EIGHT 
Night, January 15, 1919—The Haymarket Relief Station
Veronica Barry clutched her sister Mary’s arm as the two women left the chaotic hallways of the Haymarket Relief Station and slipped into the quiet dimness of their father’s room. John Barry lay motionless in his bed, moaning softly, a single lightbulb near his head casting a pale yellow glow across his upper body. His two daughters inched closer, Mary leading, Veronica at her elbow as they reached the foot of the bed. Veronica heard her sister gasp, “Father! What … ?” and she felt Mary go limp against her, nearly falling to the floor, before Veronica caught her under her arms. Veronica dragged Mary to a chair next to the bed, propped her up, lifted her head, gently slapped her face. “Mary, Mary, wake up, please wake up,” she said. Mary groaned, her eyes fluttered open, she looked at her sister in horror.
“Mary, what is it? What’s wrong?” Veronica asked.
“Is it father?” Mary asked. “Is it father? Look at him. I don’t know him.”
Veronica swung around then, gazed at her father, so she could see what Mary had seen, though a part of her was afraid to look. It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the pale light, but within a moment, as she moved closer to her injured father, she saw what had shocked her sister’s system.
John Barry’s upper torso was uncovered. His neck, shoulders, and chest were black from severe bruising, his abdomen and arms covered with lacerations. He looked as though he had been beaten repeatedly. The horrible extent of these injuries made her despair about what she could not see beneath the sheets; she knew from the doctor that her father’s legs and back were badly damaged. Veronica looked at her father’s face, now drawn and haggard. And his hair, which had been dark brown when he left the house early this morning, had turned snowy white. The strong fifty-six-year-old stonecutter looked like a broken seventy-six-year-old man, lying helplessly in the bed.
Her father moaned, stirred slightly, but did not waken. Veronica stared at him, the man who had become a stranger since morning—his disfigured body, his aged face, his white hair. She knew rescuers had pulled her father from under the firehouse, but that didn’t seem to tell the whole story.
“What happened under there?” she whispered, tears welling in her eyes.
Neither Kittie Callahan nor her cousin, Mary Doherty, could ever remember seeing John Callahan cry. Now, though, tears streamed down John’s face, as the forty-three-year-old paver for the City of Boston writhed in pain from a fractured pelvis. Molasses streaked his face and congealed around his mouth. The black liquid spilled onto the pillow beneath his head, and his wife, Kittie, could see that his hair was saturated with molasses.
“I need water to wash the molasses off,” John Callahan whispered. “Please wash me off.” As Mary Doherty moved to leave the room and get water, John said, “No, please, I want Kittie to go.”
With his wife out of the room, John motioned Mary Doherty closer. “I am in terrible agony,” he said, “in my ribs and my body. I feel like I am all squashed. I don’t think I will make it. I don’t want her to know right now. She needs to be strong for little John.”
“John, what happened?” Mary asked.
“I was reading a paper before lunch when the tank burst. It came on me like a wave at the sea. It crushed me and pinned me to the ground. I was buried in six feet of molasses. I was able to clear my mouth and find an air pocket and scream. Firefighters dug me out. They brought me here. I had $10 and a set of rosary beads when they brought me in. Promise me that Kittie will get them.”
“But, John, they may be able to do something.”
“No. I am feeling terribly—I can’t stand the suffering much longer. I’m sinking fast. Now promise you’ll take care of Kittie.”
“I promise, John,” Mary Doherty said.
Twenty-one-year-old Ralph W. Martin, a teamster and driver for Dolan Meats and Provision, was hanging practically upside down when his mother and father, Catherine and Michael, visited him at the relief station. Firefighters had unearthed Ralph from beneath a pile of debris at the wharf. Now, rigged up in a traction device called a Bradford Frame, his feet were high in the air, held fast by ropes and pulleys, and his bandaged head rested on the pillow, almost as if he were standing on his head. Michael and Catherine stood on either side of Ralph’s bed, noticing the molasses on his ears and his face.
“Please, Mom, Dad,” Ralph sobbed. “Please. The pain is terrible. You have to ask them to change my position so I can get relief.” Michael watched as Ralph clutched at his mother’s dress, gritted his teeth, rolled his eyes.
“Ma and Pa,” Ralph said. “I guess I’ll be all right, do you think? Will I? It’s tough, but we’ll beat it.”
Neither parent spoke, but Michael Martin thought that he had never seen a person suffering as much as his son was now. There was no way he could beat pain like this.
Peter Francis’s son, William, raced to the Haymarket Relief Station from nearby Scollay Square in time to hear a priest from St. Mary’s Church in the North End administering last rites to his father.
“I am prepared to meet my God,” William heard his father say. “There are other men hurt worse than I am, and I would ask you to attend to them first.” Peter Francis moaned in pain, a sure sign to his son that he was seriously injured. “He was a man who never complained,” William said. “I knew by his groaning that he was injured too badly to ever recover.” Years later, though, it was not his father’s moans that haunted William, but the grinding of the hardening molasses in his father’s clothes every time he moved.
Peter Francis died minutes after his son’s arrival at the relief station.
Death’s pall clung to the relief station throughout the night, as the screams of dying men echoed off corridor walls stained with blood and molasses. James McMullen, John Barry, John Callahan, and Ralph Martin, all with terrible injuries, fought to stay alive, and there were others who did the same. Patrick Breen, a forty-eight-year-old teamster for the City of Boston Paving Department, who was hurled into Boston Harbor by the molasses wave and rescued by sailors aboard the USS Nantucket, hung by a thread with pneumonia and infection that had developed from fractured ribs and a serious leg injury. Peter Curran, whose team of hogs had been crushed by the molasses, was dragged from the flood and now lay at the relief station with broken ribs, back and chest injuries, and a severe shock to the nervous system from which doctors were not sure he would ever recover.
Others were identified and shipped to Dr. George Burgess Magrath’s North Mortuary deep into the night. William Brogan, fifty-seven, a teamster for the paving department, stayed alive long enough for his wife, Ellen, to reach him at the relief station, before he succumbed to a fractured skull. His wife’s last memory of him was the pain in her husband’s eyes as he pawed at the bandages that swathed his head, as though tearing them off could ease his suffering. John Seiberlich, sixty-nine, a blacksmith for the City of Boston, suffered a fractured skull and a compound fracture of the femur when the wave caught him about fifty feet from the tank. He died at the relief station shortly thereafter. And the oldest flood victim—even older than Bridget Clougherty and John Sieberlich—seventy-eight-year-old Michael Sinnott, a messenger who was caught on the wharf during lunch hour, died at just past 11 P.M. on January 15, from multiple injuries, including a fractured skull, a fracture of the tibia, and severe shock.
By the time the terrible day had ended—a Wednesday that had begun with the buoyancy and high spirits that accompany a January thaw in New England—the death toll from the molasses flood had reached eleven; nine men, plus the widow Clougherty and little Maria Distasio. Another group of victims lay seriously injured and wracked with pain in the relief station, their fate hanging in the balance, largely dependent on their bodies’ ability to fight off infection.
There was also a third group: the missing. Had they been swept into the harbor? Crushed by tons of debris? Swallowed up and drowned by molasses, their bodies trapped in ooze, the chances of recovering them were impossible until cellars and freight sheds had been pumped out. As midnight approached, the cloyingly sweet smell of hardening molasses hung heavy in the Boston air, and the waterfront rats scurried across the wreckage, looking to taste and feed without becoming trapped. Rescuers tried to work, but the electric lighting was inadequate to illuminate the area. No real progress would be made until first light.
It would be then, too, that North End residents would witness the totality of the carnage on the waterfront.
January 16, 1919
News of historic proportions was on the verge of breaking on January 16, 1919, news that would change the economic and social face of America, and the world’s geopolitical landscape.
A Prohibition amendment to the U.S. Constitution, one that would ban the manufacture, sale, and consumption of alcoholic beverages, needed the approval of just one more state legislature for ratification. Thirty-five of the forty-eight states had ratified the soon-to-be enacted 18th amendment—one short of the three-fourths majority necessary for approval—only the sixth amendment to the Constitution since the Civil War and the first since 1913. Now the states of Nebraska, Minnesota, and Missouri were racing to become the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Prohibition amendment, a historic achievement that was expected within a day or two, perhaps within hours.
Half a world away, President Woodrow Wilson, who had made history by becoming the first American President to set foot on European soil while in office, was hoping to make it again outside of Paris at the famed chateau of Versailles. There, Wilson and the other “big four” leaders—British prime minister David Lloyd George, French premier Georges Clemenceau, and Italian prime minister Vittoria Orlando—were seeking to negotiate a peace treaty to end the Great War and prevent future wars. As part of the treaty, Wilson would put forth his “fourteen points,” aimed to prevent the secret alliances and treaties that had pulled the world into war in 1914. Further, in their efforts to build a lasting peace, Wilson and the other world leaders would craft, as part of the treaty, a blueprint for a new League of Nations, an unprecedented alliance of countries that would work together “to promote international cooperation and to achieve international peace and security.”
Nonetheless, both Prohibition and the peace talks were dwarfed by the coverage Boston newspapers gave to the molasses disaster, emblazoning banner headlines and displaying large photos of the flood across their front pages and throughout their news sections, in their Thursday, January 16, editions.
“Huge Molasses Tank Explodes in North End; 11 Dead, 50 Hurt,” screamed the front page of the Boston Post, adding in a nightmarish subhead, “Giant Wave of 2.3 Million Gallons of Molasses, 50-feet High, Sweeps Everything Before It—100 Men, Women and Children Caught in Sticky Stream—Buildings, Vehicles, and ‘L’ Structure Crushed.” The Boston Globe countered with a banner headline, “Molasses Tank Explosion Injures 50 and Kills 11,” and a graphic subhead: “Scene of Ruin and Desolation in North End …” plus, “Death and Devastation in Wake of North End Disaster … Buildings Demolished, Sticky Mass Floods Streets.” The Globe let Boston residents know what happened in this report:
Fragments of the great tank were thrown into the air, buildings in the neighborhood began to crumple up as though the underpinnings had been pulled away from them, and scores of people in the various buildings were buried in the ruins, some dead and others badly injured.
The explosion came without the slightest warning. The workmen were at their noontime meal, some eating in the building or just outside … once the low, rumbling sound was heard no one had a chance to escape. The buildings seemed to cringe up as though they were made of pasteboard.
In its first-day report, the Post led with the following account:
A 50-foot wave of molasses—2,300,000 gallons of it—released in some manner yet unexplained, from a giant tank, swept over Commercial street and its waterfront from Charter street to the southerly end of North End park yesterday afternoon.
Ensnaring in its sticky flood more than 100 men, women, and children; crushing buildings, teams, automobiles, and street cars—everything in its path—the black, reeking mass slapped against the side of the buildings footing Copp’s Hill and then swished back toward the harbor.
Eleven persons—a woman, a girl, and nine men—were the known dead at midnight. More than 50 injured were in hospitals and at their homes. Some of them may die. Dead horses, cats, and dogs had been carted away in team after team.
Sailors at bottom left from the USS Nantucket, which was in port when the flood occurred, aided in the rescue efforts as crews cleared tons of debris to reach trapped victims.
(Photo courtesy of Bill Noonan, Boston Fire Department Archives)
In its inside pages, the Post described the destruction in the colorful newspaper language of the day:
A rumble, a hiss—some say a boom and a swish—and the wave of molasses swept out. It smote the huge steel girders of the “L” structure and bent, twisted, and snapped them, as if by the smash of a giant’s fist. Across the street, down the street, it rolled like a two-sided breaker at the seashore. Thirty feet high, it smashed against tenements on the edge of Copp’s Hill. Swirling back it sucked a modest frame dwelling [the Clougherty house] from where it nestled beside the three-story brick tenements and threw it, a mass of wreckage, under the “L” structure.
Then, balked by the staunch brick walls of the houses at the foot of the hill, the death-dealing mass swept back towards the water. Like eggshells it crushed the buildings of the North End yard of the city’s paving division … To the north it swirled and wiped out practically all of Boston’s only electric freight terminal. Big steel trolley freight cars were crushed as if eggshells, and their piled-up cargo of boxes and merchandise minced like so much sandwich meat.
The swath of destruction caused by the molasses wave extended for hundreds of feet down Commercial Street. Note the smashed vehicle against the stone wall at right. The mass of debris burying the Clougherty house can be seen in the center of the photo, beneath the trestle.
(Photo courtesy of Bill Noonan, Boston Fire Department Archives)
Meanwhile, the cause of the disaster continued to be a source of debate carried out in the press. State chemist Walter Wedger, and U.S. inspector of explosives Daniel T. O’Connell, believed strongly in the “collapse theory”—that the tank disintegrated because of a combination of structural weakness and fermentation inside the tank. USIA attorney Henry F.R. Dolan continued to argue “beyond question” that outside influences, “evilly disposed persons,” were responsible for destroying the tank, insisting that the fifty-foot receptacle was structurally sound.
As the clean-up continued—as workers first tried to remove hardening molasses with chisels and saws, and finally used millions of gallons of briny seawater to cut the congealing liquid; as the injured were ministered at the relief station and the search continued for additional victims amidst the debris on the waterfront—Boston newspapers, and even the New York Times, continued to carry reports of the disaster on their front pages. They listed the names, ages, and occupations of the dead and the injured. They ran sidebars of people who escaped the wave by ducking under railroad cars. They published small stories explaining that people who were feared lost were actually alive and well.
For a week after the flood, the molasses tragedy became the only news in Boston, the talk of the city, the focus of activity in the North End.
Meanwhile, rescue teams kept searching for bodies.
Thursday, January 16, 1919, 8 p.m.
While clean-up and recovery efforts were continuing, church bells throughout Boston pealed in celebration. Nebraska had just become the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Prohibition amendment, providing the three-fourths total necessary to amend the U.S. Constitution; after a one-year grace period, the actual law banning alcohol in the United States would go into effect on January 17, 1920.
It no longer mattered to U.S. Industrial Alcohol. Its 2.3 million gallons of molasses covered Commercial Street and filled the basements of homes and businesses in the area. Its attempt to convert its molasses distillation process from industrial alcohol for munitions to grain alcohol for rum—its attempt, in effect, to outrun the oncoming Prohibition amendment—had ended in disaster.
USIA’s days in Boston were numbered.
Friday, January 17, 1919
Two days after the disaster, with the water of Boston Harbor stained brown from the molasses that had been washed into it, more than three hundred workers covered the waterfront, combing through wreckage for the bodies of the missing, clearing debris so the search could proceed more smoothly, and wielding acetylene torches to cut the steel pieces of the tank into manageable sizes that could be carried away. The city provided about 125 of those workers, Boston Elevated another hundred, and the Hugh Nawn Construction Company, builders of the tank’s foundation, supplied another hundred. United States Industrial Alcohol had supplied no workers and, indeed, its first representatives had not visited the scene until Friday, when Vice President M.C. Whittaker arrived from New York, engineers William F. Cochrane and John F. Barnard traveled north from Baltimore, and treasurer Arthur P. Jell made his way over from USIA’s East Cambridge distilling plant.
Whittaker and his men met with Thomas F. Sullivan, commissioner of Public Works for Boston, and a heated argument ensued that could be heard outside the building in which they met. Sullivan angrily disapproved of the fact that USIA had delayed so long before sending representatives to the scene, and was providing no clean-up assistance. Whittaker finally agreed to hire up to 150 men to assist with the clean-up. In addition, engineers Cochrane and Barnard would supervise the removal of the steel tank pieces to a scrap metal yard in Roxbury, a few miles away. The pieces would either be transported by wagon if they could fit, or for larger sections, dragged by teams of horses fitted with ropes and harnesses. Arthur P. Jell remained on the waterfront for several hours that day, but there is no evidence that he contributed to the discussion during the meeting.
After the brief exchange between the city and USIA officials, a member of the press cornered Whittaker outside.
“Can you give some cause for the accident?” the reporter asked.
“No. If I could, I wouldn’t have to work for a living,” Whittaker snapped back.
Meanwhile, at about 3 P.M., Ralph Martin, the twenty-one-year-old teamster and driver for Dolan Meats and Provision, died from infection at the Haymarket Relief Center, his parents by his side. He was conscious up to an hour before his death, begging his mother and father for some relief from the pain.
Peter Curran, whose team of hogs was destroyed in the flood, was luckier. Despite three fractured ribs, a severely bruised thigh, a bruised chest, a wrenched back, an injury to his left eye, and what doctors described as “severe nervous shock,” he was released from the hospital at about the same time as Ralph Martin died. He would be bedridden for a month and incapacitated until May.
Saturday, January 18, 1919
Chief Justice Wilfred Bolster of the Boston Municipal Court, renowned in legal circles for his sound judicial temperament, tromped through the molasses-covered debris, inspecting the ruins and surveying the horrific destruction on the waterfront with a sense of shock. The North End Paving Yard had been destroyed, reduced to a pile of kindling. The steel girders and trestles and tracks of the elevated railroad structure had been bent and broken into a misshapen mass that would take weeks, or months, to repair. Men and women, hundreds of them, swarmed over the wreckage like ants, their steps tenuous due to the dangerous footing. Some were Red Cross and Salvation Army workers assisting the rescuers, others were firefighters and sailors carefully removing wood and steel in their search for the dead, the more hopeful among them searching for survivors. Scores of other men were wielding brooms, chisels, shovels, or high-pressure hoses in their efforts to remove the molasses from the street and the wharf area. Across Commercial Street, the fire department’s hydraulic pumps were groaning as they worked to siphon thousands of gallons of molasses from the cellars of stores and tenements. In all of his fifty-two years, Wilfred Bolster had never witnessed such a scene.
As the judge who would next month conduct the criminal inquest into the terrible disaster, Bolster needed to get a complete feel for the scene. He had already interviewed the Boston Public Works superintendent and the USIA lead engineer, William Cochrane, to learn as much as possible about what had happened on Commercial Street.
Beyond his judicial responsibilities, though, Bolster loved Boston and felt compelled to see the tragedy that had befallen his city. He was a distinguished graduate of Harvard Law School, had served on the Boston School Board, and had been chief justice of the Municipal Court since 1906. Boston had been grotesquely altered by the waterfront catastrophe that had taken place this week. Bolster took this as a personal affront as much as a municipal tragedy.
As he plodded across the molasses-covered waterfront, avoiding piles of splintered wood and side-stepping the fire hoses that curled through the wharf debris, Judge Wilfred Bolster knew only one thing: Someone was responsible for what had happened here, and someone would pay.
Sunday, January 19, 1919
James McMullen, the Bay State Railroad worker who had shouted at Maria Distasio for trespassing at the tank, died at approximately 10 A.M. from infection. His wife, Margaret, who had been at his side from the beginning, said he was delirious and complained about his ferocious thirst right up until his death.
One hour later, Patrick Breen, the teamster for the City of Boston Paving Department who had been hurled into Boston Harbor by the molasses wave and rescued by sailors, died alone, from pneumonia as a result of his injuries. His daughter, Margaret, and cousin, Charles Breen, had left their bedside vigil for a few hours to get some rest.
John Barry was alive and home before the end of the day Sunday, January 19, and whereas he merely feared death while he was trapped under the firehouse four days ago, now he wished for it. He hadn’t been able to get a good look at himself in the hospital—each time he moved a nurse would order him to lie back and rest—and the morphine had masked much of his pain. But now he could see and feel, and he thought that death would be a welcome alternative.
The timbers and heavy water-heater that had pinned him for hours had damaged his torso, injured his back and legs, and crushed his spirit. His pain was indescribable. His entire body, from his neck down, was black from bruising. His thighs and knees were torn and lacerated, and his spine felt as though it would snap at any moment. Boils covered his arms and chest; the doctor had already visited once to slice them open and drain the pus, and he showed John Barry’s daughters how to clean the boils in the future. His girls, he knew, still couldn’t bear to look at him. Their strong, powerfully built father had, within days, become a broken, pitiful old man with snow-white hair.
As wretched as he looked and felt today, as much as he believed that dying would be better than the suffering he was experiencing now, John Barry still had no way of knowing how profoundly his life would change. His back and legs would never heal completely. He would remain bedridden for weeks, and even after he did manage to get out of bed, he would never be able to stand fully erect.
When he did return to work for the city, he would shuffle paper in the office, keeping track of the paving jobs—John Barry, a strapping picture of health, a man who had never been treated by a doctor prior to the molasses disaster, would also never again be physically able to cut stone for a living.
The molasses flood would not claim John Barry’s life, but it would claim his health, his livelihood, and, eventually, his self-worth. He had no way of knowing all of this on January 19, 1919, no way of knowing how much he would suffer in the years to come.
Monday, January 20, 1919
John Callahan, the City of Boston paver who sent his wife out of his room and confided to her cousin that he was “sinking fast” on the night of the molasses disaster, died five days later from shock and pneumonia. The time of death was 4 A.M. John Callahan died alone—his wife, Kittie, had not yet arrived from their South Boston home.
Later That Day, Boston City Hospital
It was just after noon, but already, it had been a long day for Martin Clougherty. His mother’s funeral had just ended, a simple, but well-attended affair. He suspected that the throngs who had paid their respects had come not so much as a testament to the family’s popularity, but more out of curiosity about the bizarre and violent manner in which his mother had died.
Now, Martin stood at the bedside of his sleeping brother, Stephen, who had been transferred to Boston City Hospital yesterday from the Haymarket Relief Station. His thirty-two-year-old brother, a man with the mind of a seven-year-old, had been a far cry from his pleasant, docile self when Martin first arrived to visit him. He had been frightened to death, begging Martin to stay with him, fearing that the hospital personnel were conspiring to harm him. “The nurses are getting ready to poison me and throw me out the window,” Stephen had cried, “just like I got thrown out the top window of our home.”
Martin had learned that sailors from the USS Enterprise had pulled his brother from the molasses and placed him in the ambulance that took him to the relief station. His brother’s hands and arms had been cut and bruised, but beyond that, he had no serious injuries. Physical injuries, Martin corrected. There had definitely been a serious diminishment of his brother’s mental condition. Normally, he could tease and joke with Stephen. But Martin had known as soon as he had walked into his brother’s room that something had changed. He could see it in Stephen’s eyes first, the sheer terror, and then his brother had begun talking about the hospital staff’s plotting to kill him. Martin had calmed him, speaking softly and gently stroking his forehead, until Stephen had fallen asleep. How he would react when he awoke was anyone’s guess.
Martin had to think about Stephen’s future. Before the accident, Stephen had handled simple chores around his mother’s house and, despite his feeble-mindedness, was enjoyable to be around. Immersed in routine and familiar surrounding, his brother could manage day-to-day living without constant care and direction. But what now? Stephen had clearly taken a turn for the worse. He was terrified and paranoid. How long would these feelings last? What if they were permanent? Stephen had no familiar surroundings to come home to. Their mother was gone. Their homewas gone.
Martin himself had been affected by the disaster more than he had imagined possible. He missed his mother, but it was more than that. His own injuries were minor, but his nerves were on edge nearly every moment and he had not been able to sleep since the disaster. He was staying with friends, and on two occasions already, they had mentioned to him that he cried out during the night. If the tragedy was affecting Martin this much, keeping him awake at night and in a state of anxiety during the day, he could only imagine how it was affecting Stephen. His brother often had trouble separating fantasy from reality. How much would his ordeal change him? And could Martin care for him if Stephen’s mental condition became much worse?
He would have to deal with this eventually, but first things first. As Martin looked down upon his sleeping brother, he wondered how he would tell Stephen that their mother was dead.
Late That Afternoon, the Waterfront
They pulled out ten-year-old Pasquale Iantosca’s battered, molasses-covered body from behind a railroad freight car as late afternoon dusk enveloped the waterfront and a raw wind whistled off the harbor. The boy’s arms, legs, pelvis, and chest were broken and his face was disfigured beyond recognition. The molasses had driven the railroad car into Pasquale, carried them both about fifty feet, and smashed both up against the wall, the railroad car crushing the little boy instantly. Rescuers knew Pasquale was missing, and when they pulled the boy out, one ran to get Pasquale’s father, Giuseppe, at his Charter Street home.
When Giuseppe arrived, he recoiled in horror upon seeing his son’s body. He couldn’t recognize the boy’s face. His first instinct was to cover his own face with his hands and weep, but Giuseppe would not do this in front of the rescue workers. He composed himself, saw that the dead boy was wearing a red sweater, bent down, lifted the sweater, and saw the second red sweater underneath. It was Pasquale. The black corduroy pants and the high brown shoes were also Pasquale’s.
Giuseppe gently hugged little Pasqualeno’s shattered body close to him, felt his son’s broken bones squirming under the sweaters, tried to imagine the boy’s pain and fear in those last seconds. Giuseppe prayed to God that Pasquale had died quickly, that he was dead before the railroad freight car had smashed his body against the wall of the building.
In a few moments, Giuseppe felt hands on his shoulders and men pulling him to his feet. One man carefully took Pasqualeno’s body and placed him tenderly into the back of a Red Cross ambulance that would take him to the morgue. The other rescuers turned away to continue their work and give Giuseppe his privacy. Giuseppe stood motionless and watched the ambulance drive north on Commercial Street. His heart was broken, but at least little Pasqualeno was no longer lost. And his wife, Maria, would be grateful. Their son would have a funeral.
January 26, 1919
Eleven days after the tank burst, firefighters fished the body of thirty-seven-year-old truck driver Flaminio Gallerani from the water underneath one of the Bay State Railroad freight houses. He had been making a delivery to Bay State on January 15, and the molasses wave lifted him and his four-ton 1915 Packard truck into the water. The vehicle was smashed to pieces, and Flaminio drowned in a combination of water and thick molasses. Luckily, during the time Flaminio’s body was in the water, only his hands were eaten by sea animals—they had left his face alone. This made it easier for Flaminio’s nephew, Frank Gallerani, to identify his uncle’s body.
With the discovery of Flaminio Gallerani’s body, the molasses flood had claimed nineteen lives. Authorities were still reporting one man missing: a thirty-two-year-old Italian immigrant named Cesare Nicolo, who drove a team and wagon and delivered goods to the waterfront. Witnesses had seen Nicolo near the Boston & Worcester Railway freight station on the Commercial Street wharf, just before the molasses tank collapsed. His wife, Josie, had visited the scene each day since the January 15 disaster, begging in vain for news about her husband.
Meanwhile, workers continued the massive recovery and clean-up effort. Police and firefighters, city workers and sailors, laborers and volunteers continued to haul away wreckage, claw through debris, operate hydraulic pumps, remove ruined goods from Commercial Street cellars, and man seawater-shooting fire hoses to cut congealed molasses. The disaster also was spreading, literally, as molasses was tracked across the city by rescue workers and onlookers when they returned home; molasses covered subway platforms and seats inside the trains and trolleys, stuck to the handsets of pay telephones, and floated in the water-troughs around the city where horses would stop for a drink.
But as bad as the situation was, rescue crews were already expressing their thanks that the tragedy had not happened in summer. In the warm weather, when school was out, there would have been twenty-five to thirty children playing in the North End Park, all of whom would have been drowned by the wall of molasses. And in the summer, the health risks from pests and rodents would have been as devastating as the flood itself; rats by the hundreds and flies by the millions would have descended upon the waterfront, attracted by thick, sweet liquid that spread across the wharf and Commercial Street. Insects were scarce in late January, but the rats were still a nuisance—in warm weather, their sheer numbers would have made them unstoppable.
As rescue workers pondered the unthinkable scene around them, as they sullenly shook their heads when Josie Nicolo asked about her missing husband, as they wondered whether the waterfront would ever return to normal, most of them had one question uppermost in their minds:
How could this have happened?