How a Deadly Circus Fire on the 'Day the Clowns Cried' Traumatized a Community—and Led to Lasting Safety Reforms

How a Deadly Circus Fire on the ‘Day the Clowns Cried’ Traumatized a Community—and Led to Lasting Safety Reforms

On July 6, 1944, a blaze broke out at a Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey show in Hartford, Connecticut. At least 167 people died, and hundreds were injured

A buzz of anticipation spread across Hartford, Connecticut, on Wednesday, July 5, 1944, just under a month after the Allied success at D-Day turned the tide of World War II on the Western Front. “Circus Trains Roll Big Show Into City Today,” proclaimed a headline in the Hartford Courant. The Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus was coming to Barbour Street for afternoon and evening shows over two days, bringing hundreds of employees, a gorilla pair named Mr. and Mrs. Gargantua the Great (among other animals), and numerous tents to house the show.

Six-year-old Peter R. Bortolan attended the July 6 afternoon show—set to begin at 2:15 p.m.—with his mother and his father, who had been deemed too old for the military draft. After driving from their home in Willimantic, Connecticut, to Hartford, the family took a bus to Barbour Street, purchased tickets and made their way into the big top, joining thousands of other circusgoers on the nearly 90 degree Fahrenheit day.

The show began without a hitch, but about 20 to 25 minutes later, there were whispers of confusion, then a panicked commotion. A fire had broken out at the southwestern end of the main tent—and it quickly grew into a roaring inferno, threatening anyone who crossed its path. Bortolan’s family sat near the main entrance and was able to easily escape, but not everyone was so lucky.

“It was total chaos, because people were in a state of panic both from the fire and the fear that the animals would get loose,” says Bortolan, who is now retired and living in South Windsor, Connecticut.

Within minutes, the tent had collapsed, leaving at least 167 people dead and hundreds injured. (The official death toll was 168, but this number included a bag of body parts that might have belonged to multiple victims.) The tragedy gained national media attention and rattled the Hartford community. For the survivors, investigations resulting in prison time for five circus employees, settlements paid to victims and their families, and new fire safety regulations both in Hartford and further afield couldn’t erase the images of that day, seared into their memories. Eighty-one years later, many say it haunted them for years or even decades.

“That followed them throughout their lives,” says Stewart O’Nan, author of The Circus Fire: A True Story of an American Tragedy. “It affected their children—it wasn’t just one generation. It was several generations that it was passed down to.”

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Right after the July 4 holiday, there was a tangible excitement in the air as young children across Connecticut (and beyond) prepared to see the “Greatest Show on Earth.” With more than 16 million American troops serving in the military during World War II, the circus—carrying strong patriotic undertones—emerged as a distraction and morale booster. In wartime, however, circuses faced logistical difficulties, including labor shortages as staff enlisted in the armed forces.

“Because of the pressure on the working force, because of World War II, the people who were coming and going were less experienced and much more transient than they had been,” says circus historian and author Chris Berry.

The first Hartford afternoon show on July 5 was canceled due to railroad delays, but the evening event proceeded as planned. The next afternoon, circusgoers again poured in from Barbour Street into the colossal big top. The matinee audience consisted primarily of women and children, as many men were either working at that hour or had joined the military, according to Berry.

Even so, Robert Payne, then 5 years old, attended the circus with his father and his older brother, Arthur Joseph Payne. He recalls looking up in amazement at the massive elephants outside the tent before taking his seat. To usher the animals inside, four-foot-tall, metal-barred animal chutes ran from the cages in the center of the tent into the aisles between the northern grandstands and bleachers, where audience members eagerly waited for the show to commence.

People first noticed the blaze around 2:40 p.m., right after the wild animal acts had wrapped up and just as the Flying Wallendas, the famous high-wire troupe, were about to begin their death-defying performance. Investigators later concluded the fire likely started near the tent’s main entrance by the men’s restroom.

At first, many circusgoers were more confused than panicked.

Hartford Circus Fire: Fire Under the Big Top

“Looking across, we saw flames on the side of the tent going up,” says Payne, a retired hospital pharmacy technician now living in Brooklyn, Connecticut. “My father thought it was part of an act for the circus. He didn’t realize it was the real thing.”

But as the flames spread up the tent’s sidewalls, it became clear that something was terribly wrong. Crowds rushed toward the exits. As the Associated Press reported, the fire “mushroomed with incredible speed from a tiny finger of flame near the main entrance to a gigantic inferno of smoke and fire.”

Hans Andersen, who was 4 years old when he attended the circus that day with his sister, mother and grandmother, says the fire “just went right up the side of that tent in a matter of probably seconds.”

“That was a nervous day for [my mother] and my grandmother,” says Andersen, who now lives in New Hartford.

Payne still remembers seeing several rows of bodies on the ground, maybe three deep. Somebody—he isn’t sure who—threw him over those bodies, and over one of the metal chutes, so he could flee to safety. (He was later reunited outside with his family, all of whom escaped injury.)

Many circusgoers found themselves backed up against the animal runways, which complicated their escape plans. Amid the commotion, Berry says, some failed to recognize they could have exited under the tent sidewall. Instead, they crowded the main entrance they had walked through just moments earlier, near the fire’s likely point of origin. Herman Wallenda, one of the high-wire performers, told the AP that he and his family, perched 30 feet above ground, slid down their ropes and headed for the performers’ exit once they saw the fire spread to the roof.

“People were so crowded there that we saw we didn’t have a chance,” Wallenda said. “So we climbed over the cage that lines the exit. That was easy for us—we’re performers. But the public couldn’t get out that way.”

Inside the tent, audience members recalled shouts and shrieks of fear, along with deafening crashes from toppling grandstand chairs. Flames and thick black smoke billowed from the big top. Parents called out for their children. Debris rained down on the crowd, setting fire to their hair and summer clothing and burning their skin. As eyewitness Paul Gokey told the AP, “People were knocked down, and other people walked on them.” Some tried to jump from elevated seats, and a few adults dropped their children down to police officers below.

Circus ushers quickly attempted to extinguish the fire using buckets of water but soon realized they didn’t stand a chance against the raging flames. Efforts to tear down the sidewall failed, though some people cut openings in the canvas so they could escape. Instead, the staff began helping with evacuations. A famous photo of clown Emmett Kelly carrying a bucket of water—wearing a big frown and even bigger shoes—led some to later refer to the fire as “the day the clowns cried.”

The 29-piece circus band, led by Merle Evans, signaled something was amiss by playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” According to the Hartford Courant, shifting from “the music of the act into a march [was] a customary procedure by all bands during time of peril,” designed to “calm the audience and avert panic.” As the situation worsened, the band filed outside and continued playing.

The tent’s support poles began to fall, and the burning big top collapsed less than ten minutes after the commotion began. Scores of people—primarily women and children—were trapped underneath, their final screams followed by a moment of shock and stillness.

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When it was all over, circus employees, police officers and civilians carried the dead from the ruins so they could be loaded into Army trucks and taken to the State Armory for identification. As firefighters extinguished the burning ruins, ambulances and other cars brought injured victims to local hospitals, which became overrun as nurses and doctors spent the subsequent weeks and months helping patients recover. Some dealt with burns. Others had lacerations and broken bones from getting trampled or jumping from the top rows of seats. All of the circus’ employees and animals survived.

Amid the chaos, acts of heroism stood out: men who hoisted children over animal chutes, staff who moved the animals and tried to restore calm, police officers and firefighters who arrived on the scene to help. But more than anything, the tragedy devastated the Hartford community. Three of Bortolan’s neighbors died in the fire, he recalls.

“It went from shock to total dismay to a feeling of heaviness on your shoulders,” Bortolan says. “The world just wasn’t the same. All that D-Day did to build up our egos in Hartford—that pretty well [got] washed away by this.”

Bortolan adds, “Obviously, there was a lot of: What the hell happened? How did it happen? Why did it happen? Why weren’t they better prepared for it?”

As the community mourned, investigators started criticizing the lack of fire prevention equipment at the site, insufficient emergency personnel, blocked exits, and a lack of coordination between Hartford’s police and fire departments before the tragedy. The fire probably spread rapidly due to the paraffin wax and gasoline that covered the big top roof—a technique used by some circuses of the era to waterproof their tents, according to Berry.

In 1945, several Ringling managers and employees were charged with criminal responsibility for the fire, largely for negligence surrounding preventable safety hazards. Five ultimately served time in state prison on charges of involuntary manslaughter.

Yet the fire’s exact cause remains a mystery. From the beginning, investigators blamed a discarded cigarette or match. Then came speculation about arson, time and again. A mentally troubled circus worker named Robert Dale Segee confessed in 1950 to setting fire to the Hartford circus tent, along with several other crimes. Investigators were never able to validate his claim, and Segee later recanted his statement. The official cause of the fire, reinvestigated in the 1990s, was declared “undetermined.”

According to O’Nan, the courts allowed Ringling Brothers to continue operations so the company could pay settlements—totaling just under $4 million (around $50 million today)—to the families of the injured and the dead. The last payout was signed in December 1950.

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In the months after the fire, six bodies remained unclaimed and unidentified, most of them terribly burned. The exception was a young girl—dubbed Little Miss 1565, per her case number—whose face was mostly intact. Though at least one family came forward to claim her after seeing her picture in local newspapers, this lead failed to pan out. The photo became a national symbol of the tragedy and the unanswered questions that lingered.

In the early 1990s, Hartford Fire Lieutenant Rick Davey identified Little Miss 1565 as Eleanor Emily Cook, an 8-year-old girl who’d attended the circus with her mother and two brothers. Davey based his analysis largely on photographic analysis and testimony from Cook’s brother Donald, and the state went on to amend her death certificate—but O’Nan came to disagree with Davey’s research when publishing his book, released in 2000. He says there are too many holes and inconsistencies in the story to make a definitive claim.

In 2019, Connecticut authorities exhumed two unidentified bodies to determine if one was Grace Fifield, a 47-year-old Vermont resident who went missing at the circus fire. The proposed DNA match was unsuccessful.

Such horrifying situations left families devastated, regardless of whether they lost a loved one. Hartford Mayor William H. Mortensen tried to quell the pain, in part, by ordering the removal of remaining circus posters from storefronts and buildings. As a survivor, Payne had nightmares for the next 30 years. “Even now, 81 years later, I cannot feel comfortable walking into a big tent,” he says.

Multiple survivors say their families didn’t speak of that day often—or at all—in the aftermath.

“A lot of people just forgot about it—they just put it away,” says Mike Skidgell, author of The Hartford Circus Fire: Tragedy Under the Big Top. “They didn’t talk about it. They buried it.”

Anita Bryant, of South Kent, Connecticut, says her late mother, Joan Bryant, attended the circus at age 13 with her parents and younger brother and sister. All survived, but her mother didn’t share her experience in detail until Bryant started writing a college paper on the topic. Years earlier, Bryant had noticed her mother becoming noticeably uncomfortable at a circus they attended together; when she found out about her mother’s past, everything started making sense.

“That day specifically, I understood her reactions and just why we never went to any circuses after that,” says Bryant, adding that her mother also had a general fear of fire.

Nowadays, children who live through such traumatic events might seek mental health treatment. That wasn’t the case in the 1940s.

“Back then … you’d be embarrassed to do that,” Skidgell says. “You’d be ashamed to admit you’re that ‘weak,’ that you can’t handle this.”

The circus left Hartford on July 15, 1944. From 1945 until its last tent performance in 1956, Ringling Brothers used fire-resistant (and waterproofed) canvas and abided by new, stricter exit code requirements for its shows—but the company didn’t return to Hartford until 1975, when it performed inside the city’s multi-purpose arena.

Revisiting the disaster on its 70th anniversary in 2014, the Hartford Courant reported that the circus fire sparked “a vast, almost immediate improvement in fire regulations, not just in Hartford but across the country.” Notable changes included improved coordination between city departments, training requirements for on-site fire personnel and flameproof tents at outdoor events.

An elementary school now stands at the site of the circus fire, along with a memorial where survivors gather on the anniversary to pay their respects. So many years later, the trauma is still very real to those who managed to escape to safety. In the face of great loss, the Hartford community came together to press onward.

“Everybody pitched in,” O’Nan says. “It was a communal tragedy, it was a communal response, and you hope a communal healing, in a way. And that takes lifetimes.”