After Cocoanut Grove

by FREDERICA WEEKS

1

SATURDAY night, November 28, 1942, goes down as the date of one of the worst disasters in the history of Boston. That evening a big crowd, most of them young, many of them in uniform, went to our largest night club, the Cocoanut Grove. Had Boston College defeated Holy Cross, as everyone expected them to do, the local football squad and many of the undergraduates would have been in ringside seats. The bitter taste of defeat mercifully kept that one party away. But others came — perhaps a thousand in all. The fire struck with the swiftness of a bomb, and when the flames had subsided, the city knew that close to five hundred had perished, that approximately two hundred and fifty had escaped, and that another two hundred were still fighting for their lives in Boston hospitals.

In the days that followed, we in this neighborhood lived under the smoky, gruesome pall of publicity. We listened as the Public Hearing dragged out the pitiful details. We heard hints of the looting, of the damage suits, of the wills to be contested — and it was a sorry story. What we did not hear was the story of the convalescents and their incredible courage, and the story of the men and women, the country over, who reached out to help Boston. When there has been a famine in China or an earthquake in Tokyo, Americans have never held back. But this time we knew the same generosity in our own neighborhood.

What surprised the Red Cross was the magnitude of the offers that started pouring in on Monday morning. People from such far places as Chicago, Florida, California, as well as scores in Massachusetts, wrote, telephoned, telegraphed offers of money, furniture, blood, skin for grafting. More than a hundred couples offered homes for orphaned children. One old man came to headquarters, bank book in hand, to show that he was giving every penny he could scrape together.

In came a gift from one mother who had lost her son in the Grove. It was not an easy gift to receive. Her boy had been in college. Now, in his memory, she wanted to send some other boy in his place. Was there, among those who had been burned, a boy who might need a scholarship? The Red Cross knew of one among the survivors. He had gone midway through his freshman year; then his father died and the youngster had to leave to help support the family. He had been working as a stevedore. Now his hands were so badly burned that he could never do that kind of manual work again. He won’t have to. He is going back to college.

“Rehabilitation” is the official label for such work as this. Among the musicians burned out at the Grove was a young saxophone player. He lost his saxophone, he lost his cornet, he lost his tuxedo, which was burned to tatters. But he lived and the doctor said his lungs would recover. One of his friends scoured among the ruins and found the battered saxophone. It would cost forty dollars to have it repaired. Forty dollars is a small fortune if you are a sick musician, uninsured, and out of a job. Then the Red Cross stepped in, and having made certain from the doctor that he would be able to use his lungs, they bought him a completely new outfit. “You don’t mean that you’ll just give me a cornet? But it costs a hundred and fifty dollars! And a new tuxedo? And pay to have my saxophone fixed!” The young man couldn’t grasp it, couldn’t believe there wasn’t a catch in it somewhere. “I wouldn’t have believed that anyone would do a thing like this for anybody,” he protested.

The fire traveled. It hurt those who were far from the scene. Three little children, the oldest a girl of four, lost their father, their mother, an uncle, two aunts, their grandmother and grandfather. The family had gathered at the Grove to celebrate a wedding anniversary and not one of them escaped. The youngsters had been left with an aunt of eighty. On the night of the fire the Red Cross sent a messenger to the home, and later a housekeeper. And since then it has kept the family intact. The one male relative competent to look after the family was an enlisted man in the South Seas. A leave of absence was arranged for him through the War Department, and he is now on his way to the children.

Among the Boston mothers who were in anguish that Saturday night was one who had quarreled with her daughter. She had ordered the girl not to go out — in anger had sent her to her room. But the girl defied her and went anyway — to the Grove. She did not come back, and the mother could not face her anguish alone. A psychiatrist talked with her, worked with her, lived in the house with her until she had regained her poise.

“I see that the papers estimate the damage at the Grove at $500,000,” said the Assistant Superintendent of Nurses at the Massachusetts General Hospital, with a wry smile. The cost of those first three days in nursing, in doctors, in blood plasma and morphine, is almost beyond calculation. Two hundred doctors were working that week-end at the Boston City Hospital. Over a thousand units of plasma (each unit a half pint) were used there in the first five days.

But this is not the kind of suffering — or care — that you can reckon in dollars. The thing is too big for the individual to cope with. The care of one girl who, if she lives, will be a helpless cripple, costs $600 a month. Her father, who earns $650, would gladly mortgage his future salary. But thanks to anonymous generosity, he doesn’t have to go into debt. The cost, both to individuals and to families, is one which will reach far down the years.

The doctor in charge of the Boston City Hospital said, “I have never seen people behave so wonderfully as they did that Saturday night.” And the nurses at the Massachusetts General Hospital say the same thing. A woman burned to the waist waved a doctor away with, “No, no. Don’t bother about me. I’m all right. Help the others first.”

Of course there were complaints. But they were relatively few. The sufferers thought first of those who had been with them. Then of the things they lost — their coats, their handbags, their rings (three ring cutters were worn out in the first night). Most of the survivors were burned on the back of the hands and the face, having thrown up their hands to protect their eyes as the blast swept toward them. In the early weeks of their recovery they could do nothing for themselves, except cheer each other up — which they did marvelously. In some wards the radio, the newspaper accounts, and the pictures of the fire were kept away from the patients. When they talked together during the first week, it was not about the disaster, but of things at home. One young girl in the Massachusetts General Hospital lost her fat her, mother, and fiancé. She didn’t speak of her own feelings, but repeated over and over, “I must get well, I must get out by Christmas. My little brother and sister will be alone for Christmas unless I get home.”

2

Ten days after the fire a reporter asked if he might interview some of the patients at a hospital. A group of young girls, well on the road to recovery, said they would see him. And to him they confided that what had worried them most was the fear that their looks might have been ruined. But when their bandages had been removed, so wrote the reporter, they found that, thanks to a miraculous salve, their skin was clearer, prettier than before. Next day an international news bureau telephoned to the doctor in charge, saying they had just received a cable from London asking for the formula of that miraculous salve. “You tell them,” chuckled the doctor, “that it was either vaseline or boric acid ointment. Wait a minute, and I’ll make sure.” And he did. It was vaseline.

In the City Hospital, still dangerously ill, is a young coastguardman who piloted his girl out of the Grove and then three times went back into the fire to rescue others. The third time ho keeled over, and by the time the firemen reached him, he was terribly burned. A messenger from the Red Cross broke the news to his parents on their farm in Missouri. That farm had to be mortgaged before they could afford the trip to Boston. There they faced weeks of waiting. And they had no money. At last the old man went to the Red Cross: there was nothing else for him to do. The old couple were installed in a small housekeeping apartment not far from the hospital. Asked how much money they would need, the old lady said she could manage on seven dollars a week. When the money was proffered them, they couldn’t bring themselves to take it. They just sat, and the tears ran down their faces.

The old man said ruefully, “I remember at the time of the Mississippi floods, five years ago, listening on the radio to the bad troubles and thinking, thank God there’s a Red Cross to help these poor people in their great need. I sent a hundred dollars then. It was a lot for me. I never thought then that I’d be coming, myself, for help.”

The mother added, “We have five other children. They’ll all work until the last one dies, to pay back what we owe you.”

The days ran into weeks and at last the old man couldn’t stand it. He worked his way back home. Then the boy became worse and again he was sent for. He cashed his only war bond and came. Gradually the boy’s condition has improved. If he lives, he can probably go home next year. Lying on his stomach, supported at the chest and hips by piles of rubber mattresses, a wire cage over him to hold the bedclothes away from his blackened flesh, he is now taking an interest in everything. At Christmas the doctors clubbed together and gave him a radio. The nurses arranged a little party for the old mother.

To an Assistant Superintendent of Nurses it was a matter of routine that doctors and nurses, even the nurses’ aides, had stood the horror and strain of that first twenty-four hours. She was outspoken in her amazement, however, at the new evidence of the toughness and resilience of a human being. That these young survivors, some of them delirious for weeks, could summon the vitality and fortitude to keep on living against such odds moved her to wonder.

A social worker, speaking of a family bot h of whose breadwinners had been lost, remarked quietly, “Courage — well, I keep using the word for lack of any other. But it’s much more than courage. I just can’t find a word for it.”

As each survivor discovered in himself an unsuspected vitality to meet this terrible challenge, so it. seems as if the rest of us, separately yet in a body, asserted the positive will to live, to recuperate, to rehabilitate. The story of the young coastguardman, his family, his Christmas radio, his mother’s party, becomes not just the story of a few individuals but the revelation of a great heart.