Hartford Circus Fire - Personal Accounts

Personal Accounts

One of the survivors of the fire, Maureen Krekian, discussed her ordeal in 2007. She was 11 at the time, and lived on the same road where the circus was held. On the day of the event, she was supposed to go to the circus with a woman next door and her daughter. When she went to their house, she found that they had already left without her. She decided to go to the circus on her own, where she seated herself in the bleachers.

"I remember somebody yelling and seeing a big ball of fire near the top of the tent. And this ball of fire just got bigger and bigger and bigger. By that time, everybody was panicking. The exit was blocked with the cages that the animals were brought in and out with. And there was a man taking kids and flinging them up and over that cage to get them out. I was sitting up in the bleachers and jumped down — I was three-quarters of the way up. You jump down and it was all straw underneath. There was a young man, a kid, and he had a pocketknife. And he slit the tent, took my arm and pulled me out."

As she was being pulled out, Krekian grabbed another little girl's arm and pulled her out as well.

Actor and theater director Charles Nelson Reilly, who was thirteen years old at the time, survived the fire and dramatized it in the film of his stage show, "The Life of Reilly". In a 1997 interview, Reilly said that he rarely attended the theater, despite being a director, since the sound of a large audience in a theater reminded him of the large crowd at the circus before the disaster.

Frieda Pushnik, who performed with the circus as the "Armless and Legless Wonder," was rescued by a minstrel show performer. She could not have gotten away on her own, but the minstrel performer rushed on stage, picked up her chair, and carried her to safety. Pushnik continued to perform with the circus until 1955.