by My daughter Sara is 13, and doing a school project on the Ringling
Brothers, Barnum and Bailey circus fire in Hartford Connecticut back in
1944. So, Carol and I drove her up from C***tesville to Hartford
this last weekend to see the site, the initial gravesite of little Miss
1565, the Armory, and anything else we could find.
It was terrific. We met a nice guy in Windsor who was 15 in 1944
and had cut his way out of the burning tent with a boy scout pocket
knife. He then helped another kid out of the tent, ran to the nearest
pay phone, and called his mother who just about fainted. She was a
single mom, a Bell Telephone switch board operator who had heard the
circus was burning down. He hadn't wanted to go, but she had nudged him
anyway.
"After that I took the bus home as fast as I could," he said. "I
just felt it was not the place to be."
This last Saturday was the first time he'd ever talked about it to
just about anyone.
Carol, myself, Sara and our cousins were at the home of this
person's relative, a gentleman who had gone off to the war and came
back to work at Pratt and Whitney as a machinist. Eventually he founded
a small machine shop devoted to making engine parts. "We specialized
in the hot section of jet engines," he told me. "The metals were
difficult to machine. We had to pioneer techniques like EDM back in the
1960s because the metal was so tough."
Well, this person and I hit it off, you betcha. I think he started
out in his garage, and ended up retiring with something like 250
employees. Actually, I don't know that he and I hit it off so much as
he is an extremely polite man and very generous with his time to
everyone. I wondered to myself if I'd stepped into an Ayn Rand novel...
I promised to send him the HSM book on rolling your own EDM.
I'll never hit the lottery, but if I did, I'd spend most of my
life just trying to listen to some of these people who spent their
lives doing the best they knew how, and never, ever thinking of
themselves as heroes or exceptional in any way. They just learned and
did as fast as they could.
It reminds me of something an older actress once told me about
*** out with Laurel and Hardy. "They didn't know they were good, no
one had done it before," she said. "They just did it. Nowadays you'd
have a camera on them all the time, but back then, they just did it
whether the camera was rolling or not."
Chas Morrill