The Cocoanut Grove Fire

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. We've gotten
a lot of requests over the years to do an
episode about the Coconut Grove nightclub fire, and I have

(00:24):
really really put off doing it because of all the
different types of disasters there are to research. For me,
the fires are the worst ones there. They're bad. Yeah,
they're bad. We can talk about reasons why on Friday
and the behind the scenes. But the Coconut Grove fire

(00:46):
came up not long ago on our episode on Charles
Ponzi because his wife Rose worked there. She went to
work there after he had been deported back to Italy,
but she was not at work that night, so I
thought about moving it onto the list. Then after it
had come up, and as I was looking at it,
I realized this year is the fires eightieth anniversary. It

(01:09):
happened on November. This is still the deadliest nightclub fire
in history, and in terms of single building fires, it
is the second deadliest in United States history. The deadliest
was the Iroquois Theater fire in Chicago that happened on
December nineteen oh three, and we covered that fire on

(01:32):
this show on December eight. As we will discuss, though,
there are a lot of lessons from the Iroquois Theater
fire that had not been heated at Coconut Grove almost
forty years later. Coconut Grove, often known just as the Grove,
was at seventeen Piedmont Street in Boston, Massachusetts, with an

(01:55):
entrance set behind a trio of archways. It's theme may
have been inspired by the Coconut Grove nightclub at the
Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. Boston's Coconut
Grove had opened in in what had previously been a
garage and warehouse. Over time, it had been built on
and expanded and remodeled and by The club had this

(02:19):
kind of odd, almost zigzag shape. The ground floor contained
the caricature bar as well as a full service restaurant.
The restaurant had a central dance floor with tables and
chairs on three sides of it and an orchestra stage
on the fourth. This area had a retractable roof that
could be opened in good weather, which I think sounds

(02:40):
very nice. This was November, though, so it was closed
the night of the fire. The ground floor also had
a newly opened lounge called the Broadway Lounge also just
called the New Lounge, that also had a bar in it.
There were also coat check rooms, restrooms, dressing rooms for
the entertainer, is, a telephone room, and a service bar.

(03:03):
So there was a lot of stuff packed into this
relatively small kind of zigzag shaped space. The basement of
the grove had only one public space, the Melody Lounge.
The rest of the basement house the furnace room, the kitchens,
with walking, cold storage and other storage spaces on both floors.
The club was decorated with lighted artificial palm trees, satiny

(03:26):
fabric draped from the ceiling and walls of stairs, and
the Melody Lounge had a satin covered ceiling and walls
covered in ratan bamboo and synthetic leather. Previously, the grove
had been owned by mob boss Charles Solomon, who was
known as King. Solomon was murdered at Boston's Cotton Club
in ninety three, and at that point his wife inherited

(03:49):
the grove. She gave it to their lawyer, Barnett Wolansky,
known as Barney in lieu of legal fees. When Solomon
owned it, the grove had kind of a seedy reputation
as a prohibition earirest speak easy but well Landski tried
to transform it into a more glamorous place that people
would want to come for dinner, drinks, dancing, and entertainment.

(04:13):
On the night of November, the grove was busy. It
was the Saturday after Thanksgiving. There had been a big
college football game earlier in the day between rivals Boston
College and Holy Cross College. Boston College was at the
end of an undefeated season and everyone expected them to
win and then be invited to play in the Sugar Bowl.

(04:35):
There was reportedly even a committee on hand to deliver
that invitation after the game, but surprise, Boston College lost
fifty five to twelve. That was an enormous upset. A
formal celebration had been planned at the grove, which was
canceled because of that loss, but a lot of people
made their way there after the game anyway. A party

(04:58):
that went on as planned that night was in honor
of actor Buck Jones. Jones was known for his work
in westerns. He had acting credits and more than a
hundred and fifty films, almost all of them Westerns. He
was on a tour promoting war bonds, and about thirty
people were at his party. A lot of them were
affiliated with Monogram Theater Group. Since this happened as the

(05:21):
United States was involved in World War Two, there were
also a lot of servicemen there. At about ten fifteen
that night, the grove was absolutely packed. The club's license
applications with the City of Boston specified that it had
four hundred chairs and thirty stools, although sources contradict about
what the club's maximum occupancy was. There are sources that

(05:44):
list both four hundred sixty and six hundred people. Regardless,
it's estimated that there were about a thousand people in
the building that night, so roughly twice the planned number. Downstairs,
in a corner of the mill the lounge, someone loosened
a light bulb in one of the artificial palm trees.

(06:05):
That corner was already pretty dimly lit, but this person
apparently wanted some more privacy with his date. The bartender
noticed this and told a bus boy to go fix
the bulb. Without that bulblet, it was too dark in
the corner to see, so the bus boy lit a match,
and then once he was done, he extinguished the match,

(06:25):
stomping it out on the floor with his foot. Very
soon after this, people noticed sparks in the vicinity of
this palm tree near the ceiling, but for a moment
there was not an obvious flame. But then the fire
spread very rapidly along the underside of the fabric draped
below the ceiling. It took somewhere between two and four

(06:47):
minutes for a very hot, fast moving fire to engulf
the melody lounge. The stairway out of the lounge, which
was narrow and steep, acted like a chimney, drawing the
fire and the heat up to the ground floor of
the building, where it burst into the foyer. The foyer
had a high, arched ceiling, and it similarly acted like

(07:08):
a chimney and pulled the fire into the rest of
the ground floor. The fabric draped walls and ceiling quickly
caught fire. Within about five minutes, the fire had moved
through the ground floor restaurant and into the New Broadway lounge.
When people noticed the flames, they panicked, and that panic
became much worse when the lights went out Just minutes

(07:29):
after the fire started, there were no emergency lights, and
the exits were not marked. Even if they had been.
Many of the doors were locked. People overturned tables and
punched and shoved one another as they fought to get
to an exit. And the exit the vast majority of
people were pushing for was the revolving door that they

(07:50):
used to enter the building that was quickly jammed with bodies.
As the fire burned through the oxygen and the melody lounge,
it left very hot, flammable gases that burst into flame
again when they got to the top of the stairs,
where there was more fresh air, and that meant people
who didn't make it up the stairs ahead of the

(08:11):
fire found those stairs blocked by flames. The same was
true for the buildings working doors to the outside. The
fire surged as it came into contact with the fresh air.
This included surging around the sides of the revolving door,
so the doors that were not locked became totally impassable.
They were blocked by bursts of flame and by bodies

(08:34):
stacked on top of one another. Together, all of this
was disastrous. Four hundred two people died. Official lists include
four nine names. One person who died in the hospital
is not included for reasons that are unclear. Another person
survived the fire but lost his wife, and he took

(08:56):
his own life at the hospital. There were also one
hundred sixties x reported injuries, but those are only the
people who were taken to the hospital. With an estimated
one thousand people in the building that night, that means
about half of the people who were there died. Only
one in four made it out without an injury bad
enough to send them to the hospital. Most of the

(09:17):
deaths were from burns, smoke annilation, or carbon monoxide poisoning,
but there were also deaths from crushing injuries or other
injuries sustained while trying to escape. We're going to take
a quick sponsor break, and then we'll talk about efforts
to put out the fire and the rescue efforts. The

(09:44):
Coconut Grove fire happened at a moment when Boston's fire
department and other emergency services were simultaneously reeling and also
well prepared for such an emergency. On November, less than
two weeks before the Coconut Grove fire, six firefighters had
been killed and about fifty others trapped or injured. After

(10:08):
a wall collapsed. The restaurant fire they had been fighting
had been brought under control, and the wall collapsed after
that part was basically finished. Then, the weekend before the
Coconut Grove fire, Boston had also conducted a civil defense drill.
This was a drill that simulated a blitzkrieg like attack

(10:29):
on the city with mass casualties. So while the fire
department and other people who had responded to that fire
were still really recovering from this earlier disaster, thousands of
people had also just practiced exactly what to do. Because
Boston is a major city on the US eastern Seaboard,
officials had been preparing for the possibility of an enemy attack.

(10:53):
In addition to the civil defense drill, area hospitals had
started establishing blood banks and stockpiling blood and plasma. Blood
banks were really a brand new innovation at this point.
That's something else that has been on Tracy's list for
a bit, so expect an episode on that fairly soon
as well. I am working on it right now. In fact,

(11:13):
at about ten fift PM on the night of the fire,
just as it was getting started in the Melody Lounge,
the Boston Fire Department responded to a signal from a
fire alarm box at the corner of Stewart and Carver Streets.
Carver Street is Charles Street today. M turned out to
be a vehicle fire, which they extinguished, but then firefighters

(11:35):
heard a commotion and noticed smoke coming from the direction
of coconut growth, which was not far away. As the
firefighters moved to investigate, they also ran into bystanders who
were calling for help. So, by total coincidence, the Boston
Fire Department was already there on the scene working to
bring the fire under control. Within minutes of its starting,

(11:57):
another bystander pulled the alarm at another fire department call box,
and at ten twenty three, roughly eight minutes after the
fire started, the fire chief on the scene ordered a
third alarm to be called. A fourth alarm followed almost
immediately at eleven o two. This became a five alarm fire.
Over that period, twenty five engine companies, five ladder companies,

(12:22):
a water tower, and a rescue company had all arrived,
along with other emergency responders. Other people soon on the
scene included Boston Mayor Maurice J. Tobin, the Fire Commissioner,
the Building Commissioner, the Police Commissioner and the Superintendent of Police,
the State Fire Marshal, Boston's acting Commissioner of Public Safety,

(12:44):
and the director of the Boston Committee on Public Safety
were all there as well. Civilian defense units arrived, as
well as people from the Red Cross and the Salvation Army.
The military was involved in the response as well. A
call went out to Boston Navy Yard at about ten pm,
and members of the Navy Army, Coast Guard, National Guard,

(13:05):
and the Naval Hospital in Chelsea, Massachusetts were all involved
in the response. And of course there were also many
civilians who came and tried to help, and we're not
affiliated with any specific group. By coincidence, the club's owner,
Barney Wolanski, was not present. He was at Massachusetts General
Hospital recovering from a heart attack he had experienced days before. Tragically,

(13:30):
it really did not matter how quickly the fire department
or any of these other responders got there. The fire
had just been much faster and people were already dead
and dying. In the words of Fire Commissioner William Arthur
Riley's official report quote, within two to five minutes of
the first appearance of the fire, most of the possible exits,
including all exits normally open to the public, were useless.

(13:54):
Pouring of fire through such exits made it impossible for
humans to pass simultaneously through these exits safely. In the
course of such pouring, the mass of burning gaseous material
appears to have been depressed from its high elevation within
the premises in order to pass through the exits. The
finding of bodies piled up at many of the exits

(14:16):
is attributable to this fact. These persons, in attempting to
pass through the exits, were overcome by the great heat
of the gaseous material pouring through them. At the same time,
to the same cause must be set down the bodies
found in the passageway in the corridor at the head
of the stairway leading from the melody Lounge. In pouring

(14:36):
through these low seed linked passageways, the mass of gaseous
material passed so close to such persons as to overcome them.
Most of the people who survived the fire had managed
to get out of the building before the flames reached
the doorways. A few people made it up to the roof.
Some of them jumped down onto the roofs of parked

(14:57):
cars below. While others found a adder, although this ladder
wasn't long enough to reach to the ground from the roof,
so the people on the roof were trying to hold
it up for people to climb down as far as
they could and then dropped to the ground from the
bottom of it. Once firefighters spotted people on the roof,
they moved in to help bring them down. A few

(15:18):
people got out through windows, but most of the windows
were glass block windows that just could not be opened
or broken. Coconut Grove employees and entertainers who knew the
layout of the building made their way out through the
kitchen or other non public areas, and some customers did
manage to follow them out. A few people survived by

(15:38):
hiding in one of the walk in refrigerators. Some in
the melody lounge survived by simply covering their faces with
a wet cloth and lying on the floor below the
flames until the fire was over and rescuers could get
into the building. Even though the city of Boston had
just been through a big drill about exactly such an

(15:59):
occurrence for spawning to a catastrophe of this size was
still really challenging. Many of the streets around the club
were small, Some of them were paved with cobblestones, and
they quickly became jammed with emergency vehicles and people, including bystanders,
people who needed emergency medical care, and the bodies of
people who had died. They're also simply were not enough

(16:22):
ambulances to carry so many people to hospitals. People were
transported to the hospital in delivery trucks, taxi cabs, basically
any other vehicle that could be used. Most of the
victims were taken to one of two hospitals, Boston City
Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital. Boston City Hospital received three

(16:45):
hundred victims of the fire over the course of only
an hour. Rescuers started sending more people to m g
H when it became clear that Boston City Hospital was overwhelmed,
and MGH received a hundred and fourteen people over the
course of about two hours. Much smaller numbers of people
were sent to hospitals elsewhere in Boston and in neighboring cities,

(17:06):
including Cambridge and Malden. At many of the hospitals, patients
started arriving around a shift change that meant that extra
people were already on hand, but the hospital still needed
help from other medical personnel all over the area beyond
the sheer numbers of patients. One of the challenges that
the hospitals faced was that the ratio of injured and

(17:28):
dead was very different from most major fires and other disasters. Often,
far more people are injured than are killed, but in
the Coconut Grove fire, far more people were killed than
were injured. The hospitals were receiving so many people who
were dead by the time they arrived, or who died

(17:49):
very shortly after arriving, that it created delays in treating
the people who were still living, whose injuries weren't fatal,
but who really did need to be treated as quickly
as possible. Eventually, a temporary morgue was set up in
a parking deck across the street from the grove to
try to reduce the number of dead who wound up
at the hospitals, but in a few cases, people who

(18:12):
were taken to the temporary morgue turned out to still
be alive. In many disasters like these, it takes a
long time to get a final death count, but in
the case of the Coconut Grove fire, that was established
very quickly, less than twelve hours after the fire, the
known death toll had already passed four hundred. What took
a lot longer was identifying the bodies. Many people had

(18:35):
died of asphyxiation or smoke in elation, and their clothing
was mostly intact, so anyone carrying their i d In
a wallet or in their pockets definitely identified fairly quickly,
But most people who had carried their i d In
a purse or in a handbag had lost it in
the scramble to escape, so in general, many women's bodies

(18:56):
took much longer to identify, especially before a responders set
up a centralized information hub. This led to problems at
the hospitals as people desperately tried to get information about
missing loved ones who had not yet been identified. The
people killed as a result of the fire included Buck Jones,
who died in the hospital two days later. Only one

(19:20):
of the people who had been at his party escaped uninjured,
and more than half died. Fifty one servicemen and two
members of the Women's Army Corps were killed, and another
twenty seven servicemen were injured. This was so many that
it raised suspicions that this had been an intentional act
of wartime sabotage, and that prompted the First Naval District

(19:41):
to conduct its own investigation into the fire. For a while,
this fire displaced World War Two on the front page
of Boston's newspapers and some of the newspapers in the region.
After another quick sponsor break, we're going to talk about
investigations into the fire's cause and its aftermath and some
of the advances that came about in the wake of

(20:02):
the fire. Like we said at the top of the show,
we're coming up on the eightieth anniversary of the Coconut
Grove fire, but we still don't know exactly how it
started or why it burned the way that it did.

(20:23):
It was an extremely hot and fast moving, deadly fire,
while also leaving sections of carpeting and decor and some
of the furniture essentially untouched. But immediately after the fire,
news reports in Boston placed the blame on one specific
person who still often comes up today, and that's the

(20:44):
bus boy who had let the match. That was Stanley Tomaschowski,
who was only sixteen. Stanley was an honors student at
Roxbury Middle School for Boys. His mother was seriously ill
and he was supplementing his father's in as a janitor
by working at the grove on busy weekends. While it

(21:05):
is clear that he did light a match, it is
not at all clear that that match started the fire.
This was an arrow when smoking indoors was a lot
more common, and businesses, including Coconut Grove, routinely handed out
matchbooks to customers, so this certainly was not the only
match lit in the lounge that night. Investigations also reveal

(21:27):
a lot of problems with the building's electrical wiring, and
its most recent electrical work had not been done by
a licensed electrician. It's possible that the act of loosening
and tightening that lightbulb had led to a spark that
ignited the fire, or that a spark came from one
of the blower units used to heat the lounge, or

(21:47):
some other source. Entirely. Boston Fire Commissioner William Arthur Riley
cleared Stanley of any blame in his official report, writing quote,
after a careful study of all the evidence, and in
an analysis of all the facts presented before me, I
am unable to find the conduct of this boy was
the cause of the fire. State Fire Marshal Stephen C.

(22:10):
Garrity came to the same conclusion quoted in is saying quote,
it is clear to me that he did not ignite
the palm tree in the Melody Lounge. The official report
on the fire described it as being of unknown origin,
but early news reports described Stanley as having unquestionably started

(22:30):
the fire, even though friends, teachers, and others came to
his defense, and later news reports walked this back. Stanley
and his family had to stay in a hotel under
police protection for months, and he continued to deal with
things like harassing phone calls and threats about it for
the rest of his life. He died in Even if

(22:53):
Stanley's match is what started the fire, he the bartender,
and other employees had immediately tried to extinguish it, and
none of them had anything to do with the factors
that made this fire so deadly. It's still not clear
at all exactly why it burned so hot and so fast.
One possibility is that there was a methyl chloride leak

(23:16):
from the club's air conditioners. Methyl chloride, also called chloro methane,
is a flammable gas that was used as a refrigerant.
Another possibility is that the asbestos tiles in the ceilings
had been held down with a flammable glue. A third
possibility is that there was just a lot of alcohol

(23:37):
present and a lot of flammable material had been used
as part of the furnishings and the decor. The design
of the building certainly played a role, with parts of
it essentially acting as chimneys. Vents over stages to allow
fires to escape upward and out of the building were
required by law, but they were not in place at
Coconut Grove. But one of the most critical actors and

(24:00):
the fires deadliness was the building's exits. The building had
six exits on the ground floor and three in the basement,
but out of these nine exits, only three of them
could be opened by the public. One door was equipped
with a panic bar that should have opened it to
the outside if somebody pressed on the bar, but that

(24:21):
bar had been disabled with a bolt. According to some sources,
the door was actually bolted shut. Into places like exactly
how this door was shut. There's a couple of different
accounts of a door out of the Broadway Lounge opened inwards,
so while some people were able to get out of
it at first, once it was shut, people were jammed

(24:41):
up against it and they couldn't get it open again.
One door had been bricked completely over. A lot of
people concluded that Barney Willlanski had locked and covered over
the doors to keep people from leaving without paying their bill,
although at least some of this might have gone back
to the nightclubs earlier time as a speakeasy, and the

(25:03):
fact that none of the exits were marked meant that
most people tried to escape by going out the way
they came in. As we said, that was through those
revolving doors onto Piedmont Street. Revolving doors were invented in
the eighteen eighties, and they're really useful for energy efficiency
and for cutting down on street noise inside a building,
but it was obvious from the beginning that they could

(25:24):
become blocked in an emergency like a fire. The National
Fire Protection Association already recommended that revolving doors be flanked
on either side with standard hinged doors, but at Coconut
Grove they were not, and the immediate aftermath of the fire,
all of Boston's nightclubs were closed for a week. The

(25:45):
use of revolving doors was temporarily banned. With revolving doors
removed from Boston City Hall just days after the fire.
Once the ban on revolving doors was lifted, they were
required to be installed with adjacent hinged doors, just the
configuration you usually see today. It also became clear that
this was not simply an issue of needing new and

(26:07):
better laws or fire codes, but that existing laws and
codes were not being enforced. Some of the exact same
problems at Coconut Grove had contributed to earlier fires. As
we said at the top of the show, the deadliest
single building fire in US history was the Iroquois Theater fire,
almost forty years before, and in many ways these fires

(26:29):
were extremely similar. Both buildings lacked emergency lighting, had exits
that were obscured and locked or that patrons couldn't get open,
lacked required sealing, ventilation over the stages, just on and on.
In both fires, rescuers had to remove piles of bodies
that were blocking doorways before they could get through them

(26:50):
to the people inside. Just a couple of days after
the Coconut Grow fire, Robert Moulton, technical secretary of the
National Fire Protection Association, was quoted in a press release
is saying, quote the Coconut Grove nightclub tragedy is clearly
due to gross violation of several fundamental principles of fire safety,

(27:10):
which had been demonstrated by years of experience in other fires,
and which should be known to everybody. In light of
all of this, people were outraged to learn that a
Boston fire captain had inspected Coconut Grove less than two
weeks before the fire and had found it to be safe.
Another source of outrage was rumors that Barney Wolanski had

(27:34):
bragged that he didn't need to follow the fire code
because the mayor was a friend of his. Mayor Tobin
denied that Welanski was getting any kind of special privileges,
but people really doubted that he would face any kind
of consequences for the fire. Welanski was Jewish, and a
lot of discussion about how much he was to blame
was also threaded through with anti semitism. A grand jury

(27:58):
indicted ten people on very as charges connected to the fire.
Fire Department Inspector Lieutenant Frank J. Lenney for neglect of
duty and as an accessory after the fact, Captain Joseph
Bucha Gross for neglecting to enforce fire laws, a designer
contractor and foreman, who had all worked on the nightclub,

(28:18):
were all indicted for conspiracy to violate building laws. Boston
City building inspector Theodore el Dratcher was indicted for failing
to report building law violations, including lack of sufficient exits,
and Barney Willanski and his brother James, who was in
charge of the club that night, were indicted for both
manslaughter and conspiracy to violate the building laws. But of

(28:43):
all these indictments, only Willanski was convicted. He was convicted
of nineteen counts of manslaughter and sentence to twelve to
fifteen years in prison. It was technically for each count
he had been convicted on, but they were going to
be served concurrently this trial. Commonwealth versus Welansky also said
a precedent that a person didn't have to be actively

(29:05):
behaving in a reckless or dangerous way, like personally starting
a fire to be considered guilty of manslaughter. Disregarding safety
standards that led to people's death or a failure to
act was enough. Wellanski served about four years of his sentence.
He was pardoned by Maurice Tobin, who had become governor

(29:25):
in Massachusetts. After developing terminal cancer, Wellansky died about nine
weeks after being released. Civil suits had been filed against
him after the fire, but he had almost no assets
to pay it with, so there was very little compensation
to survivors and the families of people who died. The
fire Commissioner's report made a series of recommendations to prevent

(29:48):
similar future tragedies. They included requiring automatic sprinklers, banning the
use of basements as places of assembly unless those basements
met specific requirement for safe exits, requiring aisle spaces around
restaurant tables which needed to be secured to the floor
so that they couldn't be overturned and become an obstacle

(30:09):
in an emergency, requiring illuminated exit signs and panic locks
at all doors, Banning decor that contained peroxyl in, which
is a flammable form of cellulose, and requiring basement rooms
that were used as places of assembly to have windows
that could open up automatically and draw off flames and
gases in the event of a fire. The National Fire

(30:33):
Protection Association also revised its safety codes in the wake
of this and other major fires. This code was originally
written to provide guidelines for contractors, builders, and building inspectors.
But after these fires in the nineteen forties, the National
Fire Protection Association also revised the way the code was
written so that its language could be used as the

(30:54):
basis for laws and official fire codes. That n f
p A doesn't have in horsement powers over the codes
that it recommends, that enforcement falls to governments. But a
lot of these things that made the Coconut Grow fire
so deadly are still issues today. For example, the fourth
deadliest nightclub fire in the US happens less than twenty

(31:18):
years ago. That was the Station nightclub fire in Rhode Island,
which started when stage pyrotechnics ignited flammable acoustic foam. A
hundred people died and more than two hundred were injured,
and various fire codes had not been followed that included
a requirement for sprinklers to be installed in buildings with
an occupancy of more than a hundred people. In addition

(31:42):
to its impact on things like fire codes, the Coconut
Grow fire led to advances in the treatment of burns
and respiratory injuries sustained in fires. This research was already
underway due to World War Two. The fires that occurred
during attacks like the Blitz and the bombing of Pearl
Harbor to large numbers of people sustaining serious burns. The

(32:03):
National Research Council had been funding research through Harvard Medical School,
which was being carried out in conjunction with Massachusetts General
Hospital and Boston General Hospital. At the time, serious burns
were often treated using a process known as tanning, using
either a combination of three antimicrobial dyes or tannic acid.

(32:27):
Both of these methods required the burns to be heavily
dibrided and scrubbed. That was often done under anesthesia because
it was just so painful, and because of the war,
anesthesia was in short supply, so people had already been
trying to find other ways to successfully treat burns. Dr
Oliver Cope at MGH had developed a burn treatment protocol

(32:49):
that involved a boric acid ointment and wraps that were
infused with petroleum jelly that could be used without so
much debridement. Boston City High Hospital, which is part of
Boston Medical Center today, they started out treating victims of
the Coconut Grove fire with either the triple die or
tanic acid methods, but they phased those out in favor

(33:11):
of a boric acid protocol that was similar to what
Coke was using at MGH. Doctors in both hospitals also
made advances in figuring out when and whether antibiotics were
helpful in treating burns. SOLFA drugs were commonly used in
burn treatments, and at m g H they were part
of initial treatments for all burned patients. Penicillin was also

(33:33):
brand new at this point, when nearly all of it
being used for the military. Some of it was diverted
into Boston to treat people who had survived the fire,
which was one of the earliest uses of penicillin in
the United States outside of clinical trials. Doctors found that
antibiotics made the most difference in patients with full thickness burns,

(33:53):
but were often unnecessary and patients whose burns were not
as deep as long as an infection was not introduced
into the wound. Yeah, maintaining a sterile area was really
important for that. As we said earlier, blood banks were
fairly new. The one at MGH had just been established
that same year, and m g H had two units

(34:15):
of dried plasma on hand in the event of some
kind of wartime need in Boston, Prior to this point,
a lot of medical experts had been cautious about giving
a lot of fluids to burn patients. There were concerns
that doing so might lead them to develop pulmonary edema.
It became clear, though, through treating all of these patients,

(34:36):
that fluid therapies really helped patients heal without causing pulmonary edema.
Through treating the victims of the Coconut grove fire, doctors
also gained a much greater understanding of how often a
burn patient's biggest issue was a respiratory injury rather than
the burns on their skin. Many people arrived at the

(34:57):
hospital in serious condition but did not outwardly appear injured.
Some even walked into the hospital under their own power,
but then collapsed after getting there. Some had clear signs
of carbon monoxide poisoning, but others had respiratory damage from
inhaling hot toxic gases and smoke. People whose noses and

(35:18):
mouths were burned, or who had lost consciousness inside the
building seemed to be at the greatest risk. This is
not even everything. For example, the entire June volume of
Annals of Surgery was devoted to developments made at m
g H while treating victims of the Coconut growth fire.
The forward to this issue of the journal was written

(35:40):
by Dr Oliver Cope, and papers in it covered topics
like protocols, shock pulmonary complications, resuscitating people whose airways were burned,
surface burned treatments, infections and antibiotics, rehabilitation and physical therapy,
and hospital administration issues. And article on neuropsychiatric observations was

(36:02):
authored by Dr Stanley Cobb and Eric Lindeman. Cobb was
a neurologist who helped establish a department of psychiatry at
m GH, and some of his work focused on the
connection between the mind and the body. Lindemann was a
psychiatrist whose focus was on bereavement and grief. They described
patients whose recoveries were impacted by a state of acute

(36:25):
grief and trauma, including an early description of what would
come to be known as post traumatic stress disorder. This
research also became part of Lindeman's nineteen forty four paper
Symptomatology and Management of Acute Grief. The Dr Lindeman especially
did a lot of work on trauma and grief and
became really groundbreaking with a lot of that. The area

(36:47):
where Coconut Grove used to be is really different now
than it was in ninety two. Various streets have been
renamed or moved. There's a hotel and condos where the
nightclub used to be. And nine three, the Bay Village
Neighborhood Association installed a memorial plaque made by fire survivor
Anthony P. Mara on Piedmont Street at the approximate site

(37:10):
of where the revolving door had been. In Shawmant Street extension,
which connected Shawmant Street with Piedmont Street was renamed Coconut
Grove Lane. In the memorial plaque was removed so the
condos could be built, with the agreement that it be
returned to its original location after construction was done. Instead,

(37:31):
the plaque was moved farther down the street. Condo owners
wrote to the Bay Village Neighborhood Association saying, quote, only
a small portion of our building overlays the site of
the club. We now occupy these homes with our families
as part of the Bay Village Neighborhood and would like
to enjoy our homes in peace without tragic memories hanging

(37:52):
reaths at our doors and tourists peaking into our houses.
People were very upset with a sense that rich people
buying three condos were putting their feelings over the memory
of victims and survivors and their descendants. I found one
article that interpreted this as the correct decision, and many
others by people who either were livid about it, or

(38:15):
like reporters trying to sound neutral, who clearly we're also
livid about it. The Coconut Grove Memorial Committee is a
nonprofit that was established in to try to establish an
actual memorial for the victims of the Coconut Grove fire,
as well as to survivors, first responders, and medical professionals,

(38:38):
rather than only having this plaque in one The Boston
City Council awarded two fifty thousand dollars in Community Preservation
Act funds for a memorial at Statler Park, which is
a small park that's not far away from where the
night club was. The current proposed design for this memorial
involves a set of three archways to resemble that arch

(39:00):
entryway into Coconut Grove. A documentary called Six Locked Doors
played at various film festivals in twenty nineteen. It's been
aired on various PBS stations around the region since then.
As of when we're recording this, there are two known
survivors of the fire who were still living. Both of
them were only eighteen when the fire happened, So that

(39:23):
as a Coconut Grove nightclub fire, that's a rough one.
Do you have some listener may I do? This is
from Jen and Jen wrote about um our Helen Duncan episode,
and Jen said, Dear Holly and Tracy, I adore your
show and hearing about people, places and events that are
new to me, as it broadens my knowledge and provides

(39:44):
context for so many modern events that I would otherwise lack.
Thank you for making the past present. I also like
it when a story touches closer to home, and your
recent episode about Helen Duncan is one such episode. As
a friend of mine met Helen Duncan. Jen goes on
to talk a little bit about how this friend is
in their later years at this point, at least in

(40:05):
at least in his eighties, and they know one another
from church. A few years ago. I was talking to
my friend and we got onto the subject of Helen Duncan.
He then gestured for me to lean in and whispered
that when he was sixteen he had been to a
seance by Helen Duncan. He was taken by his minister.
At the time. This was a big taboo within Presbyterianism,

(40:28):
which is why he whispered it, as even today he
didn't want other members of the church to know in
case they disapproved. Despite it now being no big deal.
It's also why I'm not naming him. He talked about
how she strode across the stage like a tiger. I
asked him if he thought she was genuine, knowing the
fact that she was convicted for being a false medium,

(40:50):
and without any hesitation, he proclaimed that she was the
real deal. He was convinced that night that she contacted
the deads picking up on the favorite color flower of
that one person had in their garden, and the smell
of pigs from some people visiting Edinburgh from an outside
village who kept pigs at their place. It was fascinating
to think an old friend of mine met and engaged

(41:12):
with such a famous historical figure, and to hear his
experience of one of her seances. These things are not
as far in the past as we might think, and
these personal connections to the subjects of the podcast are
still alive and thriving. Jen then asked if it was
okay to Um to burn a copy of the episode
onto a CD for her friends to listen to, because

(41:32):
he does not really know how to do podcasts. Uh.
If you if you want to burn an episode of
a podcast onto a CD for your own personal use,
that is generally fine. UM and Jen also sent some
really great pictures of a cat named Tibby Tippy You
Jenn was not able to see for a really long time,
as as things as travel was not happening during the pandemic. UM,

(41:55):
So thank you so much Jen for sending this. I
wanted to read it because one of the things Jen notes,
and the part of this that I kind of skimmed over,
is that Presbyterianism today is a lot more progressive than
it was in the nineteen forties when we talked in
that episode about how there had been one account that
said that Helen Duncan's parents said she was going to

(42:18):
be burned in the steak if she kept doing this
talking to spirits Um. They had said specifically that it
was because they were Presbyterian, And I just wasn't able
to really confirm whether that was the case, and so
I did not get into that particular detail, but the
fact that it came back up again in this um,
in this email, uh made me want to read it also. UM,

(42:40):
I hope Jen's friend is not disappointed in the episode,
since we made it clear in the episode that a
lot of the stuff she was doing with manifestations was
pretty easily pointed at as like not not the real thing.
But we also said in the behind the scenes that like,
we don't know if she felt she was she really
truly sincerely felt she was speaking to spirits or not,

(43:01):
or if well we really know. So thank you again,
Jim for this note and for the cap picture and
for giving us a chance to read this. If you
would like to send us a note about this or
any other podcast, where a history podcast at I heart
radio dot com. We're also all over social media at
miss in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter,

(43:22):
Pinterson Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on
the I heart Radio app and wherever else you'd like
to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class
is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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