Six Minutes

The smoking little flame wavered higher up the side of the cavernous tent in the big lot at Hartford, Conn. The thousands of women and their children, and the scattering of coatless men massed in the bleachers, sat quietly, second after second, watching the high-wire performers of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey's Greatest Show On Earth. They breathed the circus smells of peanuts and tigers, in the hot afternoon air, and listened to the thumping circus music. Some of them watched the harmless-looking little fire crawling up the canvas.

Then the flame suddenly spurted upward with nightmare swiftness, and billowed silently across the whole top of the tent near the main entrance. The bleachers suddenly rumbled under thousands of feet; folding chairs clattered and banged. The crowd struggled to reach the ground, flowed wildly toward the exits, clotted into groups which pushed and elbowed with silent, furious concentration in the furnace-like heat. Men & women in the high bleacher seats began dropping children to the ground, then jumped themselves. Then great blazing patches of canvas fell. Women screamed as their hair and dresses caught fire. Then a tent pole toppled soundlessly, trailed by burning canvas. People were still struggling down from their seats.

Three minutes had passed.

Disaster March. There still was brassy music. The band, on their feet at the unburned end of the tent, jerkily pumped out The Stars and Stripes Forever, as a "Disaster march," the traditional circus warning to performers outside the tent to rally round for trouble. The aerialists slid down their ropes, began tumbling acrobatically toward safety.

A mass of the crowd headed toward the performers' exits near the band. Hundreds of them jammed up against the barred runway through which the last leopards from the animal acts were still slinking toward outside cages. As the people struggled here, some scrambling over, some lifting small children, some trampling wildly, the fire raced toward them along the collapsing canvas high overhead. The heavy tent poles fell quickly, one after another. As the last toppled, all the blazing canvas came down on the crowd. There was a brief, screaming struggle beneath it.

The sooty bandsmen, now safe outside, began to play again. The street and the circus lot with its rows of red-painted wagons, the open lots lying beyond, were full of people watching the hotly burning wreckage. Past them wandered the burned and the weeping; the frantic parents of children dead in the flames, the lost tots staring at strange faces, the dazed and blackened figures with singed hair and loose rags of clothing.

Six minutes had passed.

By nightfall, after hours in which telephone exchanges were jammed with calls, and in which hospital staffs and volunteer workers of all kinds toiled in the humid heat which oppressed the city, Hartford knew how badly it had been hurt. In the worst circus disaster in U.S. history, 128 bodies lay on army cots, neatly set out on the drill floor of the grey, stone State Guard Armory, and others were arriving. More than half the bodies there, and more than half the swathed, drugged forms in the crowded hospitals were children. Almost all the rest were women. Hartford's men, who had been at work during the matinee, were left to stand silently in the bleak corridors, or to walk unsteadily beside the cots at the morgue.

Uncertain Reunion. The slow task of identifying the dead went on until after midnight, began again, next morning, continued through the day. Time after time, mothers, fathers and husbands, with ammonia-soaked gauze held to their faces, saw the figures they sought, but could not recognize them. Doctors, dentists and even jewelers, were called to check fillings, scars, rings and watches. Volunteer workers on the armory's drill floor asked patiently, "Was there a wide space between his front teeth? Did he have any identifying scars? Did she have gold fillings?"

The State's Attorney and the chief of State Police asked the questions which were on thousands of other lips. How did the fire start? Eyewitnesses swore the blaze first smouldered at the bottom of the tent near a canvas section raised as a men's restroom. Why did the tent burn with that celluloid fierceness? Circus men said the 19-ton big top had been sprayed with a waterproofing solution last April. It had not been inspected before the show by the Hartford fire marshal.

Five officials and employes of the circus were arrested on technical charges of manslaughter and released on heavy bond. Warrants were issued for four more. Nobody seemed to know what would happen to the circus. All of its performers, roustabouts and animals had escaped unscathed, and it had another tent stored at winter headquarters at Sarasota, Fla.

At week's end the death toll had mounted to 158. Hospitals were treating more than 100 badly burned women and children. Hartford was a city of funerals. Every hearse, every livery car was in constant use; undertakers toiled night & day, and some funeral parlors were holding services at 15-minute intervals. In the late hours Friday, all day Saturday, all day Sunday the slow processions moved through the streets; the quiet crowds gathered, dispersed and gathered again in the cemeteries.

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