Big Top Burning Read online

  The Cook family sat in the southwest grandstand. Like everyone else in the tent that day, Mildred and her children were eager to laugh at the clowns and to gasp in wonder at the acrobats and animal tamers. It was hot inside the tent, but at least the canvas roof gave protection from the blazing sun.

  As the band warmed up the clowns put on their makeup and the Flying Wallendas, the famous trapeze artists, got ready to take the stage. Seat hands stationed themselves beneath the bleachers. During the show they would pick up trash and watch to make sure no one snuck in without paying. They also had the very important job of guarding against accidents, including fires. Smoking was not allowed in the big top, but this rule was difficult to enforce. In the 1940s, smoking was more common than it is today. Buckets of water were placed beneath each seating section before the show. If a seat hand saw a carelessly tossed cigarette or burning match fall from the stands, he could quickly put it out.

  Map showing the interior of the big top tent.

  At 2:23 PM, the show began. Up first was a comedy act in which girls in bright sequined costumes “tamed” a performer dressed in a lion suit. Next came May Kovar and Joseph Walsh and their performances with real wild cats on opposite ends of the tent. Known as the “lion queen” of the circus, May astounded audiences with her bravery and control of the large, snarling felines. In Hartford, May deftly led 15 leopards, panthers, and pumas through their tricks as the audience watched, spellbound. Meanwhile, Joseph performed with lions, polar bears, and Great Danes.

  “I was awestruck at the enormity of how large the [big cats] really were, never having seen a wild animal like that,” circus-goer Anthony Pastizzo recalled. “And to see them performing with a human inside that cage, I was really amazed at how anyone gathered enough courage to work with an animal that size and as ferocious as that [cat]!”

  May performed with masterful artistry when most people would be shaking with fear. In fact, just the year before, May had been attacked by one of her cats during a performance. A jaguar had leapt off of its perch toward her, teeth bared. May fended him off, but the jaguar attacked a second time, digging its dagger-sharp claws into her chest. Her injuries had required dozens of stitches. Performers like May enjoyed their work, but it could be a dangerous job.

  At the end of their act, May and Joseph left the floor, and the Flying Wallendas began to take their places on a platform 30 feet in the air. The Wallendas—Karl, Helen, Joe, Herman, and Henrietta—were world famous for their performances. Karl and Helen’s daughter Carla, only four at the time, would eventually join them. The troupe’s high-wire pyramid was especially astounding. Joe and Herman pedaled bicycles on the high wire while holding a wooden board between them. On this board, Karl balanced himself precariously on a chair. Helen miraculously completed the pyramid, standing atop her husband’s shoulders.

  As the Wallendas climbed rope ladders to their platforms, the busy circus staff kept the show moving on the ground. May and Joseph guided their animals into long steel and wooden corridors called chutes, which led to cages outside the big top. Because the chutes blocked both the northeast and northwest exits, they needed to be removed after the animals had passed through. Moving the chutes was a difficult task, and because the circus was short on staff, some of the seat hands had to leave their stations to help.

  At about 2:40 PM, no seat hands were left to monitor the area by the southwest bleachers. It was then that someone first noticed a small flame flickering on the side wall of the tent.

  3

  FIRE!

  “We heard a roar, like the applause when one of the big acts comes off, only we knew that the animal act was over and there shouldn’t be applause…. Then we smelled smoke.”

  —Providence Journal, July 7, 1944

  Donalda LaVoie, age 15, grew worried when she saw the grapefruit-sized flame. “There’s a fire over there!” she told her uncle and pointed across the tent to an area just above the men’s restroom. “Don’t worry about it. Someone will put it out,” her uncle assured her. But no one did.

  High above the crowd, the Wallendas also noticed the flame, which had quickly grown in size. Karl Wallenda knew it could be dangerous. He told his family to get down from the high wire as fast as they could.

  More and more people began to notice the fire, which was spreading rapidly up the side wall. Finally some seat hands ran over to douse the flames, but their buckets of water were not enough to fight the blaze. Tragically, no fire extinguishers had been placed inside the tent. Instead, they were still packed inside a truck hundreds of yards away.

  Barbara Wallis Felgate, who was just six years old at the time, was too busy staring at the big cats to notice the fire at first. “I was watching the lions … go out,” she said. Then she saw a flickering light. “I remember the music changing.” The band struck up the first loud, staccato notes of “Stars and Stripes Forever,” a signal to the circus hands that there was danger in the tent. Termed the “Disaster March,” this tune had long been used to alert the performers and staff when there was a problem, as well as to soothe the audience and prevent a panic.

  Hearing the music, the circus hands were quick to get moving. The audience, however, did not know how to react. For a moment, some people wondered if it was all part of the show. But when someone shouted, “Fire!” it became clear this was a true emergency.

  Subdued confusion suddenly turned to frenzy. As the blaze grew, the spectators knew they had to get out of the tent, and get out fast. An announcer’s voice came over the loudspeaker, telling everyone to remain calm. Some people kept their composure and moved quickly and quietly out the nearest exit. Twelve-year-old Rose Norrie, her younger sister Antoinette, and their brother Frank were able to make it out the main entrance before it got too crowded. “I came right through the doorway,” Rose said.

  Unfortunately, many others were not so composed. Terribly frightened, some people pushed over chairs and shoved their way through the crowd to get out. Others even knocked people down to save themselves.

  “I grabbed the hand of my niece Judy and proceeded to walk out to the aisle,” Margaret D’Abatto recalled in her witness statement to police. “But within a second’s time the aisle had been completely covered with chairs…. We began climbing over chairs, and at one time, someone had pushed my niece down under one of the collapsible chairs. I helped her up immediately and kept her in front of me so that she would not be knocked down again.”

  Mildred Cook and her three children were several rows up in the southwest grandstand when people started rushing out. Donald wanted to take his brother and sister with him, but Mildred pulled the younger children back to her. “You go along,” Mildred told her oldest child. It was then that the Cooks separated. Mildred, holding Edward’s and Eleanor’s hands, made her way down to the massive crowd fighting to get out the main entrance. Donald instead climbed to the top of the grandstand and jumped nimbly down the back. Lifting up the side wall of the tent, where it was loose from the ground, he crawled underneath the canvas to safety.

  The big top on fire.

  Others also found alternate ways to escape. Thirteen-year-old Donald Anderson helped hundreds of people, including his older cousin, escape by using his pocket-knife to cut the ropes fastened to a stake that held the tent tight to the ground. He was then able to lift the canvas wall and escape by crawling underneath. “[I] noticed a girl about five years old lying on the ground—her arm seemed injured. I picked her up and got her out safely,” Donald wrote in a letter to the governor of Connecticut. Donald’s story was widely reported in the newspapers. Though it always made him uncomfortable, Donald was seen as a hero, and people from all over sent letters congratulating him for his quick thinking.

  The Wallendas were still up on the wire when Eugene Badger and his father noticed the fire. “When the fire broke out, everyone got up to run. But my father told me to sit, and I’m watching [the tent] burn.” Once everyone had left their area of the bleachers, Mr. Badger used a seat to break th
rough the boards below them. Then he dropped his son through the hole and jumped down to the ground after him. Eugene helped his father back up onto his crutches, and together they looked for an exit. “Twice before we got out my father was knocked down by two males. One of them stopped to help him up, but the other one didn’t.” Eugene and his father finally escaped through a hole cut in the tent’s wall. “I remember looking back underneath [the bleachers], seeing the burning tent falling on people.” Mr. Badger’s calm reaction to the chaos had saved his son and himself. They escaped unhurt.

  View from the field just beyond the burning circus tent.

  Lorena Dutelle and her mother attended the circus together that day. Because her father had died some years earlier, Lorena and her mother were very close. Mrs. Dutelle always wore a gold locket containing a picture of her husband, young and smart looking in his round black glasses. The two felt he had been watching over them that frightful day. They were among the lucky ones who got out safely.

  Soon the air inside the tent grew thick with smoke, and the fire had spread all the way up the side wall and onto the roof. Pieces of flaming canvas dropped down upon the crowd. The wax that had been used to waterproof the tent melted and dripped onto the people below, causing horrible burns.

  Seven-year-old Elliot Smith got caught in the swarm of people pushing toward the main entrance. “My hand got torn out of my mother’s. So there I was, alone, getting shoved and carried along with the crowd. Actually, I started punching with my fists, trying to make room for myself…. Until finally, I got knocked down.”

  Meanwhile, Mildred Cook tried to hurry her two younger children along, finally picking Edward up with one arm while clinging to Eleanor’s hand with the other. Soon the crowd became too much, and Eleanor was swept away. The air grew intensely hot as Mildred and Edward tried to get through the throng, looking for Eleanor as they were shoved along toward the exit. Edward was having trouble breathing. He told his mother he wanted to lie down and go to sleep. Soon after, both Edward and Mildred lost consciousness.

  On the other side of the tent, people tried to escape out the northeast and northwest exits, but when the fire broke out the crew hadn’t finished removing the animal chutes. The only way to escape here now was to clamber up the four-foot-high cages, over the frightened, dangerous cats. At least six were still in the chutes when the fire broke out.

  At first, circus staff tried to prevent people from exiting the tent this way, for fear that the cats would attack if someone’s arm or leg slipped between the bars of the chute. However, fire proved the more fearsome enemy, and many people who escaped by this route might have perished otherwise.

  Donalda La Voie remembers being terrified while climbing over the chute. The steel cage seemed very high as she inched across on her hands and knees. The cats were still beneath her, and Donalda feared she’d fall between the bars. For a second, she got stuck. “My foot kind of slipped, and I yanked it out.” Finally across, she and her uncle and brother got away through a hole in the tent at the end of the chute.

  Morris Handler and his three-year-old son, Phil, escaped over a chute too. Morris put Phil on his back and climbed up onto the metal cage. Once they were over the top and on the other side, they found the area blocked by circus wagons parked up against the side of the tent. Morris put his son on the ground in front of him, and together they squeezed under the wagons. There were people all around, struggling through the same tight spot. As they crawled to safety, Morris yelled, “Let my little boy through!”

  Finally, performers May Kovar and Joseph Walsh were able to push their animals through the chutes and into their cages. Every one of the animals made it out of the tent unharmed. As the situation inside the big top grew dire, May helped people, especially children, climb over the chutes to safety.

  After seeing his seven-year-old son David safely across a chute, William Curlee stayed inside the tent, pushing people over to the other side. William was 29 years old and a strong man. He refused to leave when he knew he could still help those who were too weak or scared to climb the bars of the chutes on their own. “People couldn’t get past, so he stood there and got his son, women, children, and others and pushed them over [the chutes],” William’s sister Barbara Rubenthaler told a reporter years later. As the tent began to give way, William braved falling burning ropes and canvas. He helped many people escape before a nearby tent pole gave way and fell on him. William Curlee died a hero.

  The big top about to collapse.

  The big top was now engulfed in flames, and it looked like it was about to fall completely. Despite the danger, some who had gotten out safely tried to reenter the tent to look for their loved ones. Police officers restrained them, knowing there was little chance of a second escape.

  Hartford police officer Daniel McAuliffe was stationed inside the tent. As he was helping people off the bleachers, a man dropped a child down into his arms. The man then jumped down himself, holding another child. “Some dirty son of a bitch tossed or dropped a cigarette,” the man told McAuliffe before he and his children disappeared into the crowd.

  When the fire came to a roaring pitch, bandleader Merle Evans finally gave the signal for his group to grab their instruments and run. They had remained on the bandstand, opposite from where the fire had started, playing as long as they could. Once outside, the band regrouped and, in a small but sincere attempt to calm the frightened crowd, played on.

  The fire had been blazing for only 10 minutes when the mighty big top collapsed in a rush of flames and screams. There were still people trapped inside.

  4

  “THE DAY THE CLOWNS CRIED”

  “Tumult and wild disorder spread over the circus lot. Dishevelled women, without shoes, with torn stockings, roamed over the grounds calling for their children.”

  —Hartford Times, July 6, 1944 (extra edition)

  The first fire alarm went off at 2:44 PM, but it was already too late. Because the canvas roof of the tent had been waterproofed with a mixture of paraffin wax and gasoline, it was extremely flammable. When the fire began, this coating turned the tent into a giant candle, and it melted to the ground before fire trucks even arrived on the scene.

  Aerial view of the destroyed big top.

  The circus grounds were in chaos. Survivors wandered around in a daze. People were crying and frantically searching for their loved ones. The Hartford Courant reported that “one woman, who was joined by a man, knelt down in prayer. In a few minutes the woman’s two children, faces smudged and clothes torn, came out of the crowd and ran to her arms.”

  Alden B. Crandall helped the rescue effort by carrying stretchers away from the tent, all the while keeping an eye out for his missing son. “I went back to my car with my wife and the other kids,” he told the Providence Journal. “They were all crying, and I was too. The darn fool kid was there in the backseat, waiting for us. ‘Daddy,’ and he was bawling. ‘I thought you were dead. I climbed through the bleacher and ran to the car—you always said to go to the car if we were separated.’”

  Donald Cook wandered around the circus grounds, looking for his mother, brother, and sister. He couldn’t find them. A couple from Hartford noticed Donald was alone and took him to their home to keep him safe. They gave him something to eat and called the police so his family would know he had survived. Today we might fear the thought of strangers taking a child home with them. But communities were closer then, and many children were cared for by strangers in the aftermath of the disaster.

  When Eugene Badger and his father got out of the tent, they were sad to see many people who had been badly burned. “We saw a woman come running out of the tent. She was smoldering,” Eugene recalled. Someone helped the woman extinguish the flames by rolling her on the ground, and then they picked her up and took her to get help.

  As the Badgers walked home, Eugene’s mother was riding on the city bus. She had left the Red Cross as soon as she heard about the fire. Amazingly, she spotted her husband and son thr
ough the window. She no doubt felt enormous relief when she saw that they were both all right.

  Circus performers, while hurrying to haul water and help injured people, were devastated. They felt a special connection to their audiences. They wanted to make people smile and laugh. Instead, their beloved circus had brought tears and pain.

  For days after, survivors praised the quick thinking and kindness of the Ringling Bros. workers. “The circus people were wonderful,” Charles Comp told a Hartford Courant reporter. “The band played until the musicians had to jump to safety, the ushers stood at their sections assisting the panic-stricken crowd, and the performers did everything they could.”

  Survivor Helen Hathaway also commended the circus performers when she spoke to a reporter at the city’s other major newspaper in the 1940s, the Hartford Times. “They were so calm that they prevented panic by their attitude.”

  Photographer Ralph Emerson captured a picture of Emmett Kelly—his clown makeup melted, his tramp costume charred—carrying a bucket of water across the field. It was to become the most famous photograph of the disaster. People would remember July 6, 1944, as “the day the clowns cried.”

  Unlike the previous tragic circus fire, all the animals survived the fire in Hartford. Animal handlers yelled, “Tails!” and the elephants lined up, trunk to tail, to be led onto Barbour Street, away from the blaze. Trainers tied up some of the smaller animals to any available post or tree outside the tent. The Boston Globe reported, “The circus animals were comparatively quiet during the fire, which handlers considered especially remarkable inasmuch as many of them had gone through the 1942 circus fire at Cleveland.”

  The Wallendas, who had helped many audience members escape the tent, could not find their little daughter, Carla. Panicked, they looked for her everywhere. Helen thought Carla had been watching the show from the audience, and she feared the worst. It turned out Carla had been playing outside the tent with the daughter of another performer when the fire broke out. The two girls had been led away from the tent during the chaos. Finally, police connected with the Wallendas to let them know that Carla was safely in their care.