Mobile Edition
Print
Get the Mag
Weekly Updates"I always thought of her as 'the Irish lady,"' Weiss says. Dutifully, she had no intention of leaving her register and later would become a victim to the intensifying fumes in the basement.
In a flurry of anxious talk, it was unclear as to why these people remained huddled and were not making an effort to leave. Weiss took the initiative and headed for the kitchen stairs that served the main dining room, wondering if the people up in the club had any idea what had happened in the Melody Lounge.
"I got halfway up the stairs, and then it hit me like an inferno--the heat upstairs was unbearable," Weiss says.
It had never occurred to him that the rest of the Cocoanut Grove was now experiencing on a much greater scale the same disaster suffered in the Melody Lounge. Before retreating, he recalled once again hearing screaming, crashing of furniture, and the crescendo of the fire itself.
Remembering the service stairs beyond the furnace room on the other side of the kitchen, Weiss convinced the fearful and hesitating group to follow him through the darkened passageways. These stairs led to the service rooms behind the main dining room stage, and then directly out to Shawmut Street. But as the group apprehensively came through the storage room, they opened the door to the furnace room and were hit by the warm air and soft light from the club's boiler plant. As one woman screamed, another yelled, "He's leading us into the fire!" and the group broke ranks in a panic, retreating to the kitchen.
Once again they were all in the kitchen and he pleaded with the group. Smoke was now curling around the light bulb. This time, clinging to the security of the kitchen, none would follow him and Weiss could only promise that he would send help.
As he came to the top of the service stairs, he found himself exiting among gasping survivors who were somehow still stumbling out of the upstairs part of the club. The scene on Shawmut Street was chaotic. People were running everywhere: firemen, policemen, servicemen and civilians. There was shouting, screaming and sirens. Singed survivors stumbled around in a daze, and everywhere there were bodies, tossed about like rag dolls.
Once outside, Weiss cried out that others were trapped in the basement. Firefighters were now entering the building in numbers and for him try and re-enter the club was clearly impossible. He drifted about on Shawmut Street in a stunned daze, becoming oblivious to the maddening scene. Not sure what to do, he realized his family would be worried so he wandered over to the nearby Rio Casino, owned by his Uncle Jimmy. He was happy to find that some of the Grove's help and entertainers had also ventured over to the Rio Casino.
As expected, Weiss's frantic parents were greatly relieved to receive his phone call. Immediately, they rushed to meet him. Daniel's father was himself a doctor, and upon seeing blood on Daniel's neck insisted on going to Boston City Hospital.
The scene at City Hospital, which had received the majority of the victims, was like a war zone. People were everywhere. Over 300 casualties were received over a period of a little more than one hour. It was calculated that one Grove victim arrived at Boston City Hospital every 11 seconds over a 75 minute period, ranking this as one of the highest hospital admittance rates ever.
On Sunday, the day after the fire, the police secured the area around the Cocoanut Grove. None of the people who were in the Grove during the disaster would see the inside of the building again, except for the few public officials who were in the Grove when the fire broke out, like Civil Defense Director John Walsh who escaped out the Shawmut Street exit--and Daniel Weiss.
On Sunday afternoon, Weiss was allowed to pass through police lines with an escort to assist in securing the money located in Cocoanut Grove's cash registers. The building was gutted, with everything black and broken and sad, Weiss says. Furniture was upended and scattered everywhere. Below, the Melody Lounge was eerie and water logged.
"I was only doing my duty, it was not necessarily strange. The magnitude of the event was not fully known, I'm not sure I fully realized the extent of what had happened at the time," Weiss says, who recalls the moment with a multitude of emotions.
While the building was heavily damaged and first assaulted his senses as a blackened hulk, he noticed how the fire damage in many places was strangely limited to the upper portions of the facility. In the Melody Lounge much of the bar appeared to be untouched. Even in the main dining room the fire damage seemed to be confined to the upper reaches. A hole was in the dining room ceiling and the wall and plate glass windows on both sides of the room had been smashed through, letting in the day's sunlight.
Dr. Daniel Weiss became a well-known psychiatrist. Highly respected in his field, he often served as an expert witness in major court cases. Occasionally, he still gets calls from people asking if he knows what happened to a certain individual.
"I could hardly keep track of myself!" says Weiss. "The only person I ever kept in touch with through the years was a fellow nicknamed 'tar baby'. He was the other bartender working in the Melody Lounge."
A report by Dr. John W. Powell, a Maryland psychiatrist, studied many aspects of the Grove fire and classed it as one of the rare instances of true panic in this century.
"I'm not directly familiar with Powell's report on the Grove fire, but it indeed was one of the rare instances of true panic in the twentieth century," says Weiss.
"Certainly, at the time I had no idea that it would be such a prominent historical event," he says.
The Firefighter
George "Red" Graney reported to work on Saturday evening, November 28, 1942. Graney had been on the Boston Fire Department for five years and at the time was assigned to Engine Company 35. This company was located in the old firehouse on Broadway by Warrenton Street, near the Don Boston High School along with Engine 26, Rescue 1, Water Tower 2 and District Chief 5.
In many ways, Saturday night began like any other, but the mood was still somber in the firehouses throughout Boston. Just two weeks prior, six firefighters were killed at a major fire in Maverick Square in East Boston. Graney had also worked on that Saturday evening and Engine 35 had responded to the fire on the fourth alarm. Just after they had arrived at the scene the building came down. Ladder 8 was in front of the building and was crushed by the debris. Ladder 8 was known as the white elephant, so named because it was too big to maneuver in Boston's small streets and was painted white instead of the traditional fire engine red. As bad as this tragedy was, it would soon become overshadowed by a calamity of greater proportions.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
At 10:15 p.m. an alarm box had begun to sound: one. .. five. .. one. .. four. Fifteen-fourteen; Stewart and Carver Streets, South End. This was a border line call on two districts. The firehouse was only a short distance away and the apparatus arrived in very short time to find an automobile fire. The rear seats of the car were aflame and someone had pulled the street box. Graney and the others on Engine 35 immediately went to work by pulling the seats out of the rear of the car and throwing them onto the sidewalk. The booster hose from Engine 35 was then used to quickly extinguish the small fire.
Once the fire was extinguished, Graney and fellow firefighter Arnie Snell were loading the booster hose back on the reel. Hearing a commotion the firefighters turned around at which point one of them exclaimed, "Hey look, there's another one around the corner." With the hose now back on the pumper, they immediately backed around and drove over to the Broadway Street side of the Cocoanut Grove parking, right in front of the door to the new lounge.
People were running everywhere. Smoke was pouring out the Broadway Street door of the new lounge as screams pierced the air. District Fire Chief Daniel Crowley who had also responded to the car fire had seen enough upon arrival. He immediately ordered one of the firefighters to get to nearby box fifteen-twenty-one and skip the second alarm and sound a third. This was received at Boston Fire Alarm Headquarters at 10:23 p.m. One minute later at 10:24 p.m, Chief Crowley ordered a fourth alarm be sounded for what would eventually be a five-alarm fire.
Engine Company 35 was a two-piece engine company with a hose wagon and a pumper. The pumper was driven and operated alone by Paul Rodd. On the wagon along with Graney were Arnie Snell, Web by Mansour and Captain Jerry "Haddock-Ears" Cronin. The apparatus was able to pull up on Broadway Street right in front of the building. Rescue 1 followed them, but had trouble maneuvering between parked cars.
Graney went to grab the hose from the pumper as Paul Rodd yelled to bring a hose-line to the nearby high-pressure fire hydrant. This section of Boston has highpressure fire hydrants that can be used directly and don't require a pumper. Then Graney noticed the firefighters running away from the fire apparatus. As he lugged the hose the entire side of the building suddenly lit up, he saw what the other firefighters had run to. Inside the door at the corner of Broadway and Shawmut was a man stumbling out in a sheet of flames.
By tremendous good fortune, the fire department had gained a significant time advantage by virtue of coming upon the scene with their equipment. Yet because of the swiftness of the Grove fire, much of this advantage was lost. By the time the men had been able to even approach the club, it was ablaze from the Melody Lounge all the way out to the Broadway exit.
FEED