Disaster in the Big Top (Circus Fire, the - Stewart O'Nan)

Member Name: pambo

Product:	Circus Fire, the - Stewart O'Nan
Date:	24/10/00 (82 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Excellently researched history

Disadvantages: none

Novelist Stewart O’Nan has told a complex, true story in the simply named book, The Circus Fire” which recounts the horror that occurred nearly 60 years ago in Hartford, Conn.

About 7,000 people went to see an afternoon show of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum&Bailey on July 6, 1944; of that, 167 would die horrible deaths in a fast-moving blaze, and another several hundred would suffer a range of injuries.

Of the many portraits O’Nan paints, we know this:

Many of the victims were children; some people lost their entire families; lots of people acted like heroes, while others acted like heels and cowards; dozens of survivors bear scars, literally and figuratively, to this day; most of the victims died of burns, while others were crushed as the panicked crowds tried to flee.

What we don’t know, still, is the cause of the fire or the identity of six people killed in the fire. One, in particular, has resonated with people familiar with the tragedy, and O’Nan devotes a little space to showing us how a supposed identification of the girl that was made in the 1990s is most likely incorrect.

What happened was fairly straightforward: Just a few minutes into the start of the Big Top show, people started seeing a flame on the sides or the top of the tent. Some of the people who saw the flame burst into being mistook it to be part of the show or thought that the circus workers would handle it. Their inaction proved fatal for many. So, too, was the failure, once people saw the blaze and recognized its danger, to move quickly to the nearest exit; instead, many tried to head out the main entrance which by then was blocked with animal cages that were part of the act. The sides of the tent were pegged down to keep kids from sneaking in without paying, which had the effect of trapping people inside, except for a couple with pen knives.

O’Nan takes a little sid
e tour down the path of psychological studies that tell us how people in crowds too often wait for someone else to react, or, when faced with danger, too often try to escape by going back the same route—and only that route—that brought them into the area. It’s a fascinating bit of information that should remind us to always, always get out of harm’s way, regardless of what others are doing.

Two bits of information about the fire are particularly disturbing:

One is that the tent itself was coated with paraffin and gasoline, meant to weatherproof it. Today, we can’t believe that such flammable material would be used; at the time, it was common circus practice. After this fire, circuses changed this practice, and many municipalities tightened their fire codes.

The second is this bit that O’Nan relates: “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.” It was, of course, the people themselves.

After the fire, several circus officials went to prison for short amounts of time, but remarkably, there seemed to be fairly little animosity directed at them.

Throughout the book, the author gives us great deal of detail of what some of the victims experienced, both inside the tent, and later, if they survived, of their recovery. Pages are filled with individuals’ accounts of what the inferno was like and what survivors witnessed, including the heroism of one man who stood atop the animal cages, flinging children to rescuers beyond the cages, until he fell into the crowd and was crushed.

Throughout, there’s a strong sense that some people survived through sheer chance: they arrived a little late and were still near the exit; a stranger moved out of the way at just the right moment, they were behind, and
not in front of, someone even more desperate than they to escape.

You may read more than you want about limbs being burned off but it’s a fact of this particular tragedy that, unlike some other big fires inside buildings, most of the victims were burned, not trampled. He also goes into great detail about how families lined up outside an armory to try to identify the bodies, and the many mixups that occurred as they raced from hospital to makeshift morgue and sometimes back again to find their relatives. It is, in fact, how he suspects the six unidentified bodies went unclaimed. He, and others, believe that some of the bodies were claimed by the wrong families in their grief; when the authorities were down to the final six, they didn’t match at all and thus were buried as unidentified.

The only difficulty with this book is the decision to not name everyone whose story is told. The reasoning was that O'Nan had interviewed so many people that trying to keep track of the names was a monumental task. The problem is that it's hard to follow the threads of some people's stories. This is a quibble, not a serious flaw.

The biggest villain, in my opinion, because I’m unwilling to criticize what terrified people do to survive, is the woman who lived near the circus grounds who charged survivors $5 each to use a telephone to call their families. That's low; that's inhuman.

Summary: