Children of the Hartford circus fire: After 75 years, scars both physical and emotional remain
For a
Rumbling in on a train from
The circus also offered a diversion for adults, especially the many women whose husbands, sons and brothers were in harm’s way during a particularly lethal period of World War II. It was
But joy turned to terror 40 minutes after the matinee started, when the big top on
“At one point as I was lying there, they called my grandparents and I heard them say, ‘Patty is going to die today,' " Murphy said in a recent interview from her
Murphy is a circus fire orphan. Her father perished in the fire along with her little brother. Her mother, who helped Murphy escape, died a day later.
The fire claimed 168 lives and is still among the nation’s worst mass casualty disasters. To mark the 75th anniversary, The Courant interviewed nearly 40 survivors about the scars they bear, loved ones lost and how, amid heroism and panic, the great calamity revealed the best and worst of people.
Working with the Chief State Medical Examiner, the newspaper also is part of an effort to try and add a new chapter to circus fire history by finally identifying the five victims who remain buried only as numbers.
The tent’s on fire
On that sweltering afternoon, more than 9,000 people jammed into the big top staked in a field off
That morning, 5-year-old
Then her mother made an unexpected announcement: “You’ve been such a good girl when you had the mumps -- let’s go to the circus.”
They bought bleacher seats, not the more expensive reserved seats with individual chairs, and walked by the menagerie -- highlighted by Gargantua -- through the main entrance and took their seats.
“There was nothing unusual. The same crowd of people, youngsters, women and children and everybody hustling and bustling to get into the main tent,” Hallisey later testified at the coroner’s inquest.
People were still crowding into their seats as circus workers installed the nearly four-foot-tall animal chutes from the north side of the tent to two rings on either side of the center ring.
Six-year-old
“The animals were one of the first acts and I never liked the lion act because they scared me,” Wilson said. “They would bang the side of the cages and I was always afraid that the cages would fall down and the lions would escape.”
As the animal act finished and the lions were driven back through the chutes, people raised their heads to the top of the tent, where the Flying Wallendas were set to perform aerial magic.
Only a few noticed a little sphere of fire -- smaller than a basketball, some witnesses said; no bigger than a quarter, others remembered -- creeping up the sidewall behind the southwest bleachers. High in the air,
“Everybody in our section looked up at the same time and said, ‘Holy Cow, the tent was on fire,’ ” Wilson said.
Like many people, Wilson and his grandfather stayed in their seats at first before his grandfather finally grabbed his hand and started down the stairs into the crush of people trying to escape the growing blaze.
“Grandpa moved too slowly and once we get down on the track, he wasn’t moving fast enough for me, so I broke loose from him and being small, worked my way through the crowd and out of the tent,” said Wilson, whose grandfather survived the fire.
‘That’s how people get hurt’
In those first moments, many people thought the fire was part of the show.
Three circus workers tried to douse the nascent blaze with pails of water placed behind the seats to guard against carelessly tossed cigarette butts. Thirty-five fire extinguishers were supposed to be spread around the big top as well, but none were on hand that day. The inquest revealed that no one had checked to make sure the extinguishers were in place. The person who was responsible had driven to Springfield to scout the next day’s location.
Ushers threw four pails of water on the fire, but to no avail. It had already crept too far up the nearly 16-foot-high sidewall. Circus workers knew what would happen if the fire hit the canvas top, which had been waterproofed with a mix of 6,000 gallons of gasoline and 1,800 pounds of paraffin wax, boiled down and spread with brooms.
People were not prepared for the rapid spread of the blaze, or the reaction of many in the crowd. The Verret family had good seats in a reserved section right in the center of the ring because a relative was an animal trainer for the circus. Joan, 8, and her brother Fred, 5, were sitting with their mother, Ida, and aunt, Myrtle, when the fire broke out.
“My mother stood up and yelled, ‘I’ll take Freddie and you take Joan,’ ”
“I remember turning around and I saw a man behind me and I said to him, ‘Don’t push! That’s how people get hurt,’ "
Many survivors described panicked people shoving others and stepping on those who had fallen in the rush to escape the growing heat.
Joan slipped from her aunt’s hand and never saw her again. She worked her way through the crowd until she reached one of two animal chutes.
Used to bring in animals from outside the tent, the four-foot-high chutes proved to be a deadly trap. They ran in an unbroken line from outside the tent to rings to the left and the right of the center ring. The chutes created a vice, trapping people sitting in the reserved sections on the northeast side of the tent.
In the rush to escape, desperate people piled against the four-foot high wire structure on the northeastern side. Many of the dead would be found here, stacked against both sides of that chute.
Others survived by sheer luck, by quick thinking and by heroism -- a boy who slit a hole in a side of the tent; a circus worker who pulled a child over the chute.
“I just climbed over the cage myself and got down on the other side,"
Her mother and aunt both died in the fire.
Grisly identifications
Once the blaze hit the top, the tent became a massive broiler. No one who remained inside could survive.
“No hose or fire department could ever have done any good," Hallisey testified. “I thought the fire on the drop curtain could have been put out if someone was to take care of it. That was the one chance. I’m sure it didn’t take 10 minutes to drop that tent into oblivion.”
People ran and stumbled over chairs to escape the intensifying heat and falling chunks of boiling wax. Others scrambled to the top of the bleachers and jumped down 20-25 feet, escaping by lifting the sidewall or slashing it with jackknives.
That’s how
When the fire started, Alex grabbed them and brought them up to the top of the section rather than fighting through the crowd below. He jumped and called for them to do the same.
“My mother took my hand and we jumped,” said Dolores whose last name is now DiFazio. “Your adrenaline goes and you do what you have to do.”
Once they hit the ground, they slipped under the tent side that Alex held up. He stayed and held it for others to follow.
David de le Vergne’s family wasn’t so lucky.
The 4-year-old went to the circus with his mother, Elizabeth, and his dad, Mason, and their neighbors the Thompsons. The tickets were for the top row of the reserved section, near the center ring, a big problem for his mother who was afraid of heights. So they found an usher who moved her to a seat in the front row just minutes before the circus started.
“I don’t remember seeing the fire start. All I remember is
His father tossed the two boys to his friend on the ground and then shimmied down the rope himself, badly injuring his hands and arm.
“Then we ran like hell to get out of there,” he said.
His mother, however, was missing. The family found her body later at the makeshift morgue that had been set up in the state armory, identifying her by her wedding ring.
De le Vergne’s wife now wears that ring. For years, he brought flowers to his mother’s grave on the anniversary of her death or paid someone from a local church to do it for him when his family moved to
Hickey led Weidl and others down the bleachers, but she stopped near the bottom.
“I couldn’t move; I was frozen,” Weidl said. “So Aunt Isabel ran up the bleachers. She slapped my face -- thank God, and dragged me down the bleachers.”
Chaos outside
Circus workers tried to steer people out of the tent in a race against the rapidly spreading fire.
“I tried to help the women and children, but it got so hot for me, I thought I would be burned, too," usher
He barely escaped before the big top collapsed, sealing the fates of those still struggling to get out. Morris went back to look at the wreckage after the fire was doused, but quickly realized it was too late.
“I got sick for a few minutes and then I sat down for a few minutes,” Morris said. “I helped out much as I could.”
There was chaos outside the flaming remains of the tent. Badly burned people walked around the grounds and onto
“The first thing I saw was a woman who was burned pretty bad,” DeMichele said. “There were people just standing around in various stages of injuries.”
After running back into the tent to rescue people, Hickey, the fire marshal, immediately declared an emergency. Ambulances raced to the scene from all over the county. School buses and
The 8-year-old had gone to the circus with her brother and some neighbors’ parents. Since this was her first time at a circus, McGrath put on her favorite pink dress, which had little puff sleeves.
She escaped by running from the entrance where the band was playing, but realized quickly that she wasn’t OK.
“I was burned on both of my arms. They were both bubbling way up, like great big bubbles,” McGrath said.
She remembered being in a hospital room, a nurse with scissors standing over her.
“I remember vividly them cutting my dress off," McGrath said. “They had to cut my little puff sleeves so that they could treat my arms.”
McGrath, whose last name is now Packer, doesn’t remember much else about her hospital stay other than an attempted, agonizing blood draw.
“I was screaming in pain as they tried to draw blood from my arm and finally they drew it out of my ankle,” she said.
Her younger brother, Martin, was badly burned as well. She didn’t know what had happened to him until she realized he was in the room right next to hers at
The siblings didn’t talk much about the fire. To this day, McGrath said, she still doesn’t know how Martin escaped the flames. He died two years ago.
The nameless dead
The state armory became the central point for identifying the dead. Officials lined up rows of bodies, many of them burned beyond recognition. The line to view the bodies curled around the armory and halfway up
After six days, six bodies were not identified and six other people were listed as missing. The coroner later acknowledged there were likely misidentified people who were buried under other names, creating two separate lists of “missing” and “unidentified.”
The six nameless victims were buried in
The other five have remained anonymous, but using the latest DNA technology, called genetic DNA, there may be a chance to identify some of them. The effort to give names to the unidentified victims picked up momentum amid inquires from The Courant as to whether advances in DNA testing could help solve the enduring mystery.
Dr.
If Fifield is not a match, Gill may try and compare the DNA samples to the thousands kept in private databases by companies offering people a chance to discover their ancestry. Genetic DNA testing has become a new tool for police departments across the country, who have solved murders and sexual assaults by matching DNA from unknown perpetrators to their relatives.
Gill’s request is still pending in
Cobb is planning to hold a hearing on Gill’s application that likely won’t take place until late July.
Arson?
The cause of the fire is another enduring mystery.
There were two investigations -- one by Hickey, the state fire marshal who was at the circus, and the other by
Healy interviewed 53 people, including survivors and circus employees, and focused on the negligence of Ringling’s management. He recommended seven circus employees face charges for wanton and reckless conduct and left no doubt that the animal chutes “created a perilous hazard” that led to many deaths.
Five circus officials were arrested, and four of them would serve time in prison on involuntary manslaughter charges.
Hickey centered his investigation on the cause and origin of the fire and eventually ruled that it was accidental and caused by a cigarette thrown near the sidewall behind the southwest bleachers. He based his findings on the story of one police officer who heard a man yell, “That dirty son-of-a-bitch just threw a cigarette butt!”
Police never found the man who made that claim or the person who threw the cigarette butt, but Hickey stuck to that account.
The case took another turn in 1950, when
“Just a small flame and then it turned into this red man again and then the red man became a red horse and then I remembered somebody shaking me and when I came to, I was standing on my feet with my clothing and shoes and stockings on and I ran in and tried to help with the people,” Segee told
Segee served four years in an
“We visited him and he out and out stated that he didn’t start the fire,” Lewis said recently. “We interviewed and interviewed and interviewed. We could not prove that he started the fire or that it was intentionally set."
However, based on experiments, they found that a tossed cigarette butt could not have started the blaze. Segee died in 1997.
“We couldn’t prove it wasn’t arson, but one of the things we could not prove was that
The cause remains undetermined.
Licorice and money
While Little Miss 1565 was the most famous fire fatality,
“They said in the newspaper that I liked licorice and people from all over
Murphy was so famous that police took her to
When she left the hospital, Murphy was at the center of another big story -- the fight between two sets of grandparents for custody and the
Lawyers had lined up to sue the circus, and state officials realized they needed to keep the traveling show viable while claims were heard. As the animals and performers remained at the
By
The victims and their families were given a year, until
There were 551 cases that required hearings and an additional 112 claims under
As time went on, the arbitration awards became formulaic and routine. According to one
The man replied, “Lucky? Judge, look at my face. Do you think any girl will ever look at me without shuddering?”
Even though Ringling Bros. carried only about
The last payment to families was made in 1950. The last legal action was taken in 1969, when the award to the late
Scars, physical and emotional
For those who lived, the scars ran deep. Some were physical; others changed the way they looked at the world.
Burned on his back and arms,
“I carry scars; they are very defined. I’ve had them for 75 years and they are just a part of me,” he said.
Some survivors were left with webbed fingers because of the way their hands were bandaged. Most needed skin grafts. For some, the treatments were as painful as the original burns.
“They put silver nitrate on me, and that burned way worse than the fire,” said Verret, who had moved to
Burn treatment in the 1940s was far different than today. Many of the victims had their burns wrapped in bandages coated with petroleum jelly.
Every day for six weeks, nurses changed her Vaseline-coated bandages.
“All I know is that it hurt,” Margolin said. “I still have a scar on my left arm. I was sort of embarrassed by it, but I always told people how I got it if they asked.”
In the aftermath of the circus fire, doctors quickly realized that infections were the biggest problem, and they turned to a new wonder drug that was saving soldiers’ lives.
“I remember the doctors telling my grandparents that they wanted to try this new drug that they had used in massive doses on the battlefield, but never on any children,”
Fifty-six children under age 9 died in the fire.
Of those who survived, some never went to a circus again. Others say they still fear enclosed spaces. Some cringe when they hear, “Stars and Stripes Forever,” the tune the band played as a traditional emergency alert after the fire started. Many have never talked about the fire, even with their own families.
“No matter where I went after that, I was always aware of the exit signs,”
“I never really felt comfortable in a tent, which is hard to spend a career in the
The family was escorted to John Ringling North’s private booth.
For Lassow, the enduring memory of the circus fire is the smell.
“The smell didn’t go away,” he said. “I smell the burning flesh and see the people lying all over the place.”
Many survivors say the screams of dying people have stayed with them.
“We heard the screaming and moaning, and then the tent was falling down,”
There was at least one marriage among circus survivors. Jim and
“Outside the tent, people were screaming, crying and running to escape the inferno. The fire intensified and made a tremendous whooshing sound. Flames shot high into the sky. The thick black smoke billowed over the scene, staining people’s faces. Flaming bits of canvas wafted over the panicked crowd. We felt the intense heat on our backs.”
“Time," Bushnell wrote, “does not diminish the horror.”
Patricia Murphy’s scars are obvious. She underwent plastic surgeries until she was a college freshman, traveling every summer to
She went to high school in
“My favorite was a woman who told me how beautiful my mother was and that I looked exactly like my father,” Murphy said. “Who wants to be stopped in the street like that? I didn’t want people to feel sorry for me.”
Murphy went on to become an ombudsmen for people in long-term care in
“I didn’t want to be
___
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