The Circus Fire (7 page)

The bug men were out with their boards, hawking chameleons on string leashes for 50 cents. Comedian Charles Nelson Reilly, who grew up on Vine Street, remembered buying one. Hulda Grant bought one for Donald Gale. It was supposed to turn the color of your shirt. Donald checked after a few seconds; the lizard wasn't doing much.

There was everything to buy: pink balls of candy floss bigger than kids' heads and candy apples so sweet they made one's teeth ache, striped boxes of popcorn and bags of peanuts, and the big seller today, ice cream fished from a Borden's truck, wisps of clouds licking out the door. There were balloons and circus pennants and buttons and pictures of the sideshow and big-top stars, miniature sombreros and monkeys on a stick—but only if children could convince their mothers or fathers or aunts or grandmothers to buy one for them.

Mildred Cook didn't have a lot of extra money to buy things, and Donald and Eleanor and Edward knew it. She bought them two bags of popcorn to share between the three of them.

"More than an hour's time is given patrons before the performance begins to visit the Mammoth Menagerie and the International Congress of Freaks," the program boasted. Being a Sunday School show, Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey had none of the lucrative games of chance less reputable circuses and carnivals made the staples of their midways. There were no sharps playing the nuts (the old shell game) or tossing the broads (three-card monte). There were no mitt readers or palmists, no peelers or cooch shows, only the sideshow panels shifting in the breeze, the spielers dealing out their patter on the bally platform, the ticket takers lazing in the shade of their umbrellas.

Even their sideshow was tame compared to some of the truck shows. There were no gruesome oddities like giant Amazonian rats or double-headed fetuses in jars. The freaks on exhibit that season—once the spieler enticed folks to give up their money and enter the tent—were decidedly traditional, not shocking at all: Mr. and Mrs. Fischer the giant and giantess; Baby Thelma the fat girl; Rasmus Neilsen the tattooed strongman. Anyone—like William Epps—who paid to circle the hot interior and gawk up at them on their raised stages must have felt taken. Yes, Percy Pape was

tall and gaunt, and Frieda Pushnik the armless and legless girl might upset some younger children, but Hanka Kelta the long-haired girl was hardly remarkable, and the troubadours, midgets and minstrels were frankly old hat.

The menagerie was much more interesting. Guests elbowed into the marquee and took a right through a roofed opening show folks called the connection. Even before they reached the ticket taker, the smell of elephant dung hit them.

Hard by the connection stood the air-conditioned wagons of Gargantua and M'Toto under their own small canopy, surrounded by children and their parents. Circus publicity touted Gargy as the largest gorilla ever exhibited (doubtful) and the most famous animal since Jumbo (quite possibly true). His lack of romantic interest in his bride and his love of Coca-Cola were common knowledge. According to show lore, he hated humans, the permanent sneer on his face the result of a keeper's cruelty. He reportedly crippled several trainers and nearly strangled John Ringling North, who once unwittingly stepped too close to his barred cage in winter quarters. The Carrier Corporation had built his new cage with double panes of glass that kept the interior "jungle-conditioned" at seventy-six degrees and 50 percent humidity and had the added advantage of stopping Gargy's old trick of peeing into his hands and then tossing it through the bars at the customers.

In Hartford that afternoon condensation fogged the glass, making it

hard to see, but he was in there all right. Gargantua the Great, The World's Most Terrifying Living Creature, The Largest and Fiercest Gorilla Ever Brought Before the Eyes of Civilized Man, was on his back by the tire he sometimes played with, sacked out like a hound dog.

The sun welcomed visitors to the menagerie proper, making them squint. The ground inside was strewn with wood shavings to keep the dust down. Beyond the white canvas corral of sidewall, just south of the big top, a diesel generator drummed, its rich fumes combining with the smell of crushed grass and the dung and musk of the animals.

The elephants drew people to the middle, the big cats and black bears and lesser monkeys in their wagons strung along the back wall of the sideshow tent on one side and the big top on the other, just outside the stake line. Numbering an even thirty, the herd was still formidable. Reeking, the massive beasts stood on a carpet of hay, flicking their thin ears, occasionally shoveling in a mouthful with their trunks. A single rope strung between bent metal stakes separated them from the crowd, and children lined up to warily offer them peanuts, marveling when their palms came away wet.

Betty Lou, the pygmy hippo who survived the Cleveland fire, wallowed contentedly in her bathing tank. She'd become a darling of the cage-boys, who secretly slipped her her favorite treat, chocolate. In fact, most of the animals in the menagerie were survivors of the Cleveland fire. Edith the giraffe over at the far end by McGovern's was the one who'd come dashing out of the front entrance. Beside her cage, a half-dozen brand-new camels sat in their hay, oblivious of history.

Showtime

It was almost 2:00, and people started thinking of going in, patting their pockets and searching their purses for their tickets. As hot as it was in the sun, it would be worse under the big top, sardined into the seats and bleachers shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip.

Out on the midway, one family was about to head in when the mother suddenly faltered, bent over and fell to the ground. Something was wrong with her legs; she couldn't move them. The woman's husband tried to help her up but her legs wouldn't respond. They had to find a doctor. He picked her up and carried her back to the car. She wouldn't regain the use of her legs for a year.

Another woman from East Hartford had taken her three-year-old nephew. She'd brought the boy into the sideshow with her and naturally the performers scared the toddler. She tried to quiet him with ice cream and orangeade, but the child would not stop crying. The night before, the woman had dreamed of her dead sister, dressed in black and seated on die bleachers. Though she'd already bought tickets, she returned to the yellow wagon and cashed them in. SAVED BY SIDESHOW FREAKS, the headline screamed the next day.

The lore of the fire is chock-full of these near-miss stories, generally attributed to the hand of providence. For everyone inside the tent that day, there are five who were going to go but somehow didn't end up there. The bus was late or they got off at the wrong stop. Older children took the money with which parents had entrusted them to buy siblings tickets and spent it on ice cream sundaes and war movies and forbidden penny poker

games. One woman was going to take her grandchild but, waiting for the bus, remembered she might have left the iron on and went home to check. And of course, afterward, everyone who'd planned on seeing the canceled Wednesday matinee claimed they were saved. Fate, or God, had intervened.

No such presentiments or foresight stopped the crowd now pouring through the marquee, bunching up at the iron pipe railings leading to the ticket takers. Just outside the front door, people with free passes for buying war bonds had to stop at the tax boxes and pay the government its share. Only servicemen in uniform were exempt.

The public toilets, or donickers, were off the main entryway, just past the menagerie connection, the last exit before going in. Boys and older gentlemen who had filled up on Cokes and pink lemonade took a right into an opening in the canvas; girls and women headed left. At the commissioner's inquiry, several men testified that everything in the men's seemed in order—no trash or toilet paper on the ground, just the three toilets and the trough, the overpoweringly sweet creolin disinfectant hanging by its wire. One recalled three empty metal pails by the urinal, but nothing was made of them. The commissioner didn't call any women to hear about their side.

The lines moved steadily, people taking baby steps, kids climbing the pipe railings like monkey bars. Elliott and Joan Smith's mother gave their tickets to the maroon-blazered attendant and they walked between the two blue bleacher sections at the end and into the big tent.

The heat was like a wall; it was stuffier in here, muggier. A black iron cage filled the near ring, another one down at the far end. Poles rose all around them, ropes and rigging hanging like vines, bright lights shining down. The blue quarters were thick as telephone poles and seemed to lean dangerously over the slowly filling stands, each ending in a blue or red star stitched into the tent roof. Elliott and Joan gazed all around as their mother led them along the hippodrome track—a fancy circus term for no more than the lot's natural grass strewn with wood shavings.

Usually frugal, Grace Smith had splurged on reserved seats. They went left, toward the north side of the tent—the six-bit side, it was called. They had to cross a barred iron chute that ran from the round animal cage and between the bleachers and the grandstand, beneath a canvas sign with EXIT in large red letters and outside where the animals waited in their cages.

The chute was taller than Elliott and came up to Grace's chest. They had to climb over a set of wooden stairs five steps high and a yard wide, imagining lions and tigers pacing under their feet. The stairs had no railing, and an attendant took Grace Smith's hand to steady her coming down the other side.

Iron pipe railings fronted the grandstand sections, preventing anyone from the cheaper bleachers from sneaking in, and keeping people off the track during the specs and the clown walkaround. Gatemen perched on camp stools manned the narrow openings. Grace Smith presented their tickets to one. He handed the stubs to an usher inside the railing, and that man guided the Smiths to the proper aisle and led them up the grandstand to their seats.

There were eighteen rows, three of those on the ground before the risers started. The Smiths were about halfway up, in the middle of their sec-

tion. Each row was supposed to have sixteen of the tomato-soup-red wooden folding chairs, but an enterprising usher could overlap them and fit more in, offering the extra premium seats to customers unhappy with their original tickets and then pocketing the difference. As one usher said at the inquest: "Sometimes you can pack them in and get a lot more than an ordinary sitting." Ushers in the best sections—those closest to the center ring—regularly fit in so many chairs per row they would stick out into the aisle. From testimony and the few photos available, it seems on the day of the fire at least some ushers overlapped their chairs.

Finally seated, perspiring freely, Grace Smith flagged a Coke vendor and bought one for each of the children. Elliott lifted the bottle to his lips, but instead of a cold, sugary shock to the teeth, the soda was thin and warm and bitter. He drank it anyway.

The Kurneta-Erickson party from Middletown was also in the north grandstand, farther down, in section S, the fourth row from the top. Stanley Kurneta was pleased. They were great seats, directly in the center and high enough for even the smallest, six-year-old Raymond Erickson, to see everything. The sidewall behind them had been lowered a couple feet, and a breeze dried the sweat on their necks. Around them, men had shed

their ties and laid their jackets over their laps. A vendor stalked the aisles, hawking paper fans. Most folks made do with their programs or just one hand.

Donald Gale from East Hartford was here too, after crossing the chute, even farther down toward the bandstand with his neighbor Hulda Grant, her daughter Caroline and the boyfriend. The chameleon he'd bought still wasn't doing much, but now there were the trapeze platforms to look at, the rope ladders, the highwire strung in a half silver, half invisible line above the center ring. He was glad he'd woken up his father, and glad he'd said yes.

Elizabeth de la Vergne was scared of heights. She'd gone with her husband and son and some friends, but when the usher showed them where their seats were, she balked. They were reserved seats; it wasn't like the bleachers, they couldn't just sit anywhere. She was sorry, she said, but she was not sitting all the way up there, she simply couldn't. After a brief discussion, the usher managed to squeeze her into the front row of the section, down on the ground, right by the railing. Her husband and son took their assigned seats up high. She looked back at them and waved.

Mabel Epps and her sister Maurice Goff bought general admission bleacher seats. Once they came in, they could choose between the two sections right there by the main entrance or walk the length of the tent and try one on either side of the bandstand, where the performers entered. Being seven months along, Mabel chose the closest one, the northwest bleachers, just to the left of the front door. William and Richard tagged along after her; Maurice had little Muriel by the hand.

There was no flooring, and they had to climb from seat to seat, carefully placing their feet on the narrow boards, pushing off and catching their balance like the Wallendas. They picked an open spot a few rows from the top and sat down, their legs dangling into empty space beneath them.