Clifford johnson cocoanut grove fire

JOHN C.ESPOSITO

To Linda and Nick, the flames in my heart
To firefighters and fire prevention professionals

Injustice is relatively easy to bear;
what stings is justice.

H.L.Mencken

Acknowledgments

Prologue: Saturday Night, November 28, 1942

1 The Rehearsal

2 The Intimate Place

3 No Exit

4 The Eight-Minute Fire

5 Don't Panic

6 The Unalterable Laws

7 It's Not My Job

8 Present at the Creation

9 The Man Who Wasn't There

10 The Bright Side?

11 Indictments-General and Specific

12 Recklessness

13 Ex Post Facto

14 The Verdict

15 Reckonings

16 Fact or Fiction?

Postscript: The 90-Second Fire

Index

I owe debts of gratitude to a number of people who provided encouragement and assistance in the writing of this story

First, my agent, Albert Zuckerman at Writers House, provided invariably shrewd advice about the structure of the book as well as about the publishing industry.

Among the people in Boston, Fire Commissioner Paul Christian, who opened his department's records of the Grove fire to me, helped immeasurably. Firefighter William Noonan, who has made the fire his special province, assisted me in wading through his vast archive of transcripts, news clippings, and photographs. Throughout the writing of this book, Bill promptly answered every email inquiry for clarification of some fine points.

William Arthur Reilly, son of the fire commissioner at the time of the fire, was generous with his time and provided invaluable insights about his father. I have made some stern judgments about the senior Mr. Reilly, but I hope that my essential respect for his performance after the fire is evident.

Dick Dray, Mr. Reilly's friend, was unfailingly generous with his time and contacts.

Author and Boston Herald reporter Stephanie Schorow, who has written extensively and well about the Grove and other Boston fires, provided helpful advice and materials.

I am indebted to several long-time friends for their support during the early lonely days: Daniel Weiss, Kay Gelfman, Bob Henzler, Larry J.Silverman, Mark Adams, and Eric Bruce. I thank Anna La Violette for her boundless enthusiasm and Susan La Violette for her kindness. My special thanks go to Jamie Rosenthal Wolf for her unremitting interest and keen insights.

David Martinez created the Cocoanut Grove graphic that I believe is so helpful in understanding the club's layout.

Alison Sundet provided timely help with research.

Although I have never met him, I am grateful to Jack Beatty, author of The Rascal King (Da Capo Press, 2000). His excellent biography of James Michael Curley was a primary source of information about that political legend. In addition, I would recommend Barbara Ravage's Burn Unit (Da Capo Press, 2004) to readers interested in the development of modern treatment of bum injuries.

The capable staff at Da Capo Press has made the production of this book trouble-free: John Radziewicz, Kevin Hanover, Kate Adams, Sean Maher, Fred Francis, Erin Sprague, Matty Goldberg, Liz Tzetzo, Alex Camlin, Steve Cooley, and Jennifer Swearingen. I am particularly grateful to Dan O'Neil, my very thorough and competent editor.

I invite readers to visit the web site www.fireinthegrove.com for additional information and discussion about this book.

New York City, July 2005

Park Square, Downtown Boston. The first fire alarm-from Box 1514 in Boston's theater and nightclub district-was struck at precisely 10:15 P.M.

It was a car fire.

Within minutes of the alarm, Deputy Chief Louis C.Stickel arrived in his fire department car at the corner of Stuart and Carver Streets. As he pulled his bulky frame out of his vehicle, Stickel saw that his men had already extinguished the small fire in a car parked near the corner of Broadway and Stuart. Most of the apparatus had been dismissed and the "all-out" signal ordered. Only one engine and one ladder truck remained. Stickel decided that nothing here required the presence of departmental brass on this chilly night.

He was about to slip back into the warmth of his automobile when a fireman looking past him down Broadway said, "You got another one going up over there, Chief."

Stickel turned and saw a large black cloud of smoke pushing skyward several hundred feet down Broadway. He ran down the street toward the second fire, the remnants of the engine company screaming by him.

Stickel and his men knew exactly where they were going. "I saw it was the Cocoanut Grove," he reported later.

Boston's legendary nightclub was burning.

The first thing Stickel saw through the thick smoke was a man's head and arm poking through an impossibly small hole in the thick glass block that had weeks before replaced the store window of the Grove's New Broadway Lounge. The firemen began smashing at the glass block to help the man, but the awful rush of smoke and heat pushed them back. Stickel ordered his men to play the hoses on the man, but it was too late. He could only watch as the water splashed ineffectually off the block onto the sidewalk. "And then a flame took him up," Stickel said.

At the end of this long night, Deputy Chief Stickel would learn that the fire had started nearly a city block away from where he watched that first death, at the farthest end of the jumble of buildings that made up the Cocoanut Grove nightclub.

He would also learn that by the time he had arrived at the scene-at 10:23 P.M.-that nameless man reaching out through the glass block was one of nearly five hundred people-one of every two persons on the premises-who were either already dead or doomed. Stickel was witness to the worst nightclub fire in American history.

It had all begun just eight minutes earlier, at 10:15, precisely when that coincidental car fire alarm had been turned in.

Phillips House, Massachusetts General Hospital. It was a coincidence, as well, that at 10:15 P.M.Grove owner Barnett C.Welansky was far from the object of his pride, joy, and considerable fortune. Until recently, it would have been difficult to remember a night when this portly little martinet was not prowling around his club, hovering about his bartenders, waiters, and cashiers, fussing over every detail. But tonight, the forty-fiveyear-old lawyer-turned-nightclub operator lay in a private room at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he had been rushed twelve days earlier after collapsing with a heart attack. Since then, his condition had been complicated by pneumonia, and on this Saturday night, it must have seemed to him that his recovery would be very slow-if it was to come at all.

Damn! Just when things were humming. Barney's physical discomfort must have been compounded by his bitterness. Why me? Why now?

Barney Welansky had acquired ownership of the club back in 1933, the year Prohibition had been repealed. In the nine years since, this determined man had turned the formerly gangsterrun speakeasy into the hot spot for Boston's solid middle class. Certainly, the Grove was still a wild place by staid Boston's standards, with lavish floor shows and exotic decor, but it was now also a respectable establishment that was appropriate for anniversary parties, political dinners, and dates among the younger set. Cleansed of its sinister image and perhaps a bit tame compared to its speakeasy days, the Grove had been transformed by Welansky into a place where open-minded Boston WASPs could mix with the Irish, the Jews, and the Italians. Indeed, Bostonians from those groups and of that generation would for years recall that "everybody went there."

The war had increased business enormously. It had been almost a year since the Pearl Harbor attack, and wartime spending had thickened the wallets of the locals, just as the mobilization had swelled the population of Boston. The streets of the old port city were teeming with sailors, soldiers, and airmen, thousands of charged-up young men, far from home, fatalistic about the future and in search of a good time.

From his hospital bed, Barney could comfort himself in the knowledge that this was the long Thanksgiving weekend and the day of the Big Game, the annual football battle of the Jesuits-Boston College, the hometown favorite, and its archrival from Worcester, Holy Cross. It didn't matter very much that BC had lost. Barney knew that many Cocoanut Grove patrons had booked postgame parties and were unlikely to cancel. Mayor Tobin himself was to be at the Grove with Fire Commissioner Reilly to host a dinner for the players of both teams.

Barney knew there would be a thousand people in his club on that night-easy.

Business had not always been so good, Barney would have remembered, thinking back to the days when he had first "inherited" the Cocoanut Grove from the estate of his deceased law client, Charles Solomon. In January 1933, "King" Solomon was shot dead in the men's room of the Cotton Club, a mixed-race speakeasy in Boston's Roxbury section. Barney had become the estate's attorney.

"The estate didn't want it," Barney would later explain about his "inheritance," claiming that he had "spoken" to the probate judge, although there was barely a notation of the transaction in the court records. Why the King's estate "didn't want it" and what Welansky paid for it, if anything, would be one of the many secrets that Barney would take to his grave.

His client, Charlie Solomon, had been a tough and flashy gangster whose influence had extended throughout the New England underworld. Charlie had been a charter member of "the Combination," the informal national board of directors of the Jewish wing of organized crime, whose "chairman" was New York's Meyer Lansky. King Solomon brought solid credentials to the Combination. At the time of his murder, the Boston American said Solomon "had reached the pinnacle of his fame as a dope peddler, panderer, grafter, loan shark, alky runner and New England czar of the popular forms of villainy."

Barney Welansky had always kept himself at a safe distance from such "villainy." Barney had been close enough personally to Solomon to have been one of the King's pallbearers, but professionally he handled only Solomon's straight-up business deals, including the King's purchase of the Grove in 1930. One couldn't have imagined the modest, soft-spoken Barney saying, "You'll pay for this-I'll have you put on the spot," as Solomon reportedly said to his killers just before he was plugged. Barney made an unlikely successor to the ostentatious Solomon, who had held court at the Grove every night, according to the Boston American, in his "skillfully tailored tuxedo fitted like a plaster mold." By contrast, Barney was pudgy and bald, wore rumpled suits, and had virtually no life outside of the Grove. By 1942, he no longer practiced law, choosing to devote his time to his beloved nightclub. His marriage was quiet and childless, and he demonstrated no interest in the Grove's pretty checkroom and chorus girls.

Barney might have been reserved, even bashful, but he was no wimp. "His word was everything," said Mickey Alpert, the club's master of ceremonies. But Barney was respected rather than feared-as Solomon had been.

Angelo Lippi, the club's longtime maitre d', who had been cheated by the King on his paycheck every week but had been too frightened to complain, counted Barney a distinct improvement. "I'll say this for Barney, he never cut my pay," said Lippi.

Barney may have seemed bland and frugal, but behind the colorless facade was a man of ambition, of business imagination, and even of some flair.

Business at the Grove was slow at first, even with the repeal of Prohibition. The Depression was biting hard in '33 and '34, and Welansky had to undo the years of Solomon's mismanagement. Although the King had been business-like about his rackets, he had run the club as a personal indulgence, valuing its limelight over its bottom line. Preoccupied with his far-flung criminal enterprises, he had no interest in the day-to-day management decisions, which he left to others. "That's just spit money," Solomon is reported to have said when he heard that the club was $30,000 in the red after his first year of ownership. By the time Barney took over, the place was a money pit.

In the nine years since the King's death, Welansky had built the modern Grove piece by piece. He transformed the unused spaces adjoining the original opulent 3,600-square-foot dining room into new venues for fun seekers. The club was now more than twice its original size, a 10,000-square-foot labyrinth of three rooms with four bars built on two levels, all woven together by steep staircases and twisting corridors.

Lying in his hospital bed, Barney could easily visualize that night's scene at the Grove. In the main dining room, the dance floor would be packed, and waiters would be carrying aloft extra tables and chairs as they searched for floor space. Barney could picture the steady flow of patrons through the revolving door of the main entrance and customers filling the foyer waiting for tables, squeezing into the adjoining forty-eight-foot-long Carica ture Bar or filing down the staircase with the blue fabric ceiling to the "intimate" Melody Lounge in the basement.

Yeah, the place would be bursting at the seams... the money rolling in...

The most recent expansion, the New Broadway Lounge, had opened just eleven days earlier, the day after his heart attack, so Barney had never seen the room in operation. But his brother Jimmy, who had visited earlier in the evening, was watching the store in Barney's absence and had reported that business had been good from the first night.

The new room was unlike the older parts of the club, which had been done in a random concoction of jungle kitsch, a fantasy of Tahiti by way of the Arabian Nights, with lots of blue satin covering the ceilings above the club's signature imitation palm trees. Instead, the New Broadway Lounge was decorated in a crisp and tidy modern style, its neon-lined walls and scallopshaped bar covered with glossy leatherette, its window that had looked out on Broadway refitted with that contemporary glass block.

Preparations for the new room had probably brought on the heart attack. Over the past several months, he had driven himself crazy fretting over every detail of the expansion and "negotiating" with those pests from the liquor licensing board about the tricky issue of installing expensive "fusible" fire doors between the old premises and the new. Fusible doors-doors that close automatically in case of fire-were not only expensive but would cut down on seating capacity.

Not to mention that municipal permits and inspections cost money. He had managed to expand the size of the club by twoand-a-half times its 1933 dimensions largely without the benefit of municipal approvals. However, he couldn't open the new room without a liquor license.

Thank God, Jimmy came through. On the very day of the opening, with Barney in the hospital, his brother had convinced Mary Driscoll, chair of the Boston licensing board, that everything was "according to Hoyle"-and she obligingly went for it, no questions asked. Barney got his liquor license hours before the opening of the new room, without installing the fire doors.

Building and fire codes were just a license for politicians to steal. They got enough from him already. The liquor license flap had been unusual, though. The authorities generally gave Barney no trouble. He understood the ways of Boston politics. All the big shots regularly stopped into the Cocoanut Grove. Some customers-politicians, newspapermen, bankers-had the best kind of "charge accounts"-the kind where no bills were ever rendered. For the privileged few, dinner or drink checks required only a scribbled authorization from the boss"a good friend," "see me," "important," and "will settle later." These notations were also a good way to keep records of those who were beholden to him. Barney saved every free drink and dinner check.

Barney might have consoled himself that night by recalling how he had reinvented himself along with the Cocoanut Grove. He was now a respected Boston businessman with important connections to Mayor Tobin and other Boston politicians.

He had been born into a poor Russian-Jewish immigrant family, but he was now a wealthy man. In these all-cash, precredit-card days of 1942, he admitted to a weekly take of between five and six thousand dollars-better than a quarter million a year-several million in today's dollars. But beyond the money, he must have felt rich with pride and excitement over running so glamorous an enterprise.

But this damn heart attack had spoiled it, and tonight in his bed at Mass General, he was wondering if he would live or die.

Barney had good reason to feel sorry for himself on this night. But he couldn't have realized at 10:15 P.M. that the worst was yet to come.

Parker House Hotel Dining Room. At 10:15 P.M., the only problem William Arthur Reilly had was helping to preside over a very glum "victory party." On this night, Reilly, Fire Commissioner of the City of Boston, and his boss, Mayor Maurice J. Tobin, were to have been at the Cocoanut Grove, but things had not gone according to plan.

Boston College had gone into this afternoon's game with a season record of 9 and 0, justifying the widespread expectation that it would be invited to play in the Sugar Bowl just as soon as it dispatched the mediocre Holy Cross team. Earlier that week, the Boston Herald's sports columnist had written that BC was so formidable that "they should not be allowed to use more than six men at a time."

In a stunning upset, Holy Cross humiliated its rival, winning the game 55-12. There would be no Sugar Bowl invitation. Under the circumstances, Tobin and Reilly decided to pass on the boisterous Cocoanut Grove in favor of a quiet dinner at the sedate Parker House dining room for a scattering of the dispirited BC players as well as some members of the Holy Cross team.

The low-key mood abruptly shattered as word reached the commissioner that the Cocoanut Grove was burning. Reilly and Tobin were soon in the mayor's limousine speeding south around the Boston Common to the nearby Grove.

Hearing the screeching sirens of fire trucks and ambulances coming from every direction, Reilly must have thought, This has to be big. He would later learn that by 10:24-nine minutes after the fire had started, and one minute after Deputy Chief Stickel's race down to the Broadway side of the club-a second, third, and fourth alarm had been turned in.

After quickly noting how lucky they had been to skip a night at the Cocoanut Grove, Reilly and Tobin, the two most powerful city politicians, must have quickly taken stock, their hushed conversation repeatedly circling around a number of important questions.

•Who's in charge? Reilly was a politician and businessman with no fire-fighting background. Department Chief Samuel J.Pope would be in charge, and he was a good man, an experienced professional firefighter.

•What about inspections? Reilly's people did the routine fire inspections, and the building department was supposed to look after structure and exits. The Boston licensing board was to confer-sort of confer, nobody was quite sure-with the fire and building departments before issuing liquor licenses. That stuff had better be in order.

•What about the Welanskys? Mayor Tobin's association with Barney and Jimmy Welansky was well known. The brothers were "contributors," and the mayor could be found almost every night downing his Canadian Club and chain-smoking at Jimmy's Circle Lounge Bar at Cleveland Circle. Just weeks ago, the mayor had appointed Barney to the War Resources Board.

Reilly became fire commissioner in 193 8, after managing Tobin's upstart first campaign against their erstwhile mentor and patron, the legendary James Michael Curley. Curley was the thinly veiled model for the central character of Edwin O'Conner's The Last Hurrah, the novel about a corrupt, beguiling mayor of Boston, governor of Massachusetts, congressman, and political boss.

The real James Michael Curley-once described as a man who could have become president of the United States if only he had been honest had maintained his power since the World War I era by relentlessly stoking the bitterness of the Irish. Not many generations before, the native Protestant population had welcomed the new arrivals with "Irish Need Not Apply" signs in factory and store windows and with newspaper cartoons and commentary depicting the new immigrants as staggering under the twin burdens of popery and alcoholism-the "Irish flu."

Curley, perhaps the inventor of American identity politics, reminded the Irish of this rude greeting at every opportunity. "The Anglo-Saxon is a joke," Curley told his constituents. "A new and better America is here."

No single immigrant group has ever overwhelmed an American city to the extent that the Irish had Boston. Long before 1942, the nonpartisan municipal elections had come down to choosing from among Democrats with names like Hurley, Curley, Kerrigan, and Tobin. However, while the Irish may have run Boston, they did not own it. The politically displaced Protestant, Republican old guard was still in firm control of the banks, insurance companies, cultural institutions, and newspapers. Long-reconciled to its minority status, the Yankee establishment now contented itself with anointing and supporting the "better elements" among the Irish: the reformist (that is, antiCurley), college-educated, upwardly mobile, "lace-curtain" or "two-toilet" Irish.

As Boston's mayoral election of 1937 rolled around, the Yankees trembled at the specter of Curley, who had been out of public office since losing his senatorial bid a year earlier, reclaiming the mayor's office for a fourth time in three decades. To beat the old fraud back, Boston's "better elements" rallied around the more polished, more malleable Maurice (pronounced Morris) J.Tobin.

Tobin was an attractive, new-style Irish politician who fit the bill perfectly, despite his Mission Hill working-class roots. He was well spoken, tall, and blessed with delicate good looks. Curley had brought Tobin and his good friend Reilly along in politics in the early '30s. However, the two decided that their political fortunes would improve by distancing themselves from their sponsor.

During the 1937 campaign, the Boston Post lauded Tobin as "the candidate of the forces which offer the one chance of redemption of the city." Seizing his chance, and with William Arthur Reilly's guidance and connections, Tobin turned on his much-tarnished mentor.

Wearing the mantle of the reform candidate, Tobin beat Curley twice, once in 1937 and again in 1941, helped in no small measure by Reilly's resources and influence.

After Tobin's first victory, Reilly had chosen the fire department as his prize because it offered maximum positive exposure for his own political career. Although he lacked Tobin's moviestar looks, he nevertheless cut an authoritative and elegant figure in his politician's uniform of the era-carefully tailored suit, homburg hat, and chesterfield coat. He was an important member of the Clover Club-the Irish answer to the Somerset Club and other Yankee-dominated men's clubs-a Boston College graduate, and reasonably affluent. He had inherited a Catholic music publishing business from his father.

Reilly's father had gone into the business with the special blessing of Joseph Cardinal O'Connell, the bishop of Boston. Because of the influence of the Boston church among American Catholics, the firm of McLaughlin and Reilly had a virtual monopoly over printed church music and over seminarians' materials distributed throughout the country.

Reilly inherited the business from his father, which gave him two important resources for a Boston politician-an independent income and access to a network of Boston priests, nuns, and engaged Catholic laypeople.

It must have been clear to both men that they were going places. Tobin's next stop was the governor's office. The chances were perfect for Reilly to succeed him as mayor-until this particular Saturday night, perhaps.

As they reached the club, Reilly saw that the narrow streets around the Grove were already clogged with more emergency vehicles than he had ever seen at one fire. Smoke and flames were everywhere. Firefighters, policemen, military men on leave, and passersby were climbing over each other in their desperate efforts to pull patrons out of the burning building. What looked like hundreds of bodies-the dying and dead-were piled chest-high on icy sidewalks.

Reilly watched, horror-struck, as firemen with axes hacked away at locked emergency exit doors and the hysterical victims who made it out of the Grove alive staggered about, dazed or screaming for friends and loved ones still trapped inside.

It would be the fire commissioner's statutory duty to investigate and report to the public on this fire. This would be tricky.

First, there was Mayor Tobin's association with the Welansky brothers. Second, Reilly knew that his own Fire Prevention Bureau was responsible for certain inspections of the premises. Other agencies-the building department, the police department, and the Boston licensing board, all run by the inner circle of local politicians-were each to a degree responsible for the safety of the premises and their customers.

But more than any of those others, even more than the mayor himself, Reilly would be in the spotlight over this. He would have to answer some tough questions.

When offered his choice of city posts, Reilly had considered the fire department to be the plum job. Now he knew he had made a mistake.

Newton, Massachusetts. Robert Tyng Bushnell, the Republican Massachusetts state attorney general, was at home and not at his office at the State House in downtown Boston on this Saturday night, but he would have learned quickly that the Cocoanut Grove was burning.

He must have taken grim satisfaction at the terrible news. He knew this day of retribution was coming. He had, in a way, seen it coming.

Although not a native Bostonian, having been born into wellto-do circumstances in New York, the forty-six-year-old Bush nell shared the Yankees' puritanical fury over political corruption. He was a Phillips Andover and Harvard man who would have been comfortable living at the time Massachusetts was ruled by the Puritans, who had defined themselves by their antipathy to popery.

But the attorney general fell short of the stereotype of the stoic, reserved Yankee patrician. He was notorious for public fits of temper, a slashing courtroom manner, and over-the-top rhetorical flourishes. As a rising star in the Republican Party, Bushnell had lamented the twin misfortunes that the voters of the state had brought upon themselves in the 1935 elections; they had simultaneously elected James Michael Curley as governor and legalized dog racing. Bushnell saw a parallel.

"The poor beasts," he had said, "trained in puppy hood to mangle the bodies of live rabbits and later kept at a point of starvation so that they will dash blindly and hungrily after a fake rabbit, are in precisely the same situation as the voters of Massachusetts."

Stocky and kinetic, with a wild head of hair and a Thomas E. Dewey-like mustache, the attorney general may in fact have modeled himself on the New York crime-busting prosecutor who had become the symbol of reform of the nation's corrupt cities.

Now it might be Bushnell's turn for the national spotlight, thanks to this dreadful fire.

Until this night, Bushnell had been preoccupied with his secret investigation into the ties between Police Commissioner Joseph Timilty, a former Curley campaign manager, and one Dr. Harry J.Sagansky

"Doc jasper," as Sagansky was known to friends and associates, had long ago abandoned his Scollay Square dental practice to preside over a $90 million numbers racket. Bushnell had drawn the obvious conclusion that a racket whose base of operations was across the street from the Charlestown police station could not have operated without the connivance of the police commissioner. Sagansky and Timilty were just the types Bushnell despised. The first was an out-and-out crook, while the second was a corrupt official contemptuous of public trust and defiling Bushnell's ideal of the Holy Commonwealth, a community of the righteous presided over by the most righteous.

Now Bushnell was presented with the opportunity to unravel the sordid ties between the nightclub operators and the city's politicians. His mind must have raced through the names of those involved:

•Barney Welansky, the fellow who had been that gangster's lawyer;

•Mayor Maurice Tobin, who seemed more the clever Curley protege than a reformer;

•those political types, William Arthur Reilly at the fire department, James H.Mooney at the building department, and Mary Driscoll at the licensing board.

They would all have to answer.

The Sunday morning papers, which carried the shocking stories of the fire, also provided the citizenry with Bushnell's first discourse on the tragedy: The flames at the Cocoanut Grove and the flames of corruption charring Boston were one and the same.

Bushnell's crusade for the redemption of Boston began November 28, 1942.

City "Blasted" in Its Biggest Daytime Raid

Boston Herald front-page headline, Monday, November 23, 1942

N THE BRISK, sunny afternoon of November 22, 1942, Boston tested its preparedness by subjecting itself to a mock Luftwaffe attack. In the city's tidy response to this imaginary foreign assault, fire-fighting equipment sped to simulated fire scenes, physicians and nurses reported to staged incidents, and laundry trucks became ambulances rushing to remove the "injured" to area hospitals. At the end of this exercise, only 23 persons were declared "dead" while 300 were "wounded." It had all gone precisely as planned, said Mayor Maurice Tobin, and he declared the citywide drill a success. What in fact had occurred was an unwitting dry run for the city's worst domestic catastrophe that came less than a week later.

This mock assault was no academic exercise. As the nation approached the first anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, there were nightly reminders that the homeland itself was threatened. Most of the Massachusetts coast-from Cape Cod Bay in the south to Sailsbury in the north-was subject to "dimout regulations," restrictions on street and house lights to protect from air assault. Everyone took seriously the possibility of air attack, sabotage, or even invasion-and for good reason. The war was not going well in November 1942.

There had already been small-scale invasions of U.S. territory. Earlier in the year, German saboteurs had been dropped by U-boats onto the coasts of Florida and Long Island, New York. Moreover, the Japanese controlled Kiska and Attu, American islands in the Aleutian chain off the Alaskan mainland.

Across the Pacific, the British had lost Singapore in February, and U.S. forces had surrendered the Philippines in May. In Europe, the Germans had been besieging Stalingrad for four months. In North Africa, the Allied invasion that had begun on November 8 was meeting stiff resistance in Tunisia.

By November, the war had disrupted nearly every aspect of American life. President Roosevelt had just announced that 600,000 young men would be drafted between December 11 and 31. Ultimately, sixteen million Americans would serve in the war. Henceforth, every American boy would be required to register on his eighteenth birthday.

The president had also signed orders authorizing the recruitment of women into the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, the "WAAC," or its naval counterpart, the WAVES. All told, by the war's end, 265,000 women would serve. These female volunteers released men for the battlefront by engaging is all manner of backup jobs-clerks, bakers, bookkeepers, and dispatchers. The government had announced that enrollment was open to all twenty-one to forty-four-year-old women "regardless of race, creed, or color."

A spirit of universal sacrifice and service prevailed. Because of its coastal position, Boston was overflowing with sailors and coastguardsmen. Older men and women of all ages were volunteers, selling war bonds and acting as public safety wardens, Red Cross aides, or USO hostesses. Slattery's department store pleaded for used silk and nylon stockings (washed) to make into powder bags.

Children, too, were expected to do their part. Kraft Foods offered a booklet instructing youngsters on ways to help at home so that parents would have more time to devote to the war effort. The Boston Traveler called on all Junior Commandos to come to the big rally at Boston Garden on Saturday morning, November 28. The kids, who would be encouraged at the rally to save their pennies to buy war stamps, were promised, "You'll see the Marching Marines, you'll hear the stirring music of the famed Army and Navy bands, and you'll applaud Buck Jones, the cowboy movie star." After his daylong series of patriotic events, Buck Jones would spend his Saturday night at the Cocoanut Grove.

Every Boston paper carried want ads for skilled and unskilled men and women to work at premium wartime wages at such defense sites as the Hingham or Lawley shipyards or the Sikorsky Air Craft Corporation. The ads promised that unskilled workers would be "paid while they learn." In order to discourage job shopping, applicants were warned that they could not be considered for these positions if they were already employed in war work.

To protect against inflation, hoarding, and shortages, nearly all prices were fixed by the federal Office of Price Administration (OPA). Cities in turn established local war resources boards to coordinate with the OPA. Missing no opportunity to bestow patronage at no cost, Mayor Tobin had recently appointed Cocoanut Grove owner Barnett C.Welansky to the Boston board.

Department store ads entreated customers to "shop only in stores which post ceiling prices and cooperate with the OPA." Salaries were capped at $67,500.00, but few people were in so heady an income bracket. Nevertheless, with wartime jobs paying higher than normal wages, and with many factories operating at full throttle twenty-four hours a day, overtime pay was routine. Bostonians were doing well, but they were admonished to avoid lavish spending. "Foolish Spending Is Treason," warned a dour Uncle Sam in an announcement sponsored by the mutual savings banks of Massachusetts.

In early November, the OPA announced that gasoline and home heating fuel allocations would be reduced. In response, the Massachusetts health department offered tips on staying warm, including going to bed early and elevating one's feet when seated. Filene's department store saw the bright side to rubber and gasoline shortages in the opportunity to do "tireless shopping" by taking the subway downtown. Scarce supplies of gasoline and tires had another advantage; less driving meant lower insurance rates. The Massachusetts Department of Insurance announced that the maximum compulsory insurance premium in 1943 would be $43.00, down from $53.70 for 1942.

Advertisers demonstrated a superb ingenuity in tying their promotions to the war effort and patriotism. Imported White Horse scotch whiskey proudly announced, "Every bottle has won a battle to get here." Florsheim Shoes was pleased "to have put America on a healthful footing," thus reducing the loss of "priceless man hours." Even toilet paper manufacturers managed to find a war theme: "War Bonds-Victory Insurance, Statler Toilet Tissue-Health Insurance." The Jordan Marsh department store advertised its "Victory-Rite Kit" for servicemen (at $1.95), which included seventy-five "men's size" letter sheets, with appropriate service insignias, twenty-four nopostage postcards, blotters, envelopes, and a desk-top writing box. Camel cigarettes ($1.54 per carton at the Stop and Shop Super-Market) told readers that it was "First in the Service... based on actual sales records in canteens and post exchanges." The Necco candy company-"In the service of the Service"pictured cartooned service members announcing, "Sky Bar is My Bar." The White Owl Cigar Company apologized for its recent price increase to six cents a cigar, "but this is wartime, with higher costs all along the line." The company solemnly promised to return to its pre-war five-cent level "at the earliest moment that costs make it possible."

War themes pervaded public entertainment. Irving Berlin appeared at the Boston Opera House in his traveling all-soldier show, This Is the Army. The diminutive songwriter, dressed in his World War I uniform, reportedly brought the crowd to its feet when he sang "Oh How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning." On the night of the fire, a number of cast members would stop in the Cocoanut Grove to have a drink before their show and have their pictures taken with Grove emcee Mickey Alpert.

George White's Scandals of 1943, opening a month in advance of the New Year at the RKO Boston, featured the "24 George White Beauties." According to the Boston Herald's female reviewer, the Beauties didn't have much to do "but walk around... remove some of their clothes... and sing such songs as `I Said Yes' to bashful but obviously well-pleased soldiers and sailors."

The war topped the best-seller lists. The top three best-selling nonfiction books in Boston in late 1942 were See Here, Private Hargrove, a humorous look at basic training; They Were Expendable, the drama of a torpedo boat squadron's grim experience during the Philippine debacle; and Suez to Singapore, a CBS war correspondent's firsthand account of the brutal fighting in the Malaysian jungle and the fall of Singapore. U.K.Lasser's Your Income Tax, 1943 was fourth on the list.)

Movie fare ranged between propaganda and escapism. Opening just in time for the Thanksgiving holiday at the Paramount and Fenway was Flying Tigers-"The First Yanks to Blast the Japs"starring John Wayne. Held over for a third week-"So that all Boston May See How America Is Dishing It Out to the Axis"was The Navy Comes Through, starring Pat O'Brien and George Murphy. Those who wanted escape could go to the Egyptian and see Abbott and Costello in Pardon My Sarong, or to the Metropolitan to see Crosby, Hope, and Lamour in Road to Morocco.

Nevertheless, Bostonians anticipated an austere Thanksgiving holiday. Governor Saltonstall asked defense workers to stay on the job during the holiday to avoid breaks in production. Railroads warned of limited passenger schedules to accommodate war traffic. Turkey was expensive at forty-nine cents a pound, and coffee and sugar sales had been halted completely, pending the start of rationing of those commodities on Saturday, November 28.

Between the high costs and rationing of commodities, a better deal might be had at one of Boston's restaurants. Thanksgiving dinner cost $3.00 at the Hotel Vendome (which would burn and collapse in 1972, killing nine firemen); at the Hi-Hat it ran $2.50; or for just $2.00, one could enjoy a full-course dinner at the Rio Casino as well as the "sensational revue featuring Diosa Costello, the Puerto Rican Tornado." At the sober high end, Thanksgiving dinner in the main dining room of the Parker House cost $3.50.

Boston's major league sports teams were in crisis because of the war. Although FDR had recently issued his "Green Light" letter, encouraging major leagues to continue their operations through the war, owners of the Boston Red Sox, Braves, and Bruins seriously worried whether there would be a 1943 baseball or hockey season. The Sox had ten players in the service, most notably their star, Ted Williams, who had volunteered. The ranks of the Braves were similarly depleted by the draft and enlistment. Team owners considered that they might employ seventeen-year-olds or older men with families. The National Hockey League suspended the minimum player rule-twelve men plus a goalie-for the duration of the war.

Manpower shortages also affected the Boston fire department. Several days before Thanksgiving, Commissioner William Arthur Reilly appealed to local selective service system boards to defer the drafting of firefighters for at least six months. The department had already lost 130 men to the draft, he said. In addition, the department's ranks had been further depleted less than two weeks earlier when six firemen had been killed and forty-two hospitalized as a result of the building collapse at the Luongo's Restaurant fire.

Not all of the city's planning was as high profile as its very public disaster drill. After the horror of the Pearl Harbor attack, the government had come to understand that this would be a "burns war" for which the military and the medical community were ill prepared. Remarkably little was known in 1942 about the efficient treatment of burn injuries, especially on a large scale. Consequently, the National Research Council had turned earlier in the year to two of the city's preeminent hospitalsBoston City and Massachusetts General-to study burn treatment with a particular view to developing procedures to care for massive burn casualties under battle conditions. By November, both hospitals were unusually well prepared to deal with a largescale fire catastrophe-an event that everyone believed would be initiated by a foreign enemy.

The building was not one which the layman would have considered a fire trap.

"The Cocoanut Grove Fire," Report of the National Fire Protection Association, January 1 1, 1943

T WAS ALWAYS MIDNIGHT in the Melody Lounge.

In fact, the popular joke about the Cocoanut Grove's basement bar was that you had to strike a match to find your drink, and this wasn't far from the truth. Except for one indirect light in the center of the ceiling and some neons glowing from beneath the bar, all the light in the intimate Melody Lounge came from a scattering of 71h-watt bulbs. These tiny specks of illumination flickered dimly though the motionless fronds of the imitation palm trees placed in the corners of the room. No more powerful than Christmas tree lights, the bulbs were set into the laminated coconut husks that had been screwed to the trunks.

During Prohibition, the sale of alcohol was theoretically illegal, so the original Grove had no bar. In late 1933, Barney Welansky lost no time in taking advantage of repeal and built two bars in the club: the plush Caricature Bar on the main floor, adjoining the original main dining room, and the more modest Melody Lounge, which he cobbled out of an old storage cellar.

The Caricature Bar offered patrons a view of the stage show in the original club area, so it had to be up to main-floor standards. This 48-foot-long ritzy red leatherette-padded bar was still under construction in December 1933, when for the first time in thirteen years it was legal to serve alcohol. Angelo Lippi, the club's maitre d'-nicknamed the Count for his elegant bearingannounced to the assembled revelers, "My dear ladies and gentlemen, it is my sublime pleasure to inform you, the bar is open." The Caricature Bar was a success from day one.

However, the Melody Lounge was a different story. Barney had at first moved tentatively in creating it, as he had been unsure how customers might respond to a bar in the cheerless basement, far away from the dance floor and the entertainment. He marshaled his stable of occasional workmen to build a small bar and a staircase from the main floor down to the basement and to disguise the masonry walls with cheap wood paneling.

In 1936, as business improved, Barney had the bar enlarged. By 1940, business had improved to the point where Barney had decided to go all-out with his third and most extensive renovation; he expanded the bar to a 35-by-18-foot octagon that covered about one-third of the floor space.

Despite the fact that he had not bothered to apply to the building department for permits on these three substantial renovations-a requirement of the Boston licensing board for a liquor license, at least in theory-Barney's existing license was quietly extended to cover the Melody Lounge and renewed annually thereafter. There had been no finicky inspector to deal with during those years-no bureaucratic unpleasantness like the aggravation over the New Broadway Lounge's fusible fire doors that had occurred more recently.

Barney had been just as masterful in meeting the marketing challenges created by the basement watering hole. The Melody Lounge was billed as a bar, pure and simple-no fancy food and no lavish floor shows, just a singer/piano player. Alcohol has always been the easiest money in the restaurant business-no waste, low overhead, and about a 400 percent markup. If you wanted to spring for a dinner and show in the original dining room upstairs, good for you, and better for Barney. But down in the Melody Lounge, you bought a bunch of tickets-a minimum of two bucks worth per person-and redeemed them for scotch and sodas, seven-and-sevens, or highballs. The beauty of the tickets-for-drinks system was that Barney didn't have to keep watch over everyone in the joint; bartenders and bar boys handled little cash except for their own tips.

It was a sweet system. Nevertheless, just to be on the safe side, Barney had recently installed his favorite nephew as the weekend undercover "checker" to keep a watchful eye on the cashiers and everyone else.