Case Unclosed

On a hot July afternoon in 1944. the big top of the Ringling Bros. & Barnum & Bailey Circus, pitched in an open field near Hartford, Conn., burst into flames. Within half an hour, the tent was gone and 169 people, two-thirds of them children, were dead or fatally injured. Last week, ten years to the day after the fire, Bridgeport's Superior Court Judge John T. Cullinan ordered the circus to pay $100,000 in legal fees to Julius B. Schatz. Hartford attorney who had served as legal counsel during a decade of receivership. When the fee is paid, the litigation that followed the greatest tragedy in circus history will be closed.

In the decade since the tragedy, the circus has paid almost $4,000,000 in claims for death and injury. Half a million came from Lloyds of London, and $300,000 from tax rebates. The rest of the claims consumed the show's entire profit for all of the ten years. Some 550 claimants shared the awards, one as high as $100,000. Now the last claim has been paid.

But the case is not entirely closed, and perhaps it never will be. Five bodies were unidentifiable, and there is still the unsolved mystery of a child about five years old who suffocated under the big top. Although her pretty face was unmarred and thousands viewed her body or saw her picture, no one ever claimed the body. Three times a year. Hartford police still decorate her grave.

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