Tall Tales, Fresh Snow, and Flying Elephants: Remembering the 1940 Rochester Circus Fire
Slightly different kind of blog. Today. I had written this several years ago for a genealogy and history site and I think it's a pretty good retelling of what happened on a February night in 1940 in Rochester, Indiana. When I was a boy, my grandfather and my great-uncle would sit on the front porch, spinning yarns about their youth and the historic moments that shaped our neighborhood. Their stories covered everything: Uncle Buck’s days mining in the Iron Mountain area of Michigan, his time working at the Kingsbury Ordnance Plant during the war, and Grandad McDougle’s romantic tales of courting Grandma in a surrey with bright yellow wheels. Both told me about the storm that passed a tornado less than 50 ft of the house and pointed out the path that was still evident in the trees across from the house. Sometimes their stories were benign. Other times, they grabbed a young boy's imagination and tore off down the street with it. Now, to be fair, both of them had a distinct prop...