The Circus Fire (20 page)

The house at 378 Barbour, the first one north of the grounds, was inundated, the porch a field hospital. Delivery trucks veered to the curb and dumped their loads so they could take victims. The sidewalk was covered with dry cleaning and fresh bread.

Up and down the street, mothers rummaged through medicine chests for ointments to soothe the more superficial burns. Some fell back on trusted home remedies. One mother sent her children to fetch as many sacks of potatoes as they could get. She laid raw slices on the burned until the sacks were empty. Another mother put on a pot of coffee and started tearing up the family's sheets and towels for bandages. Later they had to buy all new linens.

People needed to phone home and let their loved ones know they were okay. They waited in lines that stretched outside, stood there in the heat while the homeowners came out and gave them water. Pay phones at the time cost a nickel. On Barbour, some charged a dime, some a dollar. One woman asked for five dollars a call and got it. Others were glad to help and asked for nothing, flatly refusing to take callers' money.

Many couldn't get through to the outer towns because the circuits were jammed. One woman couldn't reach her mother in New Britain. Her friend called his wife, and his wife called the mother. "It's okay," the wife said, "they're safe." At first the mother didn't know what she was talking about; she didn't have the radio on. The woman's brother was a navy pilot who'd been killed the previous January. The mother didn't need any more bad news.

In line, people were crying. One woman was so shook up that when it was finally her turn to call she forgot where her husband worked.

Others focused on more practical matters. One woman with two children in hand shook her head at her ruined dress. On top of that she'd lost her purse. Stop worrying about the money, her husband said. Just thank God the kids are safe.

The staging area at E. B. McGurk's that John Stewart had helped the wounded to was overflowing. While employees gave the injured first aid, two secretaries calmed the children.

Next door at 353 Barbour, a homeowner stood on his porch, talking with a male aerialist from the circus and looking out over the grounds. The performer said the fire started at the end of the animal act, just after a spot-

light had been turned off. Someone turned the light off or away as the cats went into their chutes.

Meanwhile, in the victory gardens and the backyards along Barbour, the injured lay, fallen in the rush to get away from the flames. A policeman found a man sprawled in the grass off Kensington Street, raving. Nothing could be done with him. He lay on the ground facedown, moaning about how they burned, those poor kids. He didn't struggle when the officer helped him up. All the police could get out of the man was that his name was Joe and he lived on Barbour Street. They arranged for him to be taken to Municipal. One block south, on Earle Street, a burned woman stumbled into someone's house and asked them to call an ambulance.

Jaivin's Drugstore at the corner of Barbour and Westland had a pay phone. A line formed early. While people waited, Mr. Jaivin gave the children free ice cream and treated their burns with salve at the soda fountain's marble counter. Molly Garofolo came over from her beauty shop next door where she was watching some lost children. She'd tried to soothe them by washing their faces and putting Band-Aids on their cuts; maybe ice cream would prove to be a more effective medicine.

A young mother and her son wandered down Barbour and stopped across from Jaivin's. They sat down on the curb to take stock of the situation. The woman was badly burned, her leg bruised, her hair singed. She noticed the crowd in Jaivin's and had her son stand up.

They didn't have a phone at home, so she called a neighbor. She reached the neighbor's five-year-old. The child haltingly took the message, then ran outside to the husband—on a ladder, painting their house—and screamed, "Your wife is in the circus fire!"

Another woman took her girl past Jaivin's and farther down Barbour to a Jewish grocery—Levine's Fruit Market or Fleishman's Meats or Weinbaum's Delicatessen—where a lady put ice on her arm.

Some of the burned walked the mile to Municipal Hospital. They looked fine when they came through the door, but when the nurses touched them they screamed in pain. The superheated air, though below the flashpoint of their clothes, had baked their skin.

Along with the emergency workers, prosecutors were on their way to Barbour Street. Their office downtown dispatched a messenger to McGovern's with twenty-five freshly issued subpoenas, all of them sum-

moning Mr. John Doe. They also ordered to McGovern's the clerk of the police court, to take Messrs. Does' statements. Commissioner Hickey sent a police officer to McCoy's Music on Asylum (where Hickey himself had purchased his tickets) to see if they had a seating chart. In minutes the officer called back: No, there was none.

Right about now, canvas boss Leonard Aylesworth and his crew returned from Springfield. They hadn't expected to be gone so long, but the stake truck had gotten lost on the way up and they had to wait; then they ate a long lunch in the dining room of a good hotel. As they neared the circus grounds they heard the sirens, growing stronger each block. They pulled up to find the big top had vanished, the yards filled with parents and children.

There were so many children missing that parents who asked bystanders if they'd seen a boy this size or a girl wearing a blue sunsuit were sent off on wild goose chases. The easiest way to be found is to stay in one place, but that requires a patience the survivors didn't have. Adults and children, they ranged up and down the street, in and out of the grounds, hoping to bump into loved ones.

Sometimes they were lucky. A six-year-old boy wandered north to the entrance of Keney Park. He stood there as if trying to decide whether to go in. A soldier approached.

"Will you take me home, mister?"

"Sure, sonny," the soldier said. "What's your name and where do you live?"

The soldier walked him to a bus stop and got on with him. As they approached Wolcott Avenue, the boy recognized his street. He hopped off and ran home to his parents, leaving the soldier on the bus. The parents were disappointed; they wanted to thank the man personally.

William Epps didn't know where his mother or his aunt or his cousin Muriel were. They were from Bellevue Square; this part of the North End was foreign territory to him, absolutely new. With Richie in hand, he followed Barbour north to Tower Avenue, moving with the crowds. Across the busy intersection stretched the green fields and woods of Keney Park like a great forest. He waited for the light to change, then hustled his brother along.

A girl asked a policewoman to help her find her mother and her aunt.

The officer advised the girl to go wait by their car. In a few minutes the aunt came along and told her that the mother had been taken to a hospital, she didn't know which one. The policewoman suggested they try Municipal first. While they were searching the hospital for the mother, she was scouring the grounds for the girl and would soon report her missing.

The police rounded up all the lost children and moved them east through the woods to a line of cruisers parked on Hampton Street. In the front yard of the circus grounds Commissioner Hickey's men set up a sound car with speakers on its roof and asked anyone with unattached children to please bring them to Hampton Street. Officers would escort them to police headquarters.

Downtown, headquarters assigned a team of policemen and -women to establish a clearinghouse in the juvenile division. They would take the names and addresses of the children as they came in, then try to contact the parents.

Back on the grounds, Stanley Kurneta searched for his sister Mary. He couldn't find her. He couldn't find Tony, his mother—nobody. His head and neck and arms were burned, his clothes a shambles from carrying his nephew Raymond Erickson. Police noticed Stanley's condition and convinced him he needed treatment. They packed him into an ambulance and sent him off to Hartford Hospital, still unsure just what had happened to his family.

Extra, extra

Officially, the situation was under control. The fire was out, the most severely injured being tended to. The dead were in no hurry. Now the panic and confusion moved from the circus grounds out into the city at large, heralded by sirens. On Barbour Street, the authorities and their many volunteers started mopping up. Trucks rolled in empty and rolled out full.

The strangest injury of the day came after police had sealed off the lot. A policeman was working crowd control, keeping rubberneckers behind a temporary fence, when a bee stung him in the neck. His throat swelled up—classic anaphylactic shock. Another officer drove him to Municipal,

where they had to wait while the overworked doctors handled more pressing cases.

The head of the War Council was on the grounds now, directing his men. Mayor Mortensen had attracted an entourage of reporters hoping for a quote, though he was only there to help and lend moral support. Thomas Barber and his fellow detectives followed the mayor's party around, running errands for them until higher-ups arrived to accompany him more formally. The mayor would stay for two hours, pitching in, making sure everything was taken care of.

There were no phones on the lot, so Southern New England Telephone ran in four lines for police and firemen to use. Linemen mounted the phones on short poles stuck in the ground.

On orders from Prosecutor Burr S. Leikind, police stopped circus personnel from removing debris and cleared the interior of the tent of everyone except army guards. The wife of a Willimantic police officer went around picking up loose pocketbooks, her arms full of them; one recovered by the northeast chute proved to be Mary Kurneta's. About one hundred fifty MPs and troops from the antiaircraft unit formed a perimeter around the site. On Woodland Street, neighbors watched as truck after truck passed carrying soldiers holding shovels.

South of town, Motorcycle Troop A of the State Guard roared in from Niantic, escorting the 10th Battalion Ambulance Corps. They'd been at Camp Baldwin, playing Softball, when they received word. They changed, hopped on their bikes and peeled off. As they took the first curve, one man laid his down. Legend is, he was killed; actually he was just bruised—and pretty damned embarrassed. He got back on. Reportedly they made the fifty miles in thirty-three minutes.

The Office of Civilian Defense scrambled its air raid wardens, sending half to Barbour Street and half to the armory.

The manager of the Coca-Cola bottling plant in East Hartford escaped the tent with his children and immediately called the office. Seven Coca-Cola trucks rolled, filled with emergency first aid supplies.

And still the makeshift ambulances pulled up from Sage-Allen and Max Sanders and Underwood Elliott Fisher, weaving their way through the blistered circus wagons, the people sitting in the grass and staring vaguely into space.

On Garden Street, the quickest route to the armory, a young mother and her two-year-old daughter sat on their front steps and watched the trucks pass with their odd cargo of bodies. They'd planned to go to the circus that day but never made it.

Sirens crisscrossed the city. In neighborhoods all over Hartford, people spilled out into the streets to see what was happening. They stood at their porch rails and on their front walks, looking up into the air. From the west, the smoke could easily be misconstrued as coming from East Hartford. Some thought the Germans had bombed Pratt & Whitney. Others imagined a plane crash, maybe a B-25 out of Bradley Field.

WTIC had the first radio crew on the scene. As they crossed the grounds and saw the carnage and confusion, they realized a live broadcast would just add to the panic. They decided to quell the wilder rumors already circulating (such as the lions running amok) and focus on what they knew to be true. During the '36 flood, TIC had cooperated with the authorities, broadcasting missing persons reports. Now they canceled their regular programming and opened their studios to the Red Cross, the fire and police departments and other relief agencies.

Up on Blue Hills Avenue, the neighborhood kids were watching the cops wail past when a lady ran out on her porch and screamed that the circus was on fire and people were dying. Of course, the children all knew friends who'd gone that afternoon, but there was no way to find out about them.

Adults could. People drove straight to the circus grounds—or as close as possible, owing to traffic. They abandoned their cars and continued on foot, only to be stopped by the police cordon.

One brother would not be denied. He decked a policeman and bulled past the line and inside, where, miraculously, he found his sisters, one slightly burned, the other fine.

For the first time in its history, the
Hartford Times
city desk sent a flash by wire to the Associated Press. Their first Extra hit the presses minutes later. FIRE SWEEPS CIRCUS, the headline read. The story ran without pictures, and there wasn't time for editorial to check all the facts. The
Times
didn't commit to a particular number of casualties, but a prominent subhead mentioned that three performers had died. According to the story, Municipal Hospital received calls for ambulances, with reports that "quite a few" people were injured. The Silver Spur Riding Club, whose stables and show ring were on Barbour, confirmed that the big top collapsed about 2:45.