The Circus Fire: A True Story of an American Tragedy - Softcover

O'Nan, Stewart

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385496850 ISBN 13: 9780385496858

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2001

Synopsis

The acclaimed author of Emily, Alone and Henry, Himself brings all his narrative gifts to bear on this gripping account of tragedy and heroism—the great Hartford circus fire of 1944.

It was a midsummer afternoon, halfway through a Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus performance, when the big top caught fire. The tent had been waterproofed with a mixture of paraffin and gasoline; in seconds it was burning out of control. More than 8,000 people were trapped inside, and the ensuing disaster would eventually take 167 lives.

Steward O'Nan brings all his narrative gifts to bear on this gripping account of the great Hartford circus fire of 1944. Drawing on interviews with hundreds of survivors, O'Nan skillfully re-creates the horrific events and illuminates the psychological oddities of human behavior under stress: the mad scramble for the exits; the perilous effort to maneuver animals out of danger; the hero who tossed dozens of children to safety before being trampled to death. Brilliantly constructed and exceptionally moving, The Circus Fire is history at its most compelling.

About this title

About the Author

Stewart O'Nan is the author of fifteen previous novels, including West of Sunset, The Odds, Emily Alone, Songs for the Missing, Last Night at the Lobster, A Prayer for the Dying, and Snow Angels. His 2007, novel Last Night at the Lobster, was a national bestseller and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He was born and raised in Pittsburgh, where he lives with his family.

From the Back Cover

The acclaimed author of A Prayer for the Dying brings all his narrative gifts to bear on this gripping account of tragedy and heroism-the great Hartford circus fire of 1944.
Halfway through a midsummer afternoon performance, Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus's big top caught fire. The tent had been waterproofed with a mixture of paraffin and gasoline; in seconds it was burning out of control, and more than 8,000 people were trapped inside. Drawing on interviews with hundreds of survivors, O'Nan skillfully re-creates the horrific events and illuminates the psychological oddities of human behavior under stress: the mad scramble for the exits; the hero who tossed dozens of children to safety before being trampled to death.
Brilliantly constructed and exceptionally moving, The Circus Fire is history at its most compelling.

From the Inside Flap

d author of A Prayer for the Dying brings all his narrative gifts to bear on this gripping account of tragedy and heroism-the great Hartford circus fire of 1944.

Halfway through a midsummer afternoon performance, Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus's big top caught fire. The tent had been waterproofed with a mixture of paraffin and gasoline; in seconds it was burning out of control, and more than 8,000 people were trapped inside. Drawing on interviews with hundreds of survivors, O'Nan skillfully re-creates the horrific events and illuminates the psychological oddities of human behavior under stress: the mad scramble for the exits; the hero who tossed dozens of children to safety before being trampled to death.

Brilliantly constructed and exceptionally moving, The Circus Fire is history at its most compelling.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Circus Fire

By Stewart O'Nan

Anchor Books

Copyright ©2001 Stewart O'Nan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780385496858

Excerpt

The band blasted it, sat there while the fire came straight at them, the crowdsplitting like a river around the bandstand. The flames were above the endgrandstand sections, not far to go. It was snowing fire. Hot cables werefalling, cinders, embers.

The kettle drums exploded from the heat.

"Jump!" Merle Evans directed, and the band bailed?like true musicians, takingtheir instruments with them. A flaming quarterpole toppled, dropped onto thestand like a hammer.

Faces smudged, white uniforms scorched, they regrouped outside and serenaded thedazed crowd that stood there watching the drums and the organ burn.

A man leading two children straggled out. "By the time we got to the end of thetent we got out the door on the right of the bandstand. I do recall goingoutside of the tent, and the bandleader was standing there blowing his trumpet,and there were a couple of bandsmen around there. They were playing right at theentrance to the tent." Both children had third-degree burns all over, the mansecond-degree burns on his lips.

By the southeast exit, a Coca-Cola top caught fire, flames enveloping tiers ofempty deposit bottles in yellow wooden crates. The glass melted and pooled likewater.

Inside, in the withering heat, a twelve-year-old boy and his mother reached thetop of the stands. She dropped him down and told him to go. He did what shesaid.

High up, the guyropes parted, the rigging gave way, and the poles by thenortheast corner slumped inward, then the center of the canvas. The tentsagged?slowly, not all at once, the flags on top bending almost horizontal?andthen with a hissing, swishing sound, the big top collapsed on itself, the heavycenterpoles falling one after another, smashing the animal cages, crushingpeople. The quarters?thick as phone poles?banged into the grandstands, dentingthe railings.

Robert Onorato caught it on film, shooting from atop an embankment at the eastend. Slowed down on video, the fire licks up the visible tip of the eastmostcenterpole and wraps the flag. The flag catches and drops as if it's melting,falls, and immediately the tent collapses, softly, belling like a ball gown whenits wearer curtsies, like a sail emptied of wind.

Around the south side, Spencer Torell got off shot after shot, the seriesshowing the fire eating the tent's skin away, leaving the skeletal rigging, thequarterpoles still vainly linked by wires.

As the canvas fell it pushed the heat beneath out through the sidewalls. Theblast of hot air almost knocked people down.

A woman burst from the back door, badly burned on her face and arms, crying"Find my child! Find my child!" A policeman hurried her to the doctor's tent.She kept asking about her son, where was he, was he all right.

Another mother crawled out from under the sidewall with her son, strikingdaylight just as the tent collapsed, a samaritan pulling them free.

The last dashed out with their arms and legs and bodies raw and bleeding, headsand necks grotesquely blistered. The smell of burned hair turned stomachs.

Not everyone escaped. The tent fell on those unlucky enough to be inside. A lotof people outside watching it fall had no idea where their loved ones were. DonCook watched it fall, and Joan Smith, and Stanley Kurneta, and Barbara and MaryKay Smith, and Mabel Epps.

The burning tent settled on top of those left, pinning them. Under the pile bythe northeast chute, Elliott Smith could hear people above him moaning andpraying. At the bottom of the mound on the track, Donald Gale thought his legwas broken. He tried to push himself up and discovered he couldn't budge.

The fire came crackling over the paraffined canvas, a soft rushing whoosh likethe approach of wind.

The praying stopped, and then there was just screaming. People outside werestunned to hear women and children moaning and crying for their lives. Likehowling, witnesses described it as. Terrible, eerie screeching.

Several survivors said the one thing they will never forget about the circusfire as long as they live is the sound of the animals as they burned alive. Butthere were no animals.

Death by fire

The ones on top burned. Trapped by their weight, flat on his stomach, ElliottSmith could hear them screaming. He could breathe all right, he wasn'tsuffocating. He could see the reflection of the fire on the ground directly infront of him. He spat at the sawdust, trying to put it out.

He felt short stabs of pain in his back, like being jabbed again and again witha knife. Above him, the screaming stopped.

Donald Gale gathered his strength and forced his hands free, and then his arms,his face?just as the fire roared over the track. He saw a flash of light andpulled back, trying to hide in the pile, but it was too late. The burns werelike being pinched hard all over, like someone was sticking pins in his hands.The heat fused his knuckles into lumps, seared his arms up to his shoulders.After a minute he passed out.

The pile at the northeast chute only covered Jerry LeVasseur from the chestdown. The fire tore at his head and hands and shoulders, turning his skin intofuel, then moved on.

In a typical structural fire smoke is the killer because it has no place togo?as in the Cocoanut Grove. Trapped victims fall unconscious, like Mildred andEdward Cook. They involuntarily breathe in superheated air which scorches thelungs, and poison gases. The body responds by dousing the lungs with fluid, andthe victims either asphyxiate or drown in their own juices. In an overwhelmingpercentage of cases, fire victims die before the flames touch them. Here was theexception, and on a grand scale.

Those who'd jumped off the top rows of the grandstands and bleachers and brokentheir ankles or legs and couldn't run were helpless, trapped and tangled underthe burning canvas. The fire ate their clothes and then their skin and thentheir tissues, the fat raging like gasoline.

The stands burned, the bibles and bleachers?everything. This part of the firewas probably the hottest. The circus painted their grandstand chairs with a dipmethod, hanging them on hooks and lowering them into a bath of that year'scolor. Over the seasons, the chairs built up thick layers, all of them volatile.Nearly fifty years later, when a Hartford detective touched a match to a paintchip taken from one lucky chair, it flared up like a chunk of Sterno.

The heat withered trees, sent people fleeing, afraid the woods might catch fire.Deacon Blanchfield directed his water trucks. "I started the trucks over toprotect the wild-animal cages, and someone told me there were people in thereburning, and I countermanded the order and put the trucks to work.... They toldme there was a little boy burning in the exit, and when the trucks came to theexit, I stopped them at the exit, and had them play water onto these people."

The wagons to the south side of the tent were burning, and some concession tops.A circus hand jumped in a Coca-Cola truck and backed it away from the tent.

The flames were dangerously close to the light plant and its generators, whichwere filled with diesel. In his Weary Willie costume?complete with hugeshoes?Emmett Kelly came rushing over with a wash bucket full of water, hispainted frown a perfect expression of dismay and helplessness.

Hands filled buckets from a canvas trough on wheels near where the menagerie hadbeen. Gangs of roughnecks strained to push the light wagons away from the tent.Their tires were burning. Deacon Blanchfield had tractors come in and drag themout, water truck 133 spraying them as they rolled.

Engine Company 7 was the first unit to arrive. As they neared box 82 at Clarkand Westland, they slowed. Two boys in the road pointed toward the circus, andthey accelerated. The tent was down on the ground, the fire confined to the eastend. At a glance, 7's captain saw that despite George W. Smith's efforts theycouldn't fit the truck along the south side. They'd have to lay a line in. Therewas a hydrant right by the grounds, but still it would be a ton of hose. Thecaptain called on the civilians standing there to lend a hand. Young JohnStewart stepped forward and volunteered.

They laid nine hundred feet, then had to add another one hundred fifty. Itstretched down to the southeast corner where the Coca-Cola top was now a puddleof glass and ashes. "That's not water," someone warned the firemen, and theydetoured around it. By the time they reached the east end there was no tentleft, only the bleachers burning, so they directed their attentions to thewagons.

Commissioner Hickey hustled down the midway and found a policeman. He asked theofficer to see that all cars with stretchers went to the east end, and as soonas possible, even if they had to run over the hoses. He slid into cruiser number8 where Chief Hallissey was sitting. After a brief conference, Hickey got on theradio and called Governor Baldwin, a friend and fellow Republican. They wouldneed to mobilize all civilian defense forces within reach of the city.Immediately. Yes, it was that bad. Transportation was going to be a problem, andcrowd control.

"Listen," Baldwin said, "I'll go on the air and tell them not to go out therewhen they hear of the fire but to communicate with this office."

Hickey agreed.

Mayor William Mortensen arrived minutes after the first fire crews. He saw thebodies at the chute and conferred with Hickey, then used the phone at McGovern'sto call the State Armory. They would use the huge floor of the drill shed as amakeshift morgue.

The governor contacted the state police and asked the Connecticut State Guard toalert their reserves. Baldwin then enlisted all the doctors, nurses and medicalsupplies he could get from the Veterans' Home in Rocky Hill and the Veterans'Hospital in Newington. He mobilized a corps of state employees there at theCapitol to take care of the clerical duties at the armory, then set up hisemergency broadcast with WTIC.

A popular governor, Baldwin had recently announced he would not seek reelection.State's Attorney H. Meade Alcorn and some other Republicans had drawn up apetition urging him to reconsider?for the good of the state, not just theparty?but Baldwin was firm. He was supposed to be taking it easy, cruisingthrough his last months in office. Now this.

He wasn't alone in his efforts. The state and the city were fully prepared for adisaster of this magnitude. After the flood of '36 and the great hurricane of'38 and the Charter Oak Bridge collapse in '41, both had devised wide-rangingorganizations capable of responding to any catastrophe in a concerted manner.After Pearl Harbor, the State War Council added thousands of volunteers to themix and a level of vigilance that would never be duplicated. On the heels of theCocoanut Grove, Dr. Donald B. Wells of Hartford Hospital coordinated all theseagencies with the state police, the Red Cross, and Hartford County's sevencivilian hospitals.

A major air raid, a tornado, a munitions explosion?the plan and the equipmentwere in place, right down to dozens of department-store delivery trucks fittedwith special racks to accommodate stretchers. Bandages. Blood plasma. The newwonder drug penicillin.

They would need all of it.

Continues...

Excerpted from The Circus Fireby Stewart O'Nan Copyright ©2001 by Stewart O'Nan. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385496850
• ISBN 13: 9780385496858
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 385