive you in whatsoever you have failed," he recited in Latin, and rubbed some of the oil on the victim's forehead. And then the next soul, and then the next. He would be on the grounds for five hours.

The Reverend Thomas Looney of St. Michael's dashed out of the rectory there and hailed a passing car. The driver took him straight to the circus grounds. As they pulled up, Father Looney saw a woman lying on a stretcher in the middle of the street, her arms stripped of skin. He knelt by her side, absolving and anointing her before a pair of MPs just arrived from Bradley Field hustled her off. The army had sent three truckloads of soldiers to help with the dead and wounded. Inside the charred ring of seats, Father Looney went to the pile on the track and began anointing all he could reach. Somewhere among them lay Hulda Grant, dead, her jaw broken.

"I shall not describe the physical condition of these bodies," the Father later wrote. "That is something I am trying to erase from my mind."

Downtown, a Hartford County deputy sheriff sat in a lawyer's office,

wrapping up some business. The way the government was structured then, lawyers paid the sheriff and his deputies piecemeal for serving writs, five dollars a summons. As he was about to leave, the lawyer's phone rang. He made to excuse himself, but the lawyer said, "Wait a minute." The circus was on fire, he said; it didn't look good. There would probably be a fair amount of work coming his way the next few days.

A Wallingford man was parking his car in the business district and noticed the column of smoke to the north. He'd just dropped off his mother-in-law and his two children at the circus. Ambulances and fire trucks screamed through the streets. He asked a traffic cop where the fire was. The circus, the cop said. The man hopped in his car and followed the sirens, blowing through red lights, oblivious of the other traffic.

Regular ambulance service at this time in Hartford was just starting. Usually undertakers picked up victims in a method informally known as "bag 'em and drag 'em" because the drivers would wrap the injured in blankets, put them in hearses and drop them off at one of the hospitals. Pearl Harbor changed that. The State War Council put in place an emergency transportation plan in case the Germans bombed Colt's or United Aircraft. Alarms would go off at G. Fox, Sage-Allen, Brown Thomson—all the large department stores—who would then scramble their delivery vans. The council and the Red Cross ran drills to make sure the plan would work if it was ever necessary. After the success of the Normandy invasion, it appeared they would never have to use it.

One seventeen-year-old boy was working in the shipping room at Brown Thomson, delivering furniture. The phone rang on his boss's desk; they were supposed to go to the circus grounds and help remove bodies to the armory.

His boss drove. Their truck was brown and had sidebars in back to take stretchers. The police had cordoned off Main Street so emergency vehicles could get there faster. The teenager hardly saw any traffic on the way up. He knew the tent had burned and that people had been killed, but beyond that he didn't know what to expect.

Far ahead of them, a
Courant
photographer raced north in the paper's '41 Ford. He had his 4x5 Speedgraphic and a woman reporter with him. A twenty-year-old summer intern, he'd gotten the nod from the people upstairs and he was making the most of it. The night before, the two of them

had gone to Bristol to do a puff piece on a local aerialist and her family. Now they had an actual story. Army trucks with sirens in their grilles tore up North Main. Mail trucks, milk trucks, an armored car. They all converged on Barbour Street.

Outside the tent, people ran around frantically; others stood dully, as if hypnotized, their hands laid open from sliding down the sidepoles and ropes. The photographer and the reporter hurried up the midway, high steppmg over the hoses. All that was left of the big top was the marquee, strangely untouched, still promising THE GREATEST SHOW ON
EARTH.

Inside, Engine Company 16 were on the west stage, soaking down the last stubborn flames. The ground was muddy from the water. On the track was a small pile of bodies, still stuck together from the heat. A crowd surrounded them—police and firemen and circus workers. One fireman was busy pulling the mound apart. The
Courant
photographer came up behind two workmen, framed the shot and nailed it.

The mix of rescue workers is typical of the fire, all the men pitching in yet helpless before the dead. The firemen are from Engine Company 5; the priest in the background is Father Hewitt—like Father Murphy, also from St. Justin's. At the bottom of the frame a charred quarterpole rests heavily on the grandstand railing, bending it nearly perpendicular; after a heavier post, the railing continues, outlined against the slacks of the policeman, proving this isn't the chute, as the picture is usually captioned, though close to it.

As soon as the photographer got his shot, the roughnecks were on him, spinning him around, pushing him away. Son of a bitch, they said. They threatened him with clubs, and then when he didn't move fast enough, gave him a few whacks. Afraid they'd break his camera, he handed it off to the reporter. Get out of here, they said, go on, and they weren't kidding. He retreated but not far enough; they chased him back out the front door.

He took one more shot, two of the convalescent soldiers from Bradley Field standing by the rear of the circus bus, before returning to the
Courant's
offices on State Street. When the shots were developed, his editor liked them. But they couldn't run the one with the bodies—too gruesome.

Back inside, rescue efforts continued. Sideshow performers and concessionaires worked shoulder to shoulder with MPs and civilians, doctors and nurses and Red Cross volunteers. Girls from the aerial ballet lugged pails of water to the gangs who labored under the hot sun. Mr. and Mrs. Fischer, the giants, were crying. The Wallendas had all made it out okay, though Karl didn't know how. His leotard was scorched, his face black with ash. "This will mean the end of the big top," he predicted. "And a good thing too."

The less badly burned lay dazed in the grass, knees skinned, hair and clothes singed. One boy separated from his family could only recall his first name, saying it over and over.

A woman asked Dorothy Bocek if she was waiting for someone. Dorothy told her about losing her sister Stella and her nephew at the chute. The woman asked if she had a way to get home, and Dorothy said no. The woman had a car, she'd take Dorothy home. Maybe her sister would be there.

Joan Smith couldn't find Elliott or their mother so she climbed a slight rise on the north side of the tent to get a better view. There were just too many people roaming around. Some neighbors from Vernon happened to see her standing there and took her back to their car. They would stop by her father's office and let him know what the situation was.

Another girl was crying because she'd dropped a handkerchief her mother had given her that morning with strict instructions not to lose it. She was frightened by the animals, and her father had to carry her across the street.

Neighbors had set aside a space on the lawn of the Maternity Home

for missing children and directed frantic parents to it. In yards up and down Barbour Street, people waited by their cars, searching the crowd for familiar faces.

Janet Moore Sapolis, seven, had gone to the circus with her aunt, her grandmother, her five-year-old cousin and some friends. Separated during their escape, she came across a friend who remembered where their car was parked. When her aunt and cousin finally showed up, her aunt told Janet that her grandmother had been burned and was on the way to the hospital.

One young woman found a little blond girl, four or five years old. The woman's father combed the grounds for the little girl's parents but no one claimed her. They would stop at a police station and give them her description, he said, then take her home with them.