The Hartford Circus Fire.Tears of a Clown

On July 6 1944 Hartford Connecticut was in the grips of a summer heat waves. But if you were a kid in Hartford on that hot summer day,that didn't matter a bit. The Ringling Brothers and Barnum Bailey Circus was in town!

That afternoon in the stifling heat it's estimated that between 7000 and 8000 people crowded into the circus tent to watch the show under the Big Top. Due to it being wartime, the audience was mostly made up of women and children.

One of the highlight of the afternoon's show would be a performance by the world famous high wire act The Flying Wallendas. The Big Top was able to seat 12.000 people so the tent was at about two thirds of it's total capacity. The show had only been going on about 20 minutes. The Wallendas had just started their death defying high wire act when Bandleader Merle Evans spotted a small spot of red on the canvas of the circus tent. Taking immediate action Evans signaled his musicians to play the Stars and Strips Forever. The John Philip Sousa marching tune is a universally recognized sign of distress to all circus performers.

(I have to explain something here. The circus tent had been coated with 1800 pounds of paraffin and 6000 gallons of gasoline that had been mixed together to form a waterproof coating on the circus tent. Because of wartime shortages the chemical that the circus had tried to obtain for waterproofing was not available. Still it's hard for me not to think that they maybe could have been able to come up with something better than paraffin mixed with gasoline.)

The Ringmaster upon hearing the band playing Stars And Strips Forever began to try to persuade the crowd to leave in an orderly and safe fashion, but once the power failed and the lights and the public address system went out, mass panic ensued. The fire spread quickly. The canvas of the circus tent having been coated with an extremely flammable mixture,burned like a match. At least two of the available exits had been blocked by the shuts and pens used to bring animals into the Big Top. The flaming canvas began to fall in sheets and burning globs upon the people inside the big top. The circus tent collapsed on the people remaining inside within eight minutes of the first flames being spotted. It was all over in the space of 15 minutes. 168 people,mostly women and children lay dead in the ashes of Ringling Brother's Big Top. At least 700 people were injured,some horribly by the flaming paraffin.

Five employees of Ringling Brother was charged with Involuntary Manslaughter. Four of them were convicted of the charges against them and spent some time in jail before being pardoned by Connecticut's Governor. Despite the Circus management excepting full responsibly,Ringling Brother's and Barnum Bailey Circus would not perform in Hartford again until the 1970's.

It has never been positively determined what started the fire in the circus tent that hot summer day in Hartford in 1944. In 1950,a known arsonist Robert Dale Segee while being questioned in another unrelated arson investigation confessed to police that he had set the fire that day. There was never enough evidence to charge he with the crime and he later recanted his confession.

It's more than likely that it will never be known what caused the fire at the Circus that day. I just hoped that people have learned from experience. The use of a highly flammable coating on the tent to waterproof it seems in hindsight to be a reckless move to say the least.The paraffin and gasoline mix would work to make the Big Top waterproof. It also made it a giant firetrap just waiting for a spark of some other source of ignition to turn into a flaming inferno.