“We heard a roar, like the applause when one of the big acts comes off, only we knew that the animal act was over and there shouldn’t be applause…. Then we smelled smoke.”
Donalda LaVoie, age 15, grew worried when she saw the grapefruit-sized flame. “There’s a fire over there!” she told her uncle and pointed across the tent to an area just above the men’s restroom. “Don’t worry about it. Someone will put it out,” her uncle assured her. But no one did.
High above the crowd, the Wallendas also noticed the flame, which had quickly grown in size. Karl Wallenda knew it could be dangerous. He told his family to get down from the high wire as fast as they could.
More and more people began to notice the fire, which was spreading rapidly up the side wall. Finally some seat hands ran over to douse the flames, but their buckets of water were not enough to fight the blaze. Tragically, no fire extinguishers had been placed inside the tent. Instead, they were still packed inside a truck hundreds of yards away.
Barbara Wallis Felgate, who was just six years old at the time, was too busy staring at the big cats to notice the fire at first. “I was watching the lions … go out,” she said. Then she saw a flickering light. “I remember the music changing.” The band struck up the first loud, staccato notes of “Stars and Stripes Forever,” a signal to the circus hands that there was danger in the tent. Termed the “Disaster March,” this tune had long been used to alert the performers and staff when there was a problem, as well as to soothe the audience and prevent a panic.
Hearing the music, the circus hands were quick to get moving. The audience, however, did not know how to react. For a moment, some people wondered if it was all part of the show. But when someone shouted, “Fire!” it became clear this was a true emergency.
Subdued confusion suddenly turned to frenzy. As the blaze grew, the spectators knew they had to get out of the tent, and get out fast. An announcer’s voice came over the loudspeaker, telling everyone to remain calm. Some people kept their composure and moved quickly and quietly out the nearest exit. Twelve-year-old Rose Norrie, her younger sister Antoinette, and their brother Frank were able to make it out the main entrance before it got too crowded. “I came right through the doorway,” Rose said.
Unfortunately, many others were not so composed. Terribly frightened, some people pushed over chairs and shoved their way through the crowd to get out. Others even knocked people down to save themselves.
“I grabbed the hand of my niece Judy and proceeded to walk out to the aisle,” Margaret D’Abatto recalled in her witness statement to police. “But within a second’s time the aisle had been completely covered with chairs…. We began climbing over chairs, and at one time, someone had pushed my niece down under one of the collapsible chairs. I helped her up immediately and kept her in front of me so that she would not be knocked down again.”
Mildred Cook and her three children were several rows up in the southwest grandstand when people started rushing out. Donald wanted to take his brother and sister with him, but Mildred pulled the younger children back to her. “You go along,” Mildred told her oldest child. It was then that the Cooks separated. Mildred, holding Edward’s and Eleanor’s hands, made her way down to the massive crowd fighting to get out the main entrance. Donald instead climbed to the top of the grandstand and jumped nimbly down the back. Lifting up the side wall of the tent, where it was loose from the ground, he crawled underneath the canvas to safety.
Others also found alternate ways to escape. Thirteen-year-old Donald Anderson helped hundreds of people, including his older cousin, escape by using his pocket-knife to cut the ropes fastened to a stake that held the tent tight to the ground. He was then able to lift the canvas wall and escape by crawling underneath. “[I] noticed a girl about five years old lying on the ground—her arm seemed injured. I picked her up and got her out safely,” Donald wrote in a letter to the governor of Connecticut. Donald’s story was widely reported in the newspapers. Though it always made him uncomfortable, Donald was seen as a hero, and people from all over sent letters congratulating him for his quick thinking.
The Wallendas were still up on the wire when Eugene Badger and his father noticed the fire. “When the fire broke out, everyone got up to run. But my father told me to sit, and I’m watching [the tent] burn.” Once everyone had left their area of the bleachers, Mr. Badger used a seat to break through the boards below them. Then he dropped his son through the hole and jumped down to the ground after him. Eugene helped his father back up onto his crutches, and together they looked for an exit. “Twice before we got out my father was knocked down by two males. One of them stopped to help him up, but the other one didn’t.” Eugene and his father finally escaped through a hole cut in the tent’s wall. “I remember looking back underneath [the bleachers], seeing the burning tent falling on people.” Mr. Badger’s calm reaction to the chaos had saved his son and himself. They escaped unhurt.
View from the field just beyond the burning circus tent.
Lorena Dutelle and her mother attended the circus together that day. Because her father had died some years earlier, Lorena and her mother were very close. Mrs. Dutelle always wore a gold locket containing a picture of her husband, young and smart looking in his round black glasses. The two felt he had been watching over them that frightful day. They were among the lucky ones who got out safely.
Soon the air inside the tent grew thick with smoke, and the fire had spread all the way up the side wall and onto the roof. Pieces of flaming canvas dropped down upon the crowd. The wax that had been used to waterproof the tent melted and dripped onto the people below, causing horrible burns.
Seven-year-old Elliot Smith got caught in the swarm of people pushing toward the main entrance. “My hand got torn out of my mother’s. So there I was, alone, getting shoved and carried along with the crowd. Actually, I started punching with my fists, trying to make room for myself…. Until finally, I got knocked down.”
Meanwhile, Mildred Cook tried to hurry her two younger children along, finally picking Edward up with one arm while clinging to Eleanor’s hand with the other. Soon the crowd became too much, and Eleanor was swept away. The air grew intensely hot as Mildred and Edward tried to get through the throng, looking for Eleanor as they were shoved along toward the exit. Edward was having trouble breathing. He told his mother he wanted to lie down and go to sleep. Soon after, both Edward and Mildred lost consciousness.
On the other side of the tent, people tried to escape out the northeast and northwest exits, but when the fire broke out the crew hadn’t finished removing the animal chutes. The only way to escape here now was to clamber up the four-foot-high cages, over the frightened, dangerous cats. At least six were still in the chutes when the fire broke out.
At first, circus staff tried to prevent people from exiting the tent this way, for fear that the cats would attack if someone’s arm or leg slipped between the bars of the chute. However, fire proved the more fearsome enemy, and many people who escaped by this route might have perished otherwise.
Donalda La Voie remembers being terrified while climbing over the chute. The steel cage seemed very high as she inched across on her hands and knees. The cats were still beneath her, and Donalda feared she’d fall between the bars. For a second, she got stuck. “My foot kind of slipped, and I yanked it out.” Finally across, she and her uncle and brother got away through a hole in the tent at the end of the chute.
Morris Handler and his three-year-old son, Phil, escaped over a chute too. Morris put Phil on his back and climbed up onto the metal cage. Once they were over the top and on the other side, they found the area blocked by circus wagons parked up against the side of the tent. Morris put his son on the ground in front of him, and together they squeezed under the wagons. There were people all around, struggling through the same tight spot. As they crawled to safety, Morris yelled, “Let my little boy through!”
Finally, performers May Kovar and Joseph Walsh were able to push their animals through the chutes and into their cages. Every one of the animals made it out of the tent unharmed. As the situation inside the big top grew dire, May helped people, especially children, climb over the chutes to safety.
After seeing his seven-year-old son David safely across a chute, William Curlee stayed inside the tent, pushing people over to the other side. William was 29 years old and a strong man. He refused to leave when he knew he could still help those who were too weak or scared to climb the bars of the chutes on their own. “People couldn’t get past, so he stood there and got his son, women, children, and others and pushed them over [the chutes],” William’s sister Barbara Rubenthaler told a reporter years later. As the tent began to give way, William braved falling burning ropes and canvas. He helped many people escape before a nearby tent pole gave way and fell on him. William Curlee died a hero.
The big top about to collapse.
The big top was now engulfed in flames, and it looked like it was about to fall completely. Despite the danger, some who had gotten out safely tried to reenter the tent to look for their loved ones. Police officers restrained them, knowing there was little chance of a second escape.
Hartford police officer Daniel McAuliffe was stationed inside the tent. As he was helping people off the bleachers, a man dropped a child down into his arms. The man then jumped down himself, holding another child. “Some dirty son of a bitch tossed or dropped a cigarette,” the man told McAuliffe before he and his children disappeared into the crowd.
When the fire came to a roaring pitch, bandleader Merle Evans finally gave the signal for his group to grab their instruments and run. They had remained on the bandstand, opposite from where the fire had started, playing as long as they could. Once outside, the band regrouped and, in a small but sincere attempt to calm the frightened crowd, played on.
The fire had been blazing for only 10 minutes when the mighty big top collapsed in a rush of flames and screams. There were still people trapped inside.