Terror at the Big Top
Written: Aug 13 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Good history
Cons: none
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| pambo's Full Review: Stewart O'Nan - The Circus Fire |
If you have even a passing acquaintance with Connecticut, you’ve probably heard of the Hartford Circus Fire of 1944, though your information may be sketchy. Or perhaps you’ve caught a reference to it on the History Channel. Either way, you should read this book.
Novelist Stewart O’Nan has turned his skills to reporting the facts, as many as he could collect and attempt to vouchsafe, in his credible nonfiction book, “The Circus Fire”.
The basic facts are these:
167 people died in a fire at the Ringling Bros. and Barnum&Bailey big top fire on July 6, 1944.
Many of the victims were children.
The cause of the fire has never been determined, though several circus officials went to prison for short terms.
Many people, both inside and outside the tent, acted heroically; others did not.
The fire left scars on Hartford residents, literally and figuratively, that remain today.
The book examines several aspects of local politics, power struggles within the circus ownership, the lives of circus goers before and after the fire, the attempt to determine the cause of the fire, the great efforts of volunteers and professionals to save victims, and finally, the mystery of one unidentified victim who came to be known as Little Miss 1565.
He does a good job of explaining life in wartime Hartford and how the war affected people’s response to the fire.
In chilling and extensive detail, O’Nan describes the terror that ensued once the crowd realized they were in danger from the fire. He explores crowd mentality, including the reluctance of many to act at the first sign of danger, and the price paid for that hesitation.
The descriptions are horrific: for pages, he details the trampling of the elderly, the children or anyone who paused, slipped or otherwise got in the way of the terrified crowds. One survivor after another describes trying to flee the blaze, escape through the narrow exits, jump from the grandstands, claw their way through small holes cut in the tent’s side.
You’ll often get the sense that people survived through sheer chance: they happened to have tickets that put them near an exit; they arrived late, a stranger in the crowd offered them a hand when they needed it; they carried a penknife and were thus able to cut a hole in the tent and escape, they were behind, not in front of, someone even more desperate than they to escape.
O’Nan has zeroed in on one detail that tells you what hell the crowd endured:
“Several survivors said the one thing they’ll never forget about the circus fire as long as they live is the sound of the animals as they burned alive. But there were no animals.”
If that doesn’t make you shiver, I don’t know what would.
Nearly as awful are the descriptions of the long periods of recuperation endured by the survivors, and the desperate struggles to save people that occurred at the understaffed but nearest hospital.
But the truly hair-raising piece of information concerns the weatherproofing of the tent that was standard practice at the time. Soaked in paraffin and gasoline to keep the raindrops out, the tent went up in flames in just moments, dooming the crowd. In hindsight, this choice would seem to be an accident waiting to happen. Whether this was the circus’s only option was disputed, but it appears to have been common practice or at least not unusual.
O’Nan lays out and then explodes some myths that attend this disaster, including what the famous Wallenda troupe was doing and rumors about the actions of circus workers, and he disputes the supposed solution to the mystery of Little Miss 1565. (Five others also were never identified, but Little Miss 1565 won the attention of a couple of dedicated investigators who went to visit her grave for years, keeping her memory alive.) How some bodies went unclaimed while other people who went to the circus but never came home--and the futile struggle to match those two groups--is a story in itself.
If you are looking for major villains, you won’t find them in this book and that may well be because no one really was. Yes, there were people who acted poorly, people who survived by pushing others out of their way; the woman in the neighborhood charging survivors $5 each to call their families and let them know they were safe and so on. But many others, some known, some unknown, rendered great service to others, sometimes at the cost of their own lives.
I lived in Hartford in the 1970s and recall clearly the tragic memories the circus evoked in people who had lived there during the fire. It seemed that every Hartford resident knew someone at the circus that day. It also explained the great outcry in opposition to an attempt by one circus to bring the big top back to Hartford in those days, and the strong emotions stirred by the utter collapse of the Civic Center coliseum roof in 1977. (The coliseum was empty at the time and so no one was hurt.)
O’Nan, in trying to supply as many accounts as possible, struggles with the best way to do this, and winds up not naming scores of people whose stories he tells. Thus we are left with this kind of sentence, “One man was…” or “Another woman fell” and it will make you think the sentence is leading somewhere until it stops. It makes for a little bit of a tough read. But given the many accounts he read or heard from survivors, he’s somewhat stuck because trying to name all of them would just confuse the reader with far too many names. His solution is to tell the bulk of the fire account through a handful of victims. At a couple of points, his writing gets a little ragged but all in all, the book is quite good in its
delivery of good information.
There are lessons to be learned, as there always are in tragedies such as this. Many municipalities tightened their inspections, the circuses changed the way they prepared the canvas to fireproof the tents and so on. But here’s a lesson for all of us: don’t hesitate. Don’t wait for the crowd to react if you think there’s a fire. Don’t let others do your thinking. Get out. Get out. Be embarrassed later if you’re wrong and you’ve lost your seat. It’s better than being burned alive.
Recommended:
Yes
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Member: Pam
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