The Circus Fire (39 page)

Next on the schedule was the University of Detroit stadium, a twelve-day run. Opening night was Bond Night, so they sold out. The remainder of the stand, afternoon temperatures hovered around one hundred, and the crowds stayed away. Thirty-five hundred attended one rainy weeknight. For the Saturday matinee only fifteen hundred people showed up. John Ringling North was licking his chops.

While the circus struggled in the Midwest, a hepatitis outbreak swept Municipal Hospital, infecting Elliott Smith just as he'd gotten over his pneumonia. The doctors isolated him again, putting him in a room with

three women similarly afflicted. He received penicillin shots every three hours, the nurses waking him up to swab his skin cold and push the needle in until he'd beaten it. Then the doctors began the long process of skin grafting.

His hand and his back were the worst. The doctors would slice patches of undamaged skin from the fronts of his thighs, paint the burned area with a plasma preparation that would act as a kind of glue, then paste the new skin to it and wrap him again in Vaselined gauze. Elliott couldn't lie on his back, so the doctors rigged a sling to keep him on his hands and knees while it healed. His hand they tented so he wouldn't brush it against anything, the brass clips holding the grafts visible inside. Outside his window, Keney Park was a blaze of green.

Donald Gale was his new roommate. The doctors wanted to remove Donald's fingers and keep just the thumbs; his father said no and brought in a surgeon from Hartford Hospital to save his hands. The surgeon said it was touch and go but that he'd try.

First the surgeon cut away the dead skin from a finger, then amputated it from the first joint, wrapping a flap of skin over the nub, hoping a cover would grow. When it didn't, the doctor did a pedicle graft, slitting Donald's stomach, inserting the damaged hand and grafting the stomach skin to the finger. For eleven days, Donald lay in bed like a mummy. When the doctor cut his hand free, the graft had taken.

Barbara and Mary Kay Smith were split up, Barbara rooming with Marion Dineen. Marion was almost completely better. Her father would come every day, bringing the girls hot-fudge sundaes from the Lincoln Dairy, a pleasant change from the Amigen. When Marion went home, Barbara and Mary Kay were reunited, sharing the room next to Elliott and Donald's with Patty Murphy, whose parents and brother had died in the fire.

By now, only the worst cases remained, a total of seventy among the three hospitals. Across the hall, in a triple with Barbara and Mary Kay's mother, two women who'd lost children passed the days, commiserating. The two became close friends; when they got out they continued to see each other, getting together for lunch or coffee, staying in touch.

Fridays a specialist came down from Boston to change the patients' dressings, a routine the children feared. If the grafts hadn't taken, layers of

flesh peeled off with the bandages. The kids screamed and fought so much that soon the doctors took them to surgery and put them under. The ether made Donald Gale nauseous; it felt like falling, spinning in a whirlpool, and afterwards he couldn't eat.

Elliott Smith remembered lying on a gurney like a piece of meat, his new skin open to the air, waiting for the specialist to dab the infected places with a Q-Tip impregnated with silver nitrate. Having withstood this torture, he was rewarded with newly Vaselined bandages. They went on cool and soothing.

A machine called a microtome sliced the skin from his thighs, each piece slightly wider than the burns on his back; they would shrink during the grafting. The scars on Elliott's thighs were almost as bad as the ones on his back. His father volunteered to donate his skin, but medically at the time there was no way to do it.

The idea of a father wanting to take his child's pain upon himself may have struck the doctors as common, but a letter they received shortly after the fire did not. It was from the state prison in Wethersfield, from an inmate. He'd been justly convicted eight years before of a crime he said involved "a persons life." Since then, he'd tried to think of a way to repay his debt to that person by saving another's life. He donated blood every time the Red Cross came, but it didn't seem enough. "Offhand I couldn't specify the exact type of skin I have," he wrote, "but so far as I know I am perfectly healthy, am twenty-six years of age, and am more than willing to offer my skin to any person needing it. I would then feel that I had done something to give new life and new hope. Won't you please consult your files and let me know if there is anyone burned at the circus fire who is in need of a skin graft? I'm sure there must be."

The warden approved the prisoner's letter and sent it on, but, as with Mr. Smith's offer, the doctors sadly had to decline.

Ludger LeVasseur could not save his son from another, even more debilitating pain. For weeks, visiting him, he carried the secret that Jerry's mother was dead. He waited until his son was recovering—safe, in a way— to tell him. They both cried. And then at 8:00, the PA announced the end of visiting hours, and he had to leave him again.

One girl in Hartford Hospital didn't know that both of her parents had died. Her younger sister had learned from their grandparents, "and the

way they did it was awful." She wanted their parish priest and a nun from the girl's school to tell her sister.

The hospitals wisely matched patients with similar injuries and family situations as roommates, relying on them to keep each other's morale up. But some things were beyond the powers of empathy or medicine. At night nurses heard children crying and calling out for their parents. One boy asked an aide the same question over and over: How could he get out of the hospital if there was a fire?

Those at home suffered the same anxieties, some more deeply than people who'd been burned. One mother reported that her daughter had a serious mental condition as a result of seeing people trampled, the equivalent of a nervous breakdown. Another girl dreamed of a woman sitting in the bleachers alone, untouched; her clothing wasn't burned, her hair wasn't scorched, but when the dreamer reached out to touch her, she disintegrated into a pile of ashes.

Memories of the fire ate at one girl. She had recurring nightmares of burning babies. When she tried to hide under her bed, her parents dragged her out. Sirens sent her into hysterics. Her family distanced themselves from the fire, rarely mentioning it, a tactic she could never seem to master. She withdrew from the world, developing a stutter and crying in private.

Some parents became wildly overprotective, seeing disaster in the most harmless activities, never letting their children out of their sight. Some parents refused to talk about the fire. The topic was forbidden, especially with friends. Later, people who'd been children at the time of the fire would find themselves doing these exact same things with their kids; they constantly had to guard against it.

One boy had been lost at the circus, his mother knocked to the ground. Later he went to the movies on a humid night, insisting, as always, that he sit on the aisle. In the middle of the film a huge crack of thunder outside sent him running from the theater into the street.

A mother had the same kind of panic attack at the eye doctor. With no warning, in the middle of an examination she jumped up and ran out the door. Her daughter could smell smoke when others couldn't and refused to light their gas stove. Another woman dreamed there was a fire in her room and would wake up and search for it.

As if to prove their fears weren't imaginary, a series of fires swept

amusement parks up and down the East Coast. At Whalom Park in Fitchburg, a fire leveled the midway, destroying the Dodgem, the penny arcade and the shooting gallery. Early the morning of August 12th, the boardwalk at Wildwood, New Jersey, went up. That afternoon a blaze practically wiped out Luna Park in Coney Island, the heat so intense the huge swimming pool reportedly boiled. The very next day, flames gutted most of Palisades Park, seven people dying on the Virginia Reel; the fire roared over the bathhouse and two hundred cars in the parking lot, leaving people with no clothes and no way home.

The August issue of
Fire Engineering
magazine speculated that overheated spotlights just under the canvas may have started the circus fire—an old theory by this time—but also listed two new blazes: in Baltimore the baseball stadium, Oriole Park, and in Detroit, the racetrack at the State Fairgrounds.

In Hartford, a West Hartford girl died at St. Francis, following her mother and younger sister. On July 25th, while hospitalized, she'd turned seventeen. She'd survived trampling and fourth-degree burns only to weaken from shock and sepsis after skin grafting, finally succumbing to congestive heart failure. She was the last to die from the circus fire, number 167.

The next day, responding to Mayor Mortensen's recommendation, Municipal Hospital announced it would waive all charges for fire victims, unless patients requested a bill, and then they would only be asked for a flat $6 a day. Hartford Hospital followed Municipal's lead, giving the Red Cross credit for providing nursing services at no cost.

That same day, a Hartford detective arrived at Deer Lodge Prison to interview the warden and the prisoner. The inmate was doing time for passing bad paper; he'd completed the seventh grade, was a model prisoner, and subject to epileptic fits. He'd joined the circus in September of 1943, working as a helper on a water truck for Deacon Blanchfield. Cox drove a water truck. In Detroit Blanchfield fired him for being drunk, then rehired him the next stand in Chicago; later they repeated the same act in Nashville and Indianapolis. It was after Nashville, after a couple of beers, that Cox supposedly told the inmate, "So help me God, they're going to pay for this. One of these days I'm going to burn the goddamn tent down. Wait and see. The goddamn show won't get very far next year."

The detective tried to mix the prisoner up, but he stuck to his story, and the warden believed he was telling the truth. The inmate didn't seem to want anything; he was being released in a few weeks.

The detective had two leads to pursue: Cox had worked for Rubin and Cherry Shows as a Ferris wheel operator and had a married sister in Nashville. Hickey sent the detective after the carnival first. He caught up with them in Billings, at the State Fair. The show had changed hands and personnel since Cox had been with them, and no one could remember him.

The circus was in Chicago, drawing disappointing crowds to Soldier Field. The detective talked with Haley, who told him their records were in Sarasota.

"I'm glad Mr. Hickey is finally getting around to see us," he said. "We could do a lot to help if he'd talk with us." The fires at Luna and then Palisades Park made Haley suspect a pyromaniac might be on the loose. Old-timers with the show felt the Hartford blaze was arson.

Blanchfield said he didn't remember any Cox but that he had two drivers on a water truck he regularly fired and rehired on account of drunkenness, always keeping one with the rig. One of these men had been in Waterbury this year [June 19th or 20th] bothering him for a job. He'd heard the man had also been on the lot in Providence. One of the men was named Walsh or Welsh; maybe the other was Cox.

Another man was also a possibility—Blanchfield's ex-assistant, who left the show in Philadelphia after an argument with Blanchfield. The man was a native of Hartford.

The detective conferred with Hickey over the phone that night. Hickey told him to deliver this message to Haley: "We are investigating this case from every angle, and it is immaterial to us who did it or who is involved. We will report it to the court. We are making a thorough investigation."

The next day Blanchfield had the name of the driver who accosted him in Waterbury. The other's name was Emmet Welch, driver of water truck #128, fired repeatedly for drunkenness, with a married sister in Nashville. Haley seemed pleased that they finally had a suspect; he asked the detective to let the FBI know and questioned him about the state police's methods. The detective assured him—like Hickey—that they would follow the case wherever it led them.

In Nashville, he found Welch's sister's husband. The sister was visiting friends in Williamsburg, Virginia, but the man referred him to another sister who said the family rarely heard from Welch, but that six months ago he'd been in Miami, his address care of General Delivery. The woman described her brother as a tramp who, as far as she knew, didn't work and was no good to anyone. The most recent picture she had of him was at least ten years old. A local bank told the detective that the man had gone bankrupt in 1929 and his credit was no good.

Amazingly, the detective turned up an old friend of Welch. He said Welch had made his home in Miami for about ten years now, and that he was okay when he was sober, but not too good when he was drunk. The detective tried Williamsburg next, but the sister couldn't come up with an address for Welch. When the detective returned to Connecticut, Hickey sent a telegram to the Miami Police.

In days they picked up Welch for skipping out on a hotel bill. He'd just come off a ten-day drunk. They kept him in jail till the detective could get down there and question him. Welch admitted that he'd been with the circus and that he'd known the inmate, but denied ever having been arrested for arson. In 1943, before he joined the circus, he'd been living in a boarding house and dropped a cigarette in his room, starting a fire that caused some damage, but the police had never questioned him about it. He was driving a city bus for Miami Transit now, and had been since June.