The Deadliest Blaze in American History
Survivors of the deadliest nightclub fire in US history gathered on Saturday with families of the victims killed in the decades-old Boston blaze to share their stories of how they escaped the horror of the blaze.
Tuesday will mark the 75th anniversary of the November 28, 1942, fire at the former Cocoanut Grove club that claimed the lives of 492 people. An estimated 1,000 people were in the building at the time.
Two survivors, Joyce S. Mekelburg, 93, of Brockton, and Marshall Cole, 92, who escaped the blaze joined former Boston Mayor Raymond Flynn and others at the Revere Hotel on Saturday afternoon.
Mekelburg and Cole are two of eight living survivors from the tragedy.
Mekelburg, then 18, went to the nightspot with her fiance, Justin Morgan, according to the Boston Globe. She said a man lit a match to change a light bulb before flames broke out.
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Morgan told her to leave and promised to meet her outside, she said, but he didn’t make it.
‘Everybody around me was screaming and crawling,’ she said. ‘Nobody knew where to go or how to go and everybody was crawling in a different direction.’
Cole, who was a tap dancer at the club, told the Globe that he was waiting for his second performance of the night when the fire broke out.
‘The place was just mobbed. It was standing-room only,’ he said, adding that because of the crowd he waited in his dressing room.
‘And that saved my life because I would have been in the Melody Lounge.’
A documentary about the fire, ‘Six Locked Doors,’ premiered at the Saturday afternoon event on Stuart Street, where the nightclub was located.
The film features accounts from the survivors. The fire at what had been one of Boston’s foremost nightspots led to new requirements for sprinkler systems and exits.
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