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Erika Mailman @erikamailman.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

Thank you for sharing! If you're reading this, please repost as well! We really want to find this family for Don.

Erika Mailman @erikamailman.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

If you have family members who have spoken about being at the fire that day and lived nearby, a boy and girl with two parents, contact me ASAP at erika//"at"//erikamailman.com (trying to foil the scrapers to avoid spam, so the //"at"// part would just be @). #circusfire #hartford #history 19/19

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Erika Mailman @erikamailman.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

In this era before credit cards existed, a family would simply step up to a payment kiosk and buy tickets with cash, making it hard to trace how many people were at the circus that day—and exactly who they were. 18/19

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Erika Mailman @erikamailman.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

They lived walking distance from the Barbour Street circus grounds, in an easterly direction. Since they escaped the fire without injury, they wouldn’t have filed for financial relief from the circus, and their surname is probably not in official records. 17/19

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Erika Mailman @erikamailman.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

The couple has surely passed, but Don remembers their two children, a boy and a girl around his age. He thinks that they lived on the bottom floor of a two-story duplex, either an apartment or a house. He recalls a backyard. The family was white and middle class. 16/19

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Erika Mailman @erikamailman.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

Asking Don about such an agonizing turning point in his life, I did find one minor element that I hoped I could help him with. It doesn’t undo any of the trauma he endured, but it would feel good to bring closure to one element: being reunited with the family that took him home that day. 15/19

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Erika Mailman @erikamailman.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

No DNA testing was conducted, but Don feels relatively certain that the identification is correct. After so long, he is able to laugh at some details while recounting memories of that day. He and Miriam Howland, best friend to Eleanor, affectionately recall the driving “speed” of Ted Parsons. 14/19

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Erika Mailman @erikamailman.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

And Eleanor, who had been climbing up the bleachers with Don until he was told to release her? She was reported missing. In 1991—almost 50 years later— an unclaimed body known as Little Miss 1565 was exhumed from Hartford and brought to Southampton to be buried next to Edward, as Eleanor Cook. 13/19

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Erika Mailman @erikamailman.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

Don and Ted went to the hospital where they saw Mildred and Don’s younger brother Edward. Mildred was hospitalized over a period of months, part of that time in a coma, with burns over 80 percent of her body. Edward died the next day, July 7, and was buried in Southampton. 12/19

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Erika Mailman @erikamailman.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

As soon as he heard the news, Ted drove to Hartford from Southampton, MA, and reunited with Don after darkness had fallen. It was a two hour drive before the interstate was built. Don recalls climbing the fire escape to get into his mother’s apartment because the keys were lost in the fire. 11/19

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Erika Mailman @erikamailman.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

Don’s mother Mildred Parsons Cook was living alone in Hartford and had invited her children down for a few days for a special treat, to see the circus. She had left Don’s alcoholic father in an attempt to improve life for her family. 10/19

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Erika Mailman @erikamailman.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

Through phone calls to the central clearing house for victims, Don was reunited with his Uncle Ted Parsons. Ted, along with his wife Marion, was Don’s legal guardian and had cared for him and his siblings since he was three or four years old. 9/19

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Erika Mailman @erikamailman.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

“After I was able to get out of the tent, I didn’t have anybody else, so they took me back to their place and had supper,” Don said. What a strange meal that must have been, all of them still smelling of smoke and traumatized by the screams they'd heard. 8/19

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Erika Mailman @erikamailman.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

Outside the tent, a family, strangers to him, helped Don look for his family, then offered to take him home. “They were good. They helped me a little bit, then said, ‘We’ll take you home and report that we’ve got you,’” Don says. 7/19

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Erika Mailman @erikamailman.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

In this war year, the circus was attended by mostly women and children. One exit was essentially blocked by tunnels that had ushered performing wildcats into the tent. 167 people died, and more than 700 were injured: burned or trampled in the craze of 8,000 people trying to exit at once. 6/19

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Erika Mailman @erikamailman.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

As Don stood outside the tent he’d escaped, the big top collapsed, flaring down to the ground and trapping hundreds still inside. Rainproofed in a mixture of gasoline and paraffin, the tent’s ceiling torched in mere minutes. It took 8 minutes from the first shout of fire to the big top falling 5/19

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Erika Mailman @erikamailman.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

Don and I are relatives, second cousins once removed. I’m writing a book about the fire, but right now, my deepest desire is to reunite Don with the family that helped him that day 77 years ago, stranded and alone. Don is now in his 80s and time is short. 4/19

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Erika Mailman @erikamailman.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

His instincts served him well. He avoided the crush of people pressing towards the main exit/entrance. When he reached the top of the bleachers, he climbed down the side braces, reached the ground and went under the tent wall to safety. “I found where it wasn’t tied down to the ground,” he says 3/19

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Erika Mailman @erikamailman.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

Only minutes ago he had released Eleanor’s hand at his mother’s bidding and climbed up the grandstands while his family walked down. He is a survivor of the Hartford Circus Fire, one of the worst fire disasters in U.S. history. 2/19

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Erika Mailman @erikamailman.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

On July 6, 1944, my relative Donald Cook, 9, wandered around outside the remains of the burned big top. He was looking for his mother Mildred Cook and his two younger siblings, Edward & Eleanor. Long post, but it's so important. Time is of the essence; please share widely. #circusfire #hartford 1/19

Three children sitting in order of height in the 1940, each dressed in a German suspender outfit with Peter Pan collar.

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Erika Mailman @erikamailman.bsky.social · 17/07/2025

I put it on my calendar - please alert me when tickets go on sale!!! I'm so excited. Congratulations, Kristy!

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Reposted by Erika Mailman

Jennifer Billock @jenniferbillock.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

I found this a bit comforting. statuskuo.substack.com/p/is-somebod...

statuskuo.substack.com

Is Somebody Doing Something?!

Yes. Let me break it down for you.

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Erika Mailman @erikamailman.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Glad to know you got a Tonga Room trip in - it IS a trip! 😜

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Erika Mailman @erikamailman.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

After about two decades, I returned to the Tonga Room (actually on the same date that Anthony Bourdain visited back in 2012, I learned). It is a tiki thunderstorm of a place! Adore and thoroughly recommend. I will NOT let even a few years pass by again. #TongaRoom www.timeout.com/usa/news/thi...

timeout.com

This legendary tiki space in San Francisco has thunderstorms and rain

And the band floats around on a boat on the lagoon.

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Erika Mailman @erikamailman.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Yay! I'll be glad to meet you there!

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Erika Mailman @erikamailman.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

"That's pretty good for a girl" [seventh grade shop class]

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Erika Mailman @erikamailman.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

I love this Black-owned, woman-owned business in Oakland doing sustainable work to keep mannequins out of the grinder, literally: www.timeout.com/san-francisc... . . . #MannequinMadnes #Mannequin #Holiday #Gift #Christmas #Hanukkah #Kwanzaa #Oakland #BlackBusiness #WomanOwned #Quirky #kitsch

timeout.com

Need a kitschy gift idea? Mannequin Madness is your answer.

Put a “butt” in a stocking.

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Erika Mailman @erikamailman.bsky.social · 16/11/2024

Visited the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Home & the Nat'l Women's Rights Historical Park in New York. If her name isn't familiar, we have her & others to thank for FIGHTING for women to be able to vote in our country. Closed for the season but we peered through windows and sat a spell to rock on the porch

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Reposted by Erika Mailman

Bluesky @bsky.app · 15/11/2024

it's official — 1,000,000 people have joined Bluesky in just the last day!!! welcome and thank you for being here 🥳

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Erika Mailman @erikamailman.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

In the department of silly things, today I was thinking about how odd the word "grownups" is: a childish (ironically) combination of words to get to a noun that illustrates some sort of achievement. If I add a mental breath between grown and up ("She's a grown up") it seems even sillier.

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Erika Mailman @erikamailman.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

Fascinating! Sounds like a good topic for an essay. I'm personally gunning for a elementary school production of Macbeth. 😜

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Erika Mailman @erikamailman.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

The best Shakespearean play I ever saw was Hamlet played by a teenager in a black hoodie in a cellar theater in Berkeley. Amazing. He was perfectly angsty and all the things you said above are true. #ShotgunPlayers #Hamlet

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Erika Mailman @erikamailman.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

Hello, 1st post. I'm a journalist (Time Out, WashPost, WSJ, others) and author (best known book is not well known, The Witch's Trinity). Three days after the election, I visited the Women's Rights National Historical Park and sat in a rocking chair on Elizabeth Cady Stanton's porch. Lots to digest.

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