The perils of being moderately famous epub

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.

With the second renovation in 1936, Barney had decided to pull out all the stops and called in Reuben O.Bodenhorn, who had designed the original Cocoanut Grove up on the street floor in 1927. The makeshift Melody Lounge needed dressing up. The resourceful Bodenhorn cleverly met the design challenge of camouflaging this windowless basement by making its limitations the source of its allure. It would remain a dark space, a retreat of "umbrageous" intimacy, as Welansky's lawyers would later so elegantly describe it.

It was a tribute to Bodenhorn's flair that, by 1942, one couldn't think of the Melody Lounge without thinking of the word "intimate." Mostly, however, it was dark and crammed with the stuff of make-believe.

The low cement ceiling of this former garage building intensified the "intimacy" of the room. Only about 10 feet from the ground, the ceiling was effectively made still lower by 1,966 square feet of dark blue satin fabric suspended on wood strapping 12 to 18 inches below the cement. This suspended fabric, which according to designer Bodenhorn created "an illusion of the heavens on a starry night," also covered the ceiling of the staircase that led to and from the main floor.

The steep, fifteen-step staircase was the public's only way into and out of the Melody Lounge. Customers reached the top of the staircase by making an awkward 50-foot U-turn on the club's main floor. After pushing through the revolving door upstairs, the club's main entranceway on Piedmont Street, patrons walked into the foyer area about 12 feet, then turned to the left around an office/checkroom about 28 feet, then left again through a 10-foot corridor to the top of the staircase.

After making the long U-turn and walking down the fifteen steps, customers were transported from the gray streets of Boston to a world that existed only in the fantasy of Hollywood movies. If the harsh glare of daylight could have penetrated this windowless basement room, its trappings would no doubt have seemed gaudy and flimsy, especially to the modern eye. But at the beginning of the 1940s, in dowdy Boston, the underlit, exotic atmosphere evoked visions of Rogers and Astaire dancing in Rio or Morocco-and all points warm and balmy.

Rogers and Astaire would have ended their dance number by flopping on the wrap-around, zebra-striped settees that lined the walls. The walls above-as well as the staircase walls-had faux-cane leatherette covering with rattan and bamboo accents. The staircase had the additional touch of fish netting. The octagonal bar, also trimmed in rattan and bamboo, dominated the center of the room. The little floor area left between the bar and the settees was crowded with tables and chairs. Within the bar area, a piano was mounted on a revolving platform. On November 28, 1942, the singer-piano player, backlit by the neon glow from under the bar, was the portly Miss "Goodie" Goodell.

"Faintly lit"... "romantic"... "intimate"-the Melody Lounge was the perfect place for a guy to make the move on his date. And so John Bradley, the lounge's head bartender, paid no mind when, a few minutes before 10:15 P.M., he made out through the haze of cigarette smoke the twin silhouettes of a soldier warming up to his girl. The couple was seated on one end of the settee in the corner, just next to one of the palm trees with the illuminated coconut husks. The soldier was persistent-all arms and hands-but the girl seemed shy, the twinkle from the tiny bulb apparently too much like a spotlight for her comfort.

Bradley was too busy to watch for very long. He turned his attention back to the patrons standing three and four deep on all sides of his octagonal bar and to supervising the bar boys who shuttled drinks to the customers tightly packed onto the settees and at the additional tables on the floor.

There had been a steady stream of traffic up and down the staircase for a couple of hours. Some of the customers were listening to the songs of Goodie Goodell from atop her revolving platform. Others were talking over the music or drifting up the stairs to catch a dance in the main room, to see about getting a table, or to watch the floor show from the vantage of the Caricature Bar, the dining room's next-door neighbor.

Eventually, everyone went upstairs to use the rest rooms, as there were none downstairs.

But as the evening wore on, more people arrived than left. By 10:15 P.M., there could have been as many as four hundred people in this 35-by-55-foot room, with most of the floor space taken up by the bar, the tables, chairs, and settees.

But the Grove was always packed on Saturday nights. Given the cramped quarters, the guests at the Melody Lounge were more or less patient about delays in being served. Most customers seemed to understand that the bar boys had to work hard to navigate through the crowd at the bar and around the obstacle course created by the extra tables and chairs set out to accommodate as many as possible.

Sigmund Cohen was one of the impatient ones. He had come down to the Melody a few minutes after 10 P.M., intending to kill some time until the floor show began upstairs. But Cohen, not caring for the scene, decided to leave almost immediately.

"The place was packed and the smoke so thick," he remarked afterward. Despite being disturbed by the intense cigarette smoke, Cohen called over to the Grove's cigarette girl, Bunny Leslie, and bought a pack of his own. Then he headed upstairs. Instead of waiting inside, however, Sigmund pushed out through the revolving door in the upstairs foyer, lit up, and waited on Piedmont Street for the show to begin. "Something seemed to be in the air that made me do that," Cohen would say later with the certainty of hindsight.

Head barman John Bradley carried on downstairs. Things were going as well as could be expected. Very few seemed to be crying in their beers over BC's loss, and the mood was upbeat and friendly. Just as Goodie Goodell began to sing the latest Bing Crosby hit, "White Christmas," Bradley turned again to look at the corner where he'd seen the soldier and his shy girl. It was pitch black over there! That soldier must have futzed with the light in the palm tree! More darkness was the last thing the Melody Lounge needed, and John bent over the bar to tell sixteen-yearold bar boy Stanley Tomaszewski to get over to that corner and get that light back on-now.

Bradley's simple and well-intentioned instruction to Stanley went unnoticed by the patrons, who like bar patrons everywhere, were wrapped up in their own thoughts and plans for the evening.

For instance, twenty-one-year-old Joyce Spector and her fiance Justin Morgan hadn't noticed that the light had gone out, although they were just one table away from the ardent soldier and his girl. At first, they had been put off by the slow service, but then they had become distracted by the conversation of the couple seated at the table shoehorned next to theirs. Joyce and Justin smiled to each other as they listened in. "It was their 25th wedding anniversary," Joyce would remember later. She recalled that he was "a nice little man" and thought "they didn't look like folks who went to nightclubs very often."

A couple of tables away, Navy Ensign William T.Connery and Lieutenant David Fretchling also didn't notice the darkened corner. They had gotten to the Melody Lounge a little after 10 and immediately zeroed in on a couple of girls standing at the bar, about 10 feet from the darkened palm tree. After a few minutes, Fretchling, apparently bored, made his excuses and said that he was going upstairs to look for some buddies. Connery decided to hang out with the girls and try to get a drink, which he had been unable to do for nearly fifteen minutes because the place was so packed.

Ruth and Hyman Strogoff were Wednesday and Saturday night regulars. Tonight they were sitting across the room from the soldier and his girl, perched at the bar about 3 feet from the staircase. They had been there about a half hour and felt lucky to get the two stools that friends had saved for them. Ruth called up to Goodie Goodell and told her to join them for a drink at the end of her set.

Seated at a table not far from the Strogoffs, close to the foot of the stairs, and almost diagonally across the room from the darkened corner, Coast Guard Gunner's Mate James W.Lane and his friend, Marine Private Donald W.Lauer, were just taking in the scene.

Next to Lane and Lauer was an attractive young foursome. Nathan Greer, a Harvard student from Santa Fe, was with his date, Kathleen O'Neil, a bank employee from Brookline. With them were Nathan's friend Jim Jenkins, captain of the Harvard tennis team, and Jim's pretty date, Ann McCardle, a prep school student. They had come to the Grove at about 9:30 and had decided to forego the crowd waiting to be seated in the main dining room by heading down to the Melody Lounge.

After about three-quarters of an hour, Ann excused herself to go upstairs to the ladies' room. Seconds later, Nathan's eye fell on the tableau across the room. "Somebody was tampering with the light," he said later, "I guess putting this bulb in."

It was Stanley Tomaszewski. Following Bradley's instructions, the young man had walked over to the soldier and, in his unfail ingly polite manner, reminded him that turning off the light was dangerous. "It is rather dark here, and the few lights we have help keep you safe," he admonished the soldier.

Stanley looked into the darkened tree for the loosened bulb. He couldn't find it, and the soldier was not about to help. So Stanley stood on a bar stool and lit a match. Finding the darkened husk near the top, Stanley put the match in his right hand and tightened the bulb with his left. Then he blew out the match, stepped off the stool, dropped the extinguished match to the floor, and stepped on it.

"The fire originated in the Melody Lounge.... It was first seen burning in a palm tree."

Report Concerning the Cocoanut Grove Fire, Boston Fire Department, November 19, 1943

Mission accomplished. It was 10:15 P.M.

As Stanley turned to walk back to his station across the room, someone shouted, "Hey, there's a fire in the palm tree." Stanley turned and saw that a few of the tree's imitation fronds near the top were crackling with flame. He walked back to the tree and pulled at it, trying to keep the fire away from the wall and ceiling. John Bradley ran from behind his bar to help, and he and Stanley tugged at the burning tree, which had been lashed to the ceiling to secure it.

Other employees immediately joined Stanley and John Bradley around the tree, pulling at it and throwing pitchers of water on the fire. At first, those who even noticed what was going on were amused.

Donald Jeffers and his wife were celebrating their wedding anniversary. They'd had dinner at the Statler just around the corner and then had come to the Cocoanut Grove, just as they'd done on their wedding night eleven years earlier. Don remembered that they were standing very close to the "tiny blaze" and that "they were all laughing and joking" while the Grove employees wrestled with the burning tree, like Keystone Kops in white shirts and aprons.

It might not have been much of a fire, but there may never have been so much light in the Melody Lounge.

Joyce Spector and Justin Morgan, the eavesdropping couple, were neither amused nor overly alarmed. Nevertheless, already unhappy about the overflow crowd and the slow service, they decided that they could do without this little comic drama. Joyce was worried about her brand-new $800 leopardskin coat, which was in the checkroom on the main floor. She told Justin that she was going to go on ahead, collect her coat, and meet him upstairs. "It was just a little fire then, you understand," she would later recall with a trace of guilt.

"The fire immediately spread through the Melody Lounge along the underside of the false ceiling."

Boston Fire Department Report

Nathan Greer, his date Kathleen O'Neil, and Jim Jenkins also got up and started up the stairs. "I thought it would be a small fire," Nathan said later, "but my friend and I took no chances."

The smell of smoke distracted Ensign Bill Connery from his conversation with the two girls he'd just met, although just barely. He turned to see the excited staff attacking the flare-up about 10 feet away from him. Not concerned enough to leave the room yet, he continued chatting, but something told him to scan the room for an alternate exit to the public staircase he and Fretchling had come down.

It was about 10:16.

It took just seconds for the anxious staff to pull down the burning tree. "But it was too late, too far gone," barman Bradley would later say. His hands and face burned, Bradley looked up to see that the fabric ceiling immediately above the tree was sizzling.

Gunner's Mate Lane later said that he and his friend Don Lauer saw "a flame about the size of a dinner plate" flashing between the top of the tree and the blue satin suspended over it. However, the fire knew where it wanted to go-toward the oxygen-filled staircase. Almost immediately, the blue, orange, and yellow flame blossomed sideways and forward as it made its wedged-shaped march to the side walls and to the staircaseand directly at Lane and Lauer.

Don Lauer jumped on a chair and tried to deprive the fire of fuel by cutting at the "topside" with his pocketknife, said Lane. But the fire's burning path was moving too quickly. It zipped over their heads, now feeding on the fabric-covered ceiling of the staircase.

In seconds, the whole of Melody Lounge's starry heaven had turned into a crackling, spitting sheet of flame. It seemed to Ruth Strogoff that almost no time had elapsed between seeing the burning fronds and when "blue and orange flames were shooting in all different directions. You would be standing in one place and before you knew it, it would shoot out of another place." The flames were over everybody's head, spitting down on them, as though the Melody Lounge patrons were under a broiler.

There were panicked screeches and shouts for help, as the fire's destruction was fueled by the flimsy fabric of the ceiling. Large shreds of smoldering fabric were falling. The covering along the upper portion of the walls had started burning. The windowless room was filled with a dense black, acrid smoke. It was impossible to see the faces of nearby companions, or even to breathe.

Ensign Connery's hair was aflame. He spun around while beating at his head, and then he felt Stanley Tomaszewski's hands flailing at him to help extinguish the flames. Connery, who had started warily searching for another exit when the fire was still in the tree, had spotted the kitchen door on the back wall. The door was cut out of the wood paneling that made up the back wall and then hinged in place. Only the most observant could tell there was a door there. This door was close to where the fire had begun, but opposite the staircase, where it was heading.

Stanley directed Connery and some others through that kitchen door, but as the fire rolled across the ceiling, most of the frightened patrons, stumbling over upturned tables and chairs, pressed toward that familiar staircase diagonally across from the palm tree. The staircase was how they'd come. It was the only exit most knew.

Hundreds of people would have to race the flash fire up the narrow staircase. "There was [another] way to the street," said John Bradley, describing another exit behind the nearly imperceptible kitchen door. "But they were all hollering and screaming, and I don't think anyone thought about it," including Bradley himself.

But not everyone was running. Ruth Strogoff remembered that some "people were screaming but they seemed to be falling down without even trying to run or push. They dropped off stools."

These people were suffocating. Some were falling victim to the carbon monoxide in the thick smoke that was rapidly replacing the oxygen in their bloodstream. Others were burning up inside as they inhaled the superheated air-burning wood and fabric can generate temperatures of 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit-that seared shut their throats and lungs.

"As the fire rushed up the stairway... it traveled... above the heads of persons ascending the stairway."

Boston Fire Department Report

By about 10:17 everyone in the room not taken down by the smoke and flames was scrambling to escape. Ruth Strogoff was certain that she and Hyman were among the first to reach the staircase after the fire spread across the ceiling. But those behind them pulled at them in their own frenzied efforts to escape. Some who had pushed past the Strogoffs were already aflame; others caught fire as the burning fabric fell on them. Some just collapsed unburned. Some fell on the stairs just as they reached the Strogoffs; others made it past Ruth and Hyman, but then tumbled backward onto them.

The couple had gotten no further than the first step when Hyman fell. "He went down very heavy on my right arm," said Ruth. She grasped the banister with her left hand and pulled with all her might, but she could drag Hyman up only one more step. By now he was wedged under a heap of collapsed bodies and pressed into the stairs by the feet of others scrambling past.

James Lane may have been one of those who stepped on Hyman. Lane had lost track of Lauer after Lauer tried to cut down the satin ceiling, and there was no time to think about his friend. Starting up the stairs, but finding it blocked by bodies, Lane saved himself by jumping on the banister and pulling himself over the human pile to the top. He didn't see Lauer anywhere at that moment and would never see him alive again.

Now the tops of the faux-cane walls lining the staircase were burning as the fire raced ahead of Ruth, who was still pulling at her husband in her desperation to wrench him free of the tangle of bodies at the foot of the stairs. Flames and the choking smoke enveloped Ruth. Her hat and jacket were burning, and Hyman's hand slipped from her grip. She crawled forward, making it to the top, and rolled around on the floor to extinguish the flames on her clothing. As she looked back, Ruth thought that she could barely make out her husband through the smoke. He lay there, still, partially covered by other bodies. He was most likely dead. She knew she couldn't help him, even though he was no more than 10 or 12 feet away. Further trying to rescue Hyman in the slender hope that he was still alive would have only assured that both of them would die.

She stood up, pulled the remnant of her jacket over her head, scrambled past the locked emergency exit door, and retraced the long U-turn to the revolving door out to the safety and fresh air of Piedmont Street, thinking through it all, "Hyman never said a word."

Ruth Strogoff may well have been the first person in the Cocoanut Grove to experience that stark instant of having to make the awful choice of turning away from a loved one in order to save one's self. Almost half of the people in the Grove would die that night, and many of the survivors would soon confront Ruth's choice of whether to save themselves or make a brave but futile effort to rescue a doomed spouse, friend, sibling, or sweetheart.

The sizzling fire and its shroud of thick smoke were now moving onto the main floor, where there were seven to eight hundred unsuspecting customers and employees. In another moment they would be hurtling into each other in a desperate search for the exits-and escape from the firetrap that the Cocoanut Grove had become.

This is no place for us.

Cocoa Tint Grove patron Charles W.DisbrowJr. to his wife, Peggy

OT MUCH WIDER THAN an alley and otherwise nondescript, Piedmont Street was distinguishable only by the vertical neon sign and the illuminated marquee that spanned the top of the three arches at the entranceway to number 17. The marquee's streamlined art deco letters announced that this was the main entrance to Boston's famous Cocoanut Grove.

But behind this neat facade lay disorder. By November 28, 1942, the Grove had become an agglomeration of six buildings, bounded on the south by Piedmont Street, on the north by the equally narrow Shawmut Street, and on the east by Broadway. As the club prospered, Barney had renovated the Grove from the inside out without regard to the footprints of the original six structures. The result was that behind the grand entranceway there lay a confusing maze of public rooms, dressing rooms, staircases, utility rooms, and corridors.

It is a maxim among fire code professionals that, unless directed otherwise, a panicked crowd will try to leave the same way it came in. Most of the Grove patrons had come in through the main-floor revolving door on the Piedmont Street side of the building.

The average customer desperate to escape the Grove would have known only two means of egress. The only public entries-and escape routes-from this approximately 10,000 square feet of public space were the revolving door at the main entrance at 17 Piedmont Street and the New Broadway Lounge doorway around the corner on Broadway. These two exits were nearly a full city block distant from one other, and each of them, in their own way, was lethal. (The first page of the illustrations section shows the various Grove exits described here.)

The revolving door (Exit #1) at the main entrance to 17 Piedmont Street brought patrons into the foyer area. Revolving doors, which were invented to control air exchange between the outside and inside of buildings, work well to control the orderly flow of traffic into a room, but a desperate crowd seeking to get out in a hurry easily jams them.

The second public exit (Exit #2), from New Broadway Lounge, was a single door that opened to a small vestibule from which customers went through a set of two more doors to get to Broadway. The interior door swung into the room. Doors that swing into public rooms are dangerous because they defy the flow of human traffic. A panicked crowd pressing against an inwardswinging door will seal itself within a burning building.

In addition to these two publicly known doors, there were seven other doors, generally familiar only to employees, making nine total possible doorway exits.

One of the nine possible exits (Exit #3) was in the basement. It could be reached by passing through a door in the back wall of the Melody Lounge, into a passageway, and then up three steps to a door with a wooden bar across it. This hidden exit led to a blind alley between the back of the Grove and an adjoining apartment building. A sewer pipe restricted the door so that it could only be opened-again, inward-18 inches. This door proved useless, but not because of its absurd dimensions. This was the door that John Bradley recalled too late-the one not far from the Melody Lounge's hard-to-locate kitchen door that "nobody thought about" during the panic. No one escaped through this door.

"Flame appeared at the street floor... within two to four minutes after it was first seen in the basement room.... A large and extremely hot volume of burning material, largely gaseous inform, appeared at the top of the stairway."

Boston Fire Department Report

Then there was the door that Ruth Strogoff ran past on her long run to the revolving door. This door (Exit #4) was located at the top of the fifteenstep staircase to the Melody Lounge, and it could have provided a quick exit for the Melody Lounge customers. It was equipped with a "panic lock," a lock that unlatched when the bar across the door was pressed. But the panic lock was rendered useless by an additional key lock. Over this door (today it seems a cruel taunt) was an illuminated EXIT sign.

Barney Welansky had made a simple business decision about all of the emergency doors. They were kept locked or obscured to discourage deadbeats from skipping on their checks. No inspector from the City of Boston had ever challenged him on this practice.

Unlike the Strogoffs and the others who had remained downstairs, Nathan Greer and Kathleen O' Neil had left just seconds before the danger was generally perceived (about 10:18 P.M.), and they made it upstairs unscathed. Nathan had lost track of Jim Jenkins on the stairs. Once upstairs, instead of making for the revolving door, Kathleen ran in the opposite direction toward the back of the foyer. She wanted to get her coat and fetch Ann McCardle from the ladies' room. Kathleen "was taking her time," said Nathan.

Then Nathan saw the fire ripping through the staircase corridor and starting to lick into the foyer. "Like a wind it swept up the stairs and I don't know why it moved so fast. It looked like a ball of fire traveling through the air," Nathan reported later. He opened the ladies' room door and shouted, "Get the hell out, there's a fire." He dragged Kathleen out and pulled her across the foyer to the revolving door. But the door was seized shut by the panicked crowd, with people's arms, legs, and shoulders jammed between the edges of the glass leaves and the frame.

Coast Guardsman Raymond N.Carter and his party had moved to the main floor before the fire because the Melody Lounge was so crowded. "All the tables and chairs were full," he reported later, but the situation was no better upstairs. "The tables up there were so close together we had to twist and turn to get to the dance floor," Carter said. When he saw the fire, he attempted to leave the building by the revolving door but saw that "people were piling up against the door."

Trapped inside by the jammed revolving door were Wilbur Sheffield and Charles Begotti, two of a party of thirteen men from the local General Electric plant. Sheffield had just pushed through the door and was standing inside the foyer when he heard the shouts of "FIRE." He turned to leave and started pushing against the exit side of the door, but it wouldn't budge. He looked over and saw his friend Begotti trapped between two panels on the entrance side. Begotti had been on his way in, but he saw the fire and turned to make the impossible effort of pushing the panel backward in the direction of the street.

When Nathan and Kathleen reached the frozen door, Nathan saw a woman aflame between two panels. She twisted, screamed, and fell dead, further blocking the door. "I hit it with all my might but it stuck," he said. Describing Sheffield and Begotti's counterproductive efforts to push the door in both directions at once, Nathan said, "People were pushing on both sides."

Sigmund Cohen, who had stepped out earlier for a cigarette, looked on helplessly. "People trying to force their way through the revolving door jammed the way... There was nothing I could do but look on."

Finally, the door buckled under the superhuman force that a panicked crowd is capable of generating, and it crashed forward. Nathan jumped forward into the street, losing Kathleen's hand and his wristwatch as he went. Sheffield and Begotti also jumped forward to safety But the fire followed in a voracious ball, hungry for the fresh supply of oxygen from Piedmont Street. "Everybody behind me was consumed, and Kathleen was right behind me," said Nathan.

At about the same moment Coast Guardsman Raymond Carter, who had been at the revolving door but had retreated because "people were piling up" there, had climbed onto the bar that ran along the Piedmont Street wall opposite the main Caricature Bar. Carter knew that there was a concealed window high above this bar. "You wouldn't know it was a window but I had seen it before," he reported later. He was looking for something to break the window when a blast of heat hit him. "I went out through the window," he said.

A friend of Wilbur Sheffield and Charles Begotti, Elisha Cobb, had the misfortune of entering just seconds before Sheffield had, and he was too far into the foyer to make an escape. He died from internal and external burns.

Ann McCardle, whose safety had caused Kathleen O'Neil to hesitate before leaving the building, had managed to climb through the ladies' room window to Shawmut Street. Hours later, Nathan learned that Kathleen's body was among those laid out in the garage of Waterman's Funeral Home. "When they found my girl's body, she had my wristwatch in her hand," said Nathan. Jim Jenkins's body was also at Waterman's garage.

Like Nathan and Kathleen, Joyce Spector had decided to go upstairs in those last critical seconds before the "little fire" consumed the Melody Lounge ceiling. Then she hesitated before retrieving her coat. "I thought of the girls in the ladies' room. So I put my head in the door and said, `Hey girls, don't get excited, but there's a little fire downstairs and you'd better start getting out,"' she reported.

Her good deed done, Joyce started back for her coat. "But in that minute I had been in the ladies' room, the panic had got started. The whole place was one mob, shouting, screaming, pushing. There was smoke everywhere, and flames were shooting up the stairs where I had just come."

Joyce saw a woman knocked down by the crowd. The woman reached her hand up for help, but no one offered assistance. "The men were the worst. Honest. There were men pushing and hitting and shoving to get out." Joyce reached out for the woman. "Just then a big man pushed me in the back and knocked me down before I could get her hand."

Joyce started crawling-where to, she didn't know. There was too much smoke and heat for her to stand. Her eyes were useless in the blinding smoke, but she was saved by other senses. Joyce was "being pushed by feet trampling around me" when she felt a burst of fresh air.

The air was coming from another of the nine exits (Exit #5). At the center of the Shawmut Street wall of the main-floor dining room and below an EXIT sign were two wood slat "Venetian" doors that swung into the room to reveal another pair of doors in the exterior wall. Each of these exterior double doors was about 20 inches wide; they, too, were equipped with panic locks. However, the right-hand door was bolted shut at its top. On the night of the fire, as on other busy nights, extra tables and chairs blocked the cosmetic Venetian doors.

Joyce followed the trail of fresh air on her hands and knees to the double doors. Waiter Frank Accursio had opened one of these doors just seconds before, creating a meager 20-inch wide escape route. No one seemed to know about (or could see) the bolt that sealed the second 20-inch door.

Someone standing just outside the door grabbed Joyce's hand, "threw me across the sidewalk, and grabbed for more people inside." Joyce landed in the gutter. "It seemed like an hour I lay there. I couldn't tell. More people were pulled out and tossed down beside me." Then Joyce saw "that nice little man" who had been celebrating his silver wedding anniversary with his wife. "He was all cut up by glass or something. I guess he was dead."

Dead, too, was Joyce's fiance, Justin Morgan, who was scheduled to enter the Navy on Monday morning. His body was recovered from Waterman's garage.

Joyce's skirt had been burned off and her long curly hair singed. After what she had gone through, Joyce would later think it odd that she still had her leopardskin hand warmer, or "muff." Even while being knocked down and trampled and crawling on her hands and knees, and then being thrown through the door to the safety of the gutter, she never let go of the muff.

"The fire passed thence through a connecting corridor into the Foyer"

Boston Fire Department Report

The superheated gas that appeared at the top of the "chimney" formed by the steep staircase from the Melody Lounge had now propelled itself around the U-turn into the foyer. The foyer was a 40-by-12-foot room with arched ceilings. Its walls were covered with artificial leather trimmed with rattan and lined with upholstered chairs.

The foyer's relatively open space and its flammable appointments provided the fire with a re-infusion of two essential elements, oxygen and fuel. Nearly all of the survivors who saw the fire enter the foyer from the basement used the same innocuoussounding word to describe the effect of the fire at the top of the staircase-"poof." This "poof" was the silent explosion of the very hot but only partially burned carbon monoxide gas from the Melody Lounge finding the fresh air and abundant fuel of the foyer.

It was in the foyer where, on most nights, the elegant Angelo Lippi would control traffic. Except for brief interludes at other first-rate nightspots, Lippi had presided over the front of the house since the Grove's creation in 1927. His genial face crowned by pomaded hair and accented by a carefully trimmed handlebar mustache, Angelo-the "Count"-had been the face of the Grove's hospitality for fifteen years. Always impeccably attired in his tuxedo, he nightly implemented Barney Welan sky's simple instructions: "Receive guests, see they were made comfortable, see that they left happy and see that they come back again."

However, on this night, as on most nights over the previous two months, Angelo was confined to his home with arthritis and gout. His assistant, the more plebeian headwaiter, Frank Balzarini, was doing his best to fill in, but he wasn't happy about his new role. In fact, that very afternoon Frank had visited Angelo at home to confide that he was soon leaving the job at the Grove to go to work in a munitions factory.

Although Frank was doing as well as he could, this Saturday night had become particularly stressful. Extra tables and chairs had been placed on every available inch of floor space, including a few in the passageway to the New Broadway Lounge. But even with the extra places, Frank had begun turning people away at nine o'clock, and he had borne the brunt of their disappointment.

It must have passed through Frank's mind that he should have started his job at the munitions factory weeks ago. He would be making more money with less stress. Whatever regrets he harbored about the timing of his decision to leave, Frank had to be buoyed by the idea that in a short while his circumstances would improve. He had no reason to believe otherwise, for until about 10:18 P.M., the thirty-seven-year-old Frank Balzarini could not have imagined that this was the last night of his life.

"Run like hell. Open up that Shawmut Street door," Balzarini screamed to waiter Frank Accursio, just about the same time that Nathan Greer, Katherine O'Neil, and Joyce Spector had seen the ball of flame and black smoke pushing up into the foyer. After the first shouts of FIRE, Balzarini had instructed wine steward Jacob Goldfine to get to the revolving door to supervise an orderly withdrawal.

Next to the revolving door was another possible means of egress (Exit #6). This was a conventional door to the right of the revolving doors, swinging inward and visible from the inside on this night only to the main-floor checkroom girls, Barbara O'Brien and Anne Lentini. This was because this door could be reached only by making one's way through the makeshift, leanto checkroom that had been cobbled around it. As was the usual practice, this emergency door was locked on the night of November 28. In any event, it was further disguised and barricaded on the inside by the temporary wooden coatrack that hung across it on busy nights. No one escaped through this door. Anne Lentini, her hair aflame, escaped the fire, but even she didn't use this door. She ran out through the revolving door. Barbara O'Brien burned to death in the checkroom.

"I went to the revolving door and put my hand on the cable that opens it up," said Goldfine. That cable at the bottom of the door could have unfastened the glass partitions, allowing them to swing freely and create 58 1/2 inches-nearly 5 feet-of unobstructed egress.

"Someone stepped on my hand and I couldn't do anything. There were so many people around the door nobody could get out," Goldfine said later. He tried to make his way to the Venetian doors across the dining room, about 100 feet away from the fire, "but somebody threw a table at me.... I crawled underneath the legs of people." (It would have been just after this time that Nathan Greer, Wilbur Sheffield, Charles Begotti, and a few lucky others would have been falling with the collapsing revolving door panel into Piedmont Street.) As Goldfine got near the Venetian doors on the Shawmut Street side of the dining room, he encountered Frank Balzarini shouting to the panicked crowd to move toward those doors and away from the fire that was rolling overhead from the foyer.

Frank Accursio had run ahead to the Venetian doors as instructed by Balzarini. With the crowd pressing on his back, he threw aside the tables and chairs blocking the decorative doors, pulled them apart and pressed against the panic bars of the metal double exit doors. The left door, 20 inches wide, yielded; the right wouldn't budge, held in place by a bolt at the top of the door that slid into a hole in the casing. Accursio, unfamiliar with this exit, couldn't see the bolt through the smoke. He pressed against the obstinate door, but the unseen bolt held. Another waiter, Daniel Joseph Rizzo, and a sailor picked up a table by its legs and hammered away to no avail. Accursio pressed and kicked at the right side until he, Rizzo, and the sailor were pushed through the open side by the throng that had been herded there by Balzarini. The momentum of the stampede also carried Balzarini and Goldfine through the open door.

"Thence the fire proceeded the length of the Foyer past the main entrance to the premises and traversed the length of the area containing the Caricature Bar... As it traveled through the lobby toward the Caricature Bar, it was soon followed by a thick cloud of smoke."

Boston Fire Department Report

Goldfine later reported, "I got out, went home, changed my clothes, and returned." As for Balzarini, two days later the Boston Herald reported, "Forced to the street by the crowd that rushed through... Balzarini, 37, of Connecticut Avenue, East Natick, pushed his way through the crowd into the burning building and rescued a half a dozen unconscious women before he himself was killed."

At 10:19 P.M.Charles W.Disbrow Jr. told his wife, Peggy, with remarkably cool understatement, "This is no place for us." Disbrow and his wife, part of a party of nine, sat at a table near the center of the dining room, close to the crowded dance floor. They had just finished dinner and were waiting for the floor show to begin. Looking around idly, Disbrow noticed that, one after another, heads were turning toward the foyer and the bar. Then he sensed a building commotion at the Caricature Bar. "At first I thought some celebrators had started a fight." He realized very quickly that there was no fight. Disbrow saw a man jump onto the bar. "Two belches of flame seemed to be chasing him," he said.

The Caricature Bar was on the right side as one entered the Foyer from the revolving door entrance on Piedmont Street. The bar area was raised about 1 1/2 feet above the floor to facilitate viewing of the floor show in the adjoining main room, from which the bar area was separated only by a railing. The oblong bar was 48 feet long, reputed to be the largest in Boston, and surrounded by fixed chrome stools with seats covered in red leatherette. The whole bar area, in fact, was encased in red leatherette-the walls, ceiling, and the padded face of the bar itself. Photographs taken by Lynn Andrews, the Grove's photographer, and portraits of the regular patrons and famous visitors hung on the walls. Another bar ran along the Piedmont Street wall. Above this bar were four sealed casement windows, covered by dark curtains, with bottom sills 5 feet above the floor.

A large exhaust fan at the far end ventilated the bar area. It sucked the fire into the bar.

"I knew there would be a panic, and people had already started running away from the space near the bar," said Disbrow later.

Charles quickly decided that he and Peggy would find their own way to safety. They would not join the hundreds who would be pushing into the foyer in the direction of the revolving doors-and toward fire. Instead, the couple ran down the service stairs to the basement kitchen behind the Melody Lounge.

Then Disbrow thought that perhaps they had made a mistake. He and Peggy found about fifty frightened people in the kitchen searching for an exit in unfamiliar surroundings. "There was no smoke in the cellar as we entered. There seemed to be a line of people down there, about two abreast, and they were going toward a dark corner," he said. In that dark corner was a door to the refrigerator room that appeared to be a dead end. "We can't get out this way," someone screamed. Then the lights failed.

The Disbrows tried to return to the main floor, but by this time, everything-the basement, the staircase, and the main floor-was enveloped in blinding and choking smoke. The Disbrows and another couple decided against going back upstairs. "The smoke really saved us," Disbrow reported. They would take their chances on finding an escape route from the basement.

The foursome left the larger group, which was now enveloped by both smoke and panic. Their eyesight was useless in the black smoke, and they groped their way around the kitchen. "I didn't think we'd get out. We followed so many false trails down there," he said. Then Disbrow sensed a shaft of chilly November air pushing through the smoke. Following the current, he found a small boarded-up window high above the kitchen service bar, just next to the door connecting to the Melody Lounge. (This was the "invisible" door on the back wall of the Melody Lounge through which Stanley Tomaszewski had led Bill Connery.)

Disbrow jumped on the service bar and kicked away glasses and bottles. He pulled away the boards and smashed his hand through the remaining shards of glass. Two pipes ran across the window so that there was only about 1 1/2 feet of vertical clearance. He pulled Peggy up onto the bar and boosted her through the narrow opening. Then he and the other man attempted to boost the other woman through the window, but she lost her footing and slid along the wall into the space between the back of the service bar and the wall. They pulled her up and saw that her face was cut. They managed to boost her up and through the window; then Disbrow and the other man made their escapes.

Outside, the two couples found themselves in the blind alley between the back of the club and a neighboring apartment building, the same alley that the forgotten door obstructed by the sewer pipe opened to. They opened the alley door of the adjoining apartment building and confronted a very surprised Mrs. Margaret Foley standing in the hallway. Unaware of the emergency next door, Mrs. Foley looked "as if she thought we were crazy," said Disbrow. Put off by this disheveled bunch, Mrs. Foley announced sternly, "You can't go through my house."

Disbrow was in no mood to explain. "`You bet we're going through,' I said, and we tore through."

Mrs. Foley later estimated that, minutes after the Disbrows had come through, as many as fifty people filed through her hallway or through the adjoining alleyway to the street. Since the only other way to Mrs. Foley's would have been through the door that no one remembered (Exit #3), the one blocked by a sewer pipe, it is certain that Charles W.Disbrow Jr. discovered one of the most effective emergency exits from the Grove, a 1 1/2-by-2-foot space about 7 or 8 feet above the basement floor.

After losing control of the fire in the palm tree, John Bradley retreated to the kitchen. There he found several employees, including Mrs. Catherine Swett, the head cashier. Mrs. Swett sat at her desk, clutching the bulky cash box that held all of the night's receipts for the entire club. Bradley told Mrs. Swett and the others to get out and then returned to the Melody Lounge to make another attempt to control the fire and panic.

Henry Bimler, a waiter in the main room, ran down the service stairs to the kitchen. "I asked Catherine Swett to give me her cash box and get out," said Bimler. "She kept saying she couldn't leave the money. I said it was dangerous, but she wouldn't go."

Meanwhile, John Bradley had quickly assessed the situation in the Melody Lounge and decided that there was nothing he could do. He returned to the kitchen, but he could see nothing through the blinding smoke that now filled the room. "I called, `Anybody there?' There was no answer," said Bradley. He then climbed onto the service bar and pulled his portly frame through the same little window that Charles Disbrow's group had.

Several hours later, when the initial list of the dead was compiled, Catherine Swett's name was on it. The next day the Boston Herald would carry a small story about Catherine Swett headlined "Loyal to the End."

Donald Jeffers and his wife, Mildred, who had watched "everyone laughing and joking" as the Grove employees danced around that "little blaze," realized that they were in mortal danger. The little blaze had become a blue and orange-or yellowflash across the ceiling of the room and had engulfed it in thick, caustic smoke. Seeing the flames rushing past and over the crowd in the public staircase, the Jefferses made their way in the opposite direction, through the door on the back wall of the Melody Lounge and into the kitchen, the same route that Stanley Tomaszewski had taken with Ensign Bill Connery.

There was no relief in the kitchen from the smoke, and the Jeffers were immediately separated in the blackness. Unable to hear Don's response to her calls to him, Mildred groped around and soon discovered that window over the service bar-the Disbrows' escape route. Then Mildred made the same sad choice that Ruth Strogoff had made moments earlier, to save herself. She climbed on the service bar, went through the window, and then made her way to the street through Mrs. Foley's now welltraveled hallway. Mildred then suffered an hour of guilt and anxiety walking around the Grove countless times, searching the piles of bodies now being laid on the sidewalks by policemen, firemen, civil defense workers, and passersby.

After losing track of Mildred in the dark smoke, Don Jeffers crawled on the floor of the kitchen, searching for his own escape. "A man yelled to me from the darkness saying, `This is the refrigerator. Jump in quick. It's fire proof."' Jeffers opened the door to the walk-in box and joined two men and two women.

"Several times we opened the door and heard the most terrifying screams and shrieks. One of the women with us prayed more fervently than I ever heard from the pulpit," he said. After about a half hour, the group heard the sounds of splashing water and pushed at the door tentatively to shout for help. A fireman responded and came to the refrigerator. It was still impossible to see, and the fireman instructed them to take hold of the fire hose and follow it to the street. Once on the street, Don replicated the same desperate circles around the block that Mildred had begun as soon as she had made her escape.

At about 11:30 P.M., more than one hour after Mildred had climbed through the window, the Jefferses' grisly search for each other among the piles of the dead and dying ended. They were reunited on the street.

It was just a wild outburst of everybody rushing and swinging their arms and fighting and hollering and screaming.... It was like a lot of wild animals pushing people around.

Cocoanut Grove patron Harry Thomas

From [the bar] or from the Foyer itself, the fire spread to the main dining room.

Boston Fire Department Report

Y 10:20 P.m. AT THE LATEST, as if to advise the patrons that there would be no escape from its authority, the fire was marching into the main dining room from two separate flanks. Feeding on the fresh fuel of the foyer's trappings and then sucked into the Caricature Bar by the exhaust fan, it was now converging from both those areas into the main-floor dining room, hungry for more oxygen and fuel.

The main-floor dining room was the largest single area open to the public, a 60-by-60-foot square room, and the Grove's showplace. In the center of the room was a 600-square-foot wooden dance floor, surrounded by tables and chairs. The six "palm trees"-actually structural columns-provided the signature decor of the Grove: three on each side of the dance floor.

A patron entering the main dining room from the foyer would see the orchestra platform at the far end of the room about 4 feet above the floor. Under the orchestra area rested a sliding platform that was pulled out over the dance floor for the floorshows.

To the right of the orchestra platform, as patrons came in from the foyer, was the opening to the L-shaped, orange velourcovered passageway to the New Broadway Lounge. Extra tables and chairs had been set up in that opening to accommodate the overflow crowd.

On the left side of the orchestra platform was another door that opened, inward, to Shawmut Street. This "service door" (Exit #7) was always locked when the club was open for business. The key to this lock was kept in the basement kitchen. Further to the east along Shawmut Street were two doors that were of no help to the fire's victims. One of these (Exit #8) was a locked, inward-swinging door hidden behind a warren of dressing and utility rooms. The other door (Exit #9) was also locked and inward swinging. Welansky had submitted plans to the building department that showed that Exit #9 was to be freely accessible to New Broadway Lounge patrons in an emergency. Instead, he built a checkroom that completely blocked it.

The Shawmut Street side of the dining room was a false wood veneer wall hiding three large plate-glass windows. Had the panels not obscured them, these large windows might have provided an escape route for hundreds of people.

Extending about 8 feet from this wall was a Spanish tile canopy, and the floor area under it was raised about 6 inches above the main floor. This area and a similar tile canopy and platform on the opposite side backing up to the Caricature Bar area were referred to as the "arcades."

Against the wall opposite the orchestra platform, immediately to the left as one entered from the foyer, was the "terrace." Built about 2 feet above the floor, the terrace was the club's VIP area, and it provided a commanding view of the grand main dining room. The terrace was reached by a short staircase at its center and was surrounded on three sides by a wrought-iron railing.

Over the dance floor was a 900-square-foot rolling roof that Barney Welansky had installed in 1934, shortly after he had inherited the Grove. During mild weather, he opened the roof to allow dancing under the stars. When not in use, as was the case in November, the rolling roof was closed and concealed from below by billowy blue satin fabric. The celestial blue effect extended from wall to wall. All told, the main dining room had about 3,600 square feet of fabric ceiling. In addition, the orchestra platform was decorated with the same fabric on its walls and ceiling, except that it was the color of "mirage satin egg." The orchestra platform also had a fabric stage curtain across the front.

The dining room was a tightly enclosed tinderbox.

On November 28 a party of twelve sat in the Shawmut Street arcade, including John C.Gill, Boston College's alumni secretary, and his wife, Margaret. Despite BC's crushing defeat at the hands of the Holy Cross squad that afternoon, John and Margaret had decided to attend a long-planned Saturday night victory party at the Grove. This was a Thanksgiving weekend tradition. Why miss the fun just because your team lost by six touchdowns? Besides, the party was hosted by an important person, John Walsh, chairman of the Boston Committee for Public Safety, a wartime mobilization-planning agency. As it turned out, his organization was sorely tested that evening.

Everyone was waiting for the start of the show, which was to be signaled by the tenor Billy Payne's rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner," a nightly practice since the beginning of the war. The Gills sat at the far end of the table, with their backs to the foyer. The back-up band was playing, and the dance floor was jammed. They were surrounded by the loud sounds of conversation and laughter coming from other tables, the dance floor, and the bar.

Then John Gill gradually became aware of an unsettling sound, which he described as "a vague flurry," mixing with the sounds of merriment. In an instant, this flurry mushroomed into the sounds of a building panic-crashing tables and breaking bottles, glasses, and dinnerware. Turning in their chairs, the Gills were stunned to see a tongue of flame roll along the ceiling, barely touching the flimsy fabric material. Then came the screams of "FIRE" as balls of flame fell upon tables, the bar, and the bandstand and began to move down the walls. The floor rumbled with the vibration of stampeding feet.

"Keep calm. It's a fire. Keep calm. It's a fire," he repeatedly told those rushing around him. No one heeded his sensible advice. Then he saw Margaret pushed to the floor by the crowd clamoring to avoid the falling fireballs and searching for the exit doors. As he moved to help her, the panicked customers rushing past bounced John from side to side. Then he fell, his body covering Margaret. He scrambled to his feet and tried to get Mar garet to hers, but they were knocked down repeatedly, climbed over and stepped on by the wild crowd. He felt feet on his back and neck and thought, "They're going over us. They're going over us to freedom!" In fact, for most, there was no freedomjust chaos.

By now, the room had darkened, either from the burning of electrical wiring or by the density of the smoke-or both. Nevertheless, there were flashes of illumination from the fire, and John could see his fellow patrons, many with their clothes afire and women with their long hair aflame, beating themselves to extinguish the flames while running haphazardly in every direction to avoid the fluttering sheets of burning fabric falling everywhere.

The flames had not touched John, but the superheated air had singed his hair, and the skin on his face was peeling. The time to reason with the crowd had passed; it was time for the Gills to save themselves. John got to his feet and pulled Margaret to hers. With one arm around his wife, he used the other to make his way through the frantic men and women whose stampede threatened to throw them back to the floor. John and Margaret made it to one of the Shawmut Street doors, the half of the double doors that waiter Frank Accursio had opened. John recalled later: "I don't remember that we were borne through that little door, but we must have been. I don't know whether we were shoved through standing up or whether we crawled."

The Gills' journey from their table through that "little door" took seconds, no more than a minute. Margaret, having been shielded by John's body, was bruised but not burned. John's burns were superficial, and the couple was treated at Boston City Hospital and released after a short stay. They were among the lucky ones.

Most of the dining room terrace had been taken up by a party of about thirty people hosted by New England movie distributors and theater executives to honor cowboy movie star Charles "Buck" Jones. Now a forgotten name, Buck Jones had been a superstar in the '30s. Beginning in silent movies, Jones had successfully made the transition to talkies; in 1936, he was voted the country's favorite Western movie hero. By 1942, he had starred in more than two hundred movies and serials. Boston was the final leg of an exhausting cross-country tour that Jones had begun weeks earlier in California-a combination of warbond rallies and promotions for his Rough Rider series, in which he co-starred with another cowboy movie legend of the time, "Colonel" Tim McCoy.

Buck was especially popular with children. He said that he never played the villain because "the little shavers wouldn't like it." That morning a crowd of 12,000 little shavers and their parents had been in the Boston Garden for a mass meeting of the Buck Jones fan club, where Buck entreated kids and parents to buy war stamps and bonds. Then Buck had gone to the children's hospital to cheer up some young patients. There photographers took pictures of him in a gray ten-gallon hat, smiling down at little Georgie Piette, a very sick four-year-old. That afternoon he sat in a drizzling rain in Fenway Park as the guest of honor in Mayor Tobin's box, watching Holy Cross trounce Boston College.

By the end of the afternoon, Buck was exhausted and suffering from a bad cold. He begged off his scheduled 9:30 appear ance at a USO facility, the Buddies Club, and had tried to get out of the dinner planned in his honor. Marty Sheridan, a local newspaperman who was handling Buck's public relations in Boston, encouraged him not to miss the Grove affair. Realizing that the local movie executives were too important to snub, Buck reluctantly agreed to attend as planned.

The floor show had been scheduled to begin at 10:15, but "the girls were late coming down," Mickey Alpert, the Grove's entertainment coordinator, later recalled. Alpert caught up with his pal, singer Billy Payne, and said, "I'm tired Billy. Let's sit down." As usual, Alpert had spent the evening schmoozing and glad-handing the guests in the dining room. It was the same tiring ritual he went through every night; it came with the job. The delay in starting the show was a welcome breather.

But just as he and Billy sat down, someone on the terrace called for Mickey to come on up and meet Buck Jones. Alpert stood up and began to move toward the terrace steps when Billy Payne said, "Hey, Mickey, it's a fight." Like so many others, Payne had mistaken the excitement in the foyer and the shouts of FIRE to be the commotion of a "fight." Alpert turned to see the fire flashing through the foyer and coming directly at the terrace.

The terrace, just off the foyer, was the first section of the main room to be overwhelmed by flames and smoke. Until then, the party for Buck had been a happy gathering. It was largely composed of old friends and business acquaintances; some were sharing pictures of their children just before the fire reached them. But in an instant, all camaraderie was destroyed. Insurance executive Abe Yarchin remembered, "It was every man for himself." The frightened crowd-and the railing-trapped him and his wife, Goldie, on the terrace. "I don't remember anything except finding myself in the hospital," he said afterward.

Harry Thomas, the East Coast sales manager for Buck Jones's Monogram Pictures, recalled: "It was just a wild outburst of everybody rushing and swinging their arms and fighting and hollering and screaming.... It was like a lot of wild animals pushing people around." Thomas made it down from the terrace and then was knocked to the floor. Weakened by the fumes, he lay there in the dark under a pile of bodies.

"The great mass of compressed partially burned gases spread... into the Broadway Lounge."

Boston Fire Department Report

The decor of the New Broadway Lounge lacked the obvious tinder of the Melody Lounge and the main dining room, particularly their fabric ceilings. Nevertheless, after rampaging elsewhere through the club, the increased heat of the fire generated an intense pressure that pushed the flame and gases into the narrow passageway leading to the new room. Here was where the most complete burning occurred and where authorities found twenty-five incinerated bodies. The heat and pressure generated in the passageway created a virtual blowtorch pointed directly at the New Broadway Lounge.

Sitting together in the lounge had been Barney's brother, Jimmy Welansky, Suffolk County Assistant District Attorney Garret Byrne, and Captain Joseph A.Buccigross. Captain Buccigross headed the local police precinct that included the Grove and other top Boston clubs like the Mayfair and the Latin Quarter. When asked several days later why he had been at the Grove that Saturday night, Buccigross's stiff reply was that, despite being in civilian clothes, he was there "to see that order was maintained and to see that the licensees lived up to the letter of their license."

The reality was a great deal less official. Welansky, Byrne, and Buccigross sat at a table chatting amiably over drinks about a current murder case and about the New Broadway Lounge itself, which Buccigross hadn't seen before.

"Then a waitress came out of the dining room," reported the captain, "and said, `Mr. Welansky, there's a fire in the main dining room.' Welansky left at once."

Because of its comparative remoteness from the main building, the crowd in the New Broadway Lounge was unaware for several minutes of the destruction being wrought next door. In those minutes, many of the patrons in the other rooms who were not yet taken down by burns or smoke saw the New Broadway Lounge as their last clear chance for escape. The crowd, numbering in the hundreds, rolled through the passageway and slammed into the 250 or so unprepared patrons sitting in the lounge. The heavy smoke, and then the fire, followed. The only way out for these several hundred people was through the 36-inch-wide, inward-swinging door to Broadway Street.

It could have been as late as 10:20 when Jimmy Welansky was informed by the waitress of the fire. "I got the smell of smoke," said Captain Buccigross, and then "the stampede came into the room." Buccigross and Assistant D.A.Byrne tried to calm the crowd, with little success. "They pushed me over a stool," said the captain. "But I got up and assisted in getting people out until flames came through." Buccigross and Byrne said the pressure of the panicked crowd eventually carried them through the doorway.

Joseph Kelly was one of the patrons who would soon be running through the passageway to the new lounge. He was at the Caricature Bar just moments before the fire rolled through. He saw the fire just as it pushed up into the foyer, a distance of more than 60 feet from his bar stool. Then, the fire "lifted a little and spread" into the bar area and the main dining room "in a matter of instants," said Kelly. Fortunately, he was sitting next to the passageway to the New Broadway Lounge. As he ran through that corridor, Kelly realized that he was just steps ahead of a tunnel fire. "There seemed to be a natural draft... a current I guess... through the passageway and out that exit," he said. Then as he reached the end of the passageway, the flame flashed over his head and into the room. He ran toward the door "under the fire," he reported later.

Kelly had observed that the fire had been a ball of flame in the foyer, but in the New Broadway Lounge, "it had leveled out onto the ceiling and under it a heavy layer of smoke and gas." Kelly described how he bent over just enough to stay under the sheet of fire and smoke: "It got down to the six-foot level.... The fire and smoke were stratified.... There was a clear space under the smoke, and it was in that clear space that I managed to escape." He ran past people falling unconscious or dead to the floor and reached the door. It was jammed with "perhaps 50 or 100 people" scrambling to escape. He plunged in. "The crowd had a twisting motion," said Kelly. "I must have got caught in the vortex of it, or the center of that confusion, and been twisted out. I landed on Broadway, not of my own volition, feeling for a moment that I might be crushed when I was in the middle of the thing."

Harold Segool was standing on Broadway. He had just escaped from the burning new lounge with two of his three companions-his friend's wife would be found dead in the ladies' room. The three stood on the street and saw a man try to climb through a small opening in the glass block. The efforts of Deputy Chief Stickel's men to save him were fruitless. Segool and his friends watched in horror as the man burned to death, despite the fire hoses being played on him. "He was half in and half out," said Segool.

Cab driver Sam Meyers, a passerby, ran to the Broadway doors to help. He stepped into the little vestibule to assist people through, but a man who was "hollering and screeching" blocked the inner door. The man would not come out to the street, and he wouldn't let others pass. "Then a sailor hit him.... I found out he had stopped people from getting outside because he thought his wife was inside. I dragged him into the street. About 10 people got out," Meyers said, before the door became jammed again with the clawing crowd.