The Circus Fire Read Online Free PDF Page A

the Jacksonville yards, he slipped and fell as he was trying to hop a moving baggage wagon. The front wheel crushed his skull, killing him. The circus mourned and carried on. That was circus life.
But while the razorbacks and canvas hands knew the dangers at the

    runs and on the lot, everyone with the show also knew the risks were theirs alone. The audience was never in danger. It was with great pride that even after the Cleveland fire Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey could truthfully state that no spectator at any of their shows had ever been killed.
As terrible as the menagerie fire was, Thanksgiving of that year taught the public how bad a fire could really be. The Cocoanut Grove, a crowded nightclub in Boston, burned in seven minutes. Exits were few, some of them blocked by doors that opened inward, and 492 people died, most of them not from burns but by asphyxiation. The smoke from materials used to decorate the club proved to be toxic, poisoning hundreds. Many of the bodies seemed untouched, just sleeping. All 492 were identified.
    The Boston press made much of the Grove's employees knowing the way out while customers groped blindly in the smoke. How the fire started was never firmly established, though a teenaged waiter, having lighted a match to see a lightbulb he was supposed to change, was tried in the papers. The courts cited the inflammable materials, lack of exits and well-past-capacity crowd as criminally negligent, and sentenced the club's absentee owner to prison. The courts also tried the city building inspector who had licensed the club, but while they found him derelict in his duties, he didn't see time.
Survivors of the dead sued, but the owner's pockets were not deep. Each claimant received as a death benefit only $160. Immediately, cities around the country changed and then began to strictly enforce their fire codes. Insurance companies clamped down. We would learn from the Cocoanut Grove, officials said.

    July 4 , 1944

    It was Christmas in July, a circus tradition, the one day the whole family of the Big Show threw themselves a party. In Providence they'd be celebrating, the cookhouse decked out with flags and crepe-paper streamers, the canvas wall segregating the workers from the performers and management taken down just this one day, everyone digging into fried chicken, with cake and ice cream for dessert and seconds for all who wanted them.
But no, the twenty-four-hour man was here in Hartford, ahead of the show, laying out the lot, telling the mowers how to do their job, ordering all the hay and grain and fuel and food the show would need during their stand and then making sure it would all be here by morning when the first section of the train pulled in. Rationing made his job that much harder, and forget about getting anything delivered the night of the Fourth.
His first concern was the lot. He knew it well; they'd played on the Barbour Street grounds for ten years now, moving over from Colt's Meadows in the early thirties. The city had bought the land back then, hoping to build a high school on it, but that didn't happen, and they turned it over to the Public Building Commission, who rented it to carnivals and circuses. The show had played here around this time every year since, only missing once, during the '38 strike season. Most of the year the land stood empty, a grassy meadow.
It was a long, rectangular lot stretching east from the street—the only real access. The ground was level enough, but dusty, the grass dry; it hadn't rained in days. To the right as he came in was the McGovern Granite Company who made tombstones, their long yard filled with blank, polished samples. Farther in on the same side a maroon snow fence protected a tract of victory gardens. Neighborhood kids used the middle of the lot as a ball field, and the twenty-four-hour man could see the ruts of the batter's box on both sides of home, the grass trampled between the dust pits of the bases. The left side and back end