The Circus Fire (34 page)

His daughter was a spinner, Adler said, with the aerial ballet. She had guts. After the fire both of them went over to the armory, and she insisted on going in and seeing the bodies. She asked a trooper how she could get in; the officer told her she needed to be looking for a particular person. Adler himself refused to, but she gave a name and saw the bodies in the company of a Red Cross nurse and another trooper.

Adler said the troupe would be drinking at the Hofbrau House on Trumbull Street later. Adler was going to catch a quick nap; if Whelan was still in the bar at 11:00, Adler would bring him along and introduce him to the Wallendas and other stars. Whelan said he'd probably be here since it didn't look like his date was going to show.

Across the room, the other detective had spoken with Leonard Aylesworth. In the lobby of the Bond, his partner slipped a note to Whelan. It read: "I am Supt. of that Department, an engineer and a graduate of Yale. I know textile. I was in Springfield, Mass, when this fire took place. In the year 1799 Geo. Washington attended a circus and from that day to this day the tents have been always treated the same. Now who is lax the circus or your city officials. I was before some of the 'Big-Shots' until six o'clock this morning then thrown in jail. 'What for?' 'That's my business?' 'I will never tell you.' 'I did the best I could but they are not kidding me.' 'Of course there may have been some laxity but at these times, what can you expect.'"

At 11:00, Adler returned with a man named Bill Hudson from New York City. He wasn't part of the circus, just someone—like Whelan—he'd met at the bar. Hal Olver, the press flack, came along and told stories about how he'd broken peoples cameras during the fire. Adler said he'd busted one too. Olver was sore about a fellow named Roden or Rodent who apparently was "a weak sister, who he told to shut his mouth." He was surprised the cops hadn't picked him up yet. Adler wondered why they hadn't questioned Blinky Meek.

Olver left and Adler suggested he and Whelan and Hudson go out to a bar called the Spinning Wheel on Albany Avenue. Whelan said that was fine but he couldn't stay out too late. He excused himself to go to the bathroom, then ran outside and across the street to his car and removed its fishing pole antenna and hid it in the high grass of a vacant lot.

At the Spinning Wheel, Adler introduced the two men to Frankie Saluto, the famous midget clown. Adler and Saluto reminisced about the good old days in New York and signed autographs for people at the bar. Show folks there were wondering where "Cookie the Blow" disappeared to after the fire.

After last call, Adler said he'd buy them beers back at the railroad cars; porters sold them by the bottle. When they got there, Hudson paid. Two midgets drank with them. When Hudson went outside to pee, Whelan

learned that Adler didn't know the man at all. Adler mentioned it was the first beer Hudson had bought in a long time, and when he returned, the show people seemed suspicious of him. Hudson told a circus story from years back, and another fellow tripped him up in his details. Whelan thought they might gang up on the man if he didn't get him out of there, so he said it was time he was heading back.

He dropped Adler off at the Bond. Once he was alone in the car with Hudson, he asked him a few offhand questions about New York. Hudson clammed up. Whelan asked him who he was and who he thought he was kidding. The remark sobered Hudson instantly. Whelan said he didn't think he was even from New York. He asked if he was a government agent.

"I could be," Hudson said.

Whelan told him who he was and showed him his credentials. He demanded to know what Hudson's business was. When Hudson refused to say, Whelan told him he was taking him in.

Just short of the barracks, Hudson broke down and confessed that he was just a fireman from Stamford. He showed him his badge. Whelan hauled him in anyway, asking the duty officer to make a record of Hudson in the logbook. Hudson was terrified, afraid he'd lose his job. He'd been suspended for being drunk on duty a few weeks before. He begged Whelan to take his name off the log.

Whelan was sick of him and his stories. He dropped him at his hotel, swung back to the Hotel Bond and retrieved his antenna, then drove home. The nickel he stuck in an envelope and attached to his report to the commissioner, along with a cocktail napkin autographed by Felix Adler, King of the Clowns.

July 9 , 1944

Sunday no one celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of Tom Thumb's first visit to Hartford. They were too busy with funerals.

Mt. St. Benedict Cemetery on Blue Hills Avenue had all of their employees working overtime. They would bury twenty people today, with fifteen more scheduled for tomorrow.

The papers were full of announcements. In New Hartford: "The local Girl Scouts will attend the funeral of Lorraine Wabrek Sunday afternoon in a body. They will meet one-half hour before the funeral in the parsonage, in uniform."

In Hartford, the triple funeral of one mother and her two young sons drew a crowd to Talarski's. Her husband didn't attend; he'd collapsed upon hearing the news and was in seclusion. Thick tributes of flowers blanketed the white caskets, the boys on either side of their mother, two small crosses of white roses at their feet. As the organist played "Nearer My God to Thee," the woman's mother cried, "Alice, my Alice, why did you go, why did you go?" The reverend chose an appropriate verse: "Jesus said suffer the little children to come unto me, for such is the kingdom of heaven." Emotion overcame both grandmothers; they had to be helped out of the chapel. A cortege of fifty cars wound its way to Fairview Cemetery. Again, the women nearly fainted. It was already hot, haze hovering above the trees. Relatives plucked rosebuds from the wreaths and cast them into the open graves. The crowd dispersed, gently shutting their doors. The sexton lowered the boxes, the workmen uncovered the dirt.

There were so many dead that the funeral notices' normally acceptable platitudes—true or not—now rang false and hollow. "Mrs. Goff was well known and had a wide circle of friends." "Mrs. de la Vergne was widely known and had a large circle of friends."

The heat was unbearable, in the nineties before noon and staying there past supper time. At the baseball stadium, John Stewart and the St. Michael's Boys Brigade roamed the stands, collecting money for the
Times'
Circus Victims Fund.

Strangely, at the air-conditioned Roxy Theater off Broad Street, along with a short of Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra
{Swooner vs. Crooner),
they were showing
Under the Big Top,
a collection of clips from Ringling's Madison Square Garden dates. For the Roxy, though, this was not in questionable taste but absolutely fitting; their features Sunday were
Delinquent Parents
(See . . . Youth on the loose!) and
Rebellious Daughters
(What do they do at night?).

In Sarasota, the
Herald Tribune
ran an editorial about the fire on their front page.

In time, it will probably be decided no individual or group was really to blame. Canvas has been weatherproofed the same way for years. We shall probably decide the catastrophe may be attributed to any one of a number of causes, from a cigarette to a match carelessly flipped.

Human beings, subject to human limitations, learn primarily by experience. There was, in this case, no criterion worthy of the name. Now that the criterion exists, you won't have to worry further about another Ringling circus fire.

Detention in Hartford of five key men on a technical charge of manslaughter is merely a normal step in [an] official investigation. Not one of the five but would have given his right arm, his very life, to have prevented the holocaust. Authorities realize this. So will the public, once hysteria dies.

Whatever the cost in lives and immeasurable anguish, whatever the official aftermath, there will be no more inflammable canvas stretched above circus audiences. Not because of what the law will do, but because those operating the Ringling circus HAVE NOW LEARNED FROM EXPERIENCE. Doubtless Ringling's new "big top" will not only be unburnable but so constructed that multiple exits will safeguard against panic of any type. Ringling executives will see to this regardless of investigations or popular sentiment.

Commissioner Hickey didn't read the editorial. He spent the day going over all the testimony he'd collected since Thursday night, trying to figure out who he should talk to next.

Mabel Epps came home from St. Francis to her boys—safe, thank God. Why her sister Maurice and her niece Muriel were taken, she couldn't understand. Everyone wanted her to rest. She tried, but how did you rest your mind? How did you not think?

At the morgue, a dentist from Middletown identified Michael Norris by his teeth. He checked the two girls who were left, but neither of them was remotely close to Judy.

Seaman Raymond Erickson Sr. came all the way from Gulfport to find his son. He didn't know what to make of Stanley Kurneta's story about the priest. He went to the morgue, hoping to find a child his son's size with no dental work whatsoever and the knotted shoelace his wife had tied. And Raymond had just recovered from a broken arm; an X-ray could verify that.

The one boy left was far too large to be Raymond. There were no others.

The police escorted Mr. Erickson to Municipal Hospital, but no one there offered any clues, and all the patients had names. He returned to Middletown. What else could he do? It didn't matter that it wasn't his fault he'd been away. He'd come too late and his son was gone.

As the day waned, the morgue fell quiet. Everyone on the missing list had been checked into except Ermo Flanders, and none of the six bodies fit his age.

Dr. Weissenborn was just as puzzled as Thomas Barber and Ed Lowe by 1565. He suggested the possibility that the one person who could identify the girl might be among the critically injured, or perhaps she was the only child of one of the three nameless adults laid out on the tables. Maybe someone had claimed the wrong body. The detectives wouldn't rule anything out.

Tomorrow the city would bury those left. The mayor's office had a ceremony planned.

Weissenborn set to work cataloguing the bodies, carefully taking their data—height, weight, head circumference, estimated age. He helped Dr. Butler to shoot dental X-rays of all six, then Butler pulled out his clipboard and patiently started charting. A detective gathered the information together in one place. Maybe someday people would need it.

July 10, 1944

As the courts and law offices opened, scores of suits against the circus clogged the docket, dozens of them naming the city as co-defendant. Always the populist, Mayor Mortensen spoke with the president of the local bar on behalf of citizens who couldn't afford legal counsel.

The mayor also appealed to storekeepers and owners of vacant buildings to take circus posters out of their windows. He personally paid to have a large billboard with the Ringling banner stripped.

The forecast for Monday was cloudy with showers, a warm rain breaking the heat wave. It ruined Coroner Frank Healy's last day of vacation. He'd missed all the commotion, down on the shore in Milford. Now he had to shut up the beach house and head north. His inquest started tomorrow.

The morgue opened at 8:30. No one was foolish enough to be hopeful at this point, though they showed up just the same: Barber and Lowe and Butler and Weissenborn. William Menser called in sick. They waited in the chilly room, blowing into their hands; when it was apparent nobody was coming, Weissenborn called in a state police photographer to take some pictures for the files.

From the official notes, the six unidentified were:

1503—9 year old female, white (probably), 3'11", 55 lbs., slender build, light brown hair with red glow. Upper and lower permanent incisors and first molars present. All baby molars present, the four baby second molars all have fillings, these are the only fillings in the mouth.

1510—11 year old male, white (probably)—badly burned. 4'4" (estimated), 70 lbs., muscularly developed. Wore white ribbed shorts, undershirt with shoulder straps. Only three baby teeth present (upper cuspids and lower left second molar); five fillings in four teeth.

1565—6 year old female, white, blue eyes, 3'10", 40 lbs., moderately well developed, head circumference
20
^l
li",
blond or light hair, shoul-

der length. Curly hair. All baby teeth present except lower central incisors, the incisal edges of which are even with the occlusal plane of the lower lateral baby incisors. Brown shoes (pair); flowered dress.

2109—30 plus female, white, 5'1", 148 lbs. (approximately), small boned, stocky, head circumference 22", light brown or blonde hair, appendix operation about 8 years ago. Wore Spencer corset, pink pants, and tan rayon stockings. Gold crowns in upper left laterals; other dental work indicates intermittent care.