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  Martin reached his home, and once inside, scribbled a note to his sister, Teresa, asking her to wake him at 12:30 P.M., which would give him more than enough time to get ready for the 1:30 P.M. meeting with his accountant.

  Amid his conflicting emotions—the elation about moving, the melancholy about leaving the club, the uncertainty of Prohibition—Martin was clear about one thing: Life as he knew it was about to change.

  He climbed the stairs to his bedroom and was fast asleep in moments.

  11:55 a.m.

  Today should be a quiet day at the molasses tank, a rarity, William White thought. The Miliero had discharged her huge shipment two days ago, and no new molasses deliveries would arrive for at least three months. Within the next few days, and continuing for weeks afterward, White would be busy. He would supervise the process of filling railroad tank cars with molasses and transporting them to the USIA Cambridge distilling plant. He would fill out enough paperwork to bury his small office that sat next to the pump pit. Today was a bonus day, a “middle day,” the calm between the Miliero’s arrival and the frenetic production cycle that followed a major delivery.

  White was thankful for the pause, even more so when his wife, Sarah, had called a few moments ago from South Station asking if he could meet her at the Jordan Marsh department store to help her choose some dresses she wanted to buy. She suggested that they could have lunch at a downtown restaurant following the brief shopping trip. White, who usually ate at his desk, thought he deserved a lunch-hour away from the tank, and saw the invitation as a good opportunity to indulge his wife. Besides, the weather had warmed considerably in the two days since the Miliero’s delivery, with temperatures soaring from 2 degrees to 40 degrees Fahrenheit. It was another good reason to venture downtown and walk around a bit.

  He grabbed his coat and hat and set out to meet Sarah, happy for the break in his routine in the middle of the workweek.

  The thought crossed his mind that the tank would be left unattended while he was gone, but no harm—he would be back in his office within an hour.

  12:41 p.m.

  Pasquale Iantosca and Antonio Distasio crouched behind the giant molasses tank and watched the two adults scold Antonio’s sister, Maria. The children’s parents had told the youngsters to collect firewood from around the molasses tank while they were home for lunch from the Paul Revere Elementary School on Prince Street. Pasquale complained to Antonio that he knew his father would be watching him from the window of their home across the street to make sure this chore was done, a task made all the more difficult with the two sweaters Pasquale’s parents forced him to wear to keep from catching cold. Antonio smiled when he looked at his friend; Pasquale was so bundled up that he had a hard time moving, and beads of sweat were forming on his forehead on this mild winter day.

  Hiding behind the tank, both boys were frightened and restless as they watched two big railroad workers wagging their fingers at Maria, whom they had spotted gathering wood between a railroad freight car and the molasses tank. The men were shouting at her to leave the area.

  Antonio felt sad that his sister was suffering alone and he left his hiding spot next to the tank to help her. Little Pasquale—Pasqualeno—remained where he was, hunched between the tank and a railroad freight car.

  Antonio emerged from behind the tank and circled to his right. He watched as Maria turned toward him, and away from the men who were scolding her. Then everything happened fast.

  The railroad workers screamed and Maria swung her head back to face them, her long hair trailing across her face. Antonio saw that the men were no longer yelling at Maria. Their mouths agape, their eyes wide, they were focused on something behind his sister, fixed on the spot that he had just vacated, where Pasqualeno still hid. Terror darkened the men’s faces, and, in the same instant, Antonio glimpsed a blur of movement to his left and saw a shadow falling across his sister …

  Peter Curran walked his two-horse team into the Commercial Street wharf yard, the fifteen hogs he had just picked up from the New England Beef Company on nearby Clinton Street squealing and snorting in the wagon behind him. He backed the wagon carefully into the Bay State Railway shed, coaxed the hogs out of the truck and onto the platform, and presented the receiving clerk with the bill of lading. As the two men talked, Peter Curran felt the ground shake and heard a roar. The hogs squealed louder and huddled closer, becoming a single mass of pink-brown flesh jiggling on the platform. Curran turned to look, convinced by the tremor and the noise that a Commercial Street elevated train had jumped the track and plunged to the street below …

  U.S. Navy gunner’s mate Robert Henry Johnston stood on the deck of the Bessie J. talking to two other sailors about the work the men had completed that morning. Since the armistice had been signed, the Navy—in this case, Johnston and his mates—was stripping a number of small boats of their ordnance and armaments. These smaller craft pulled alongside the Bessie J., and all morning, Johnston had been removing guns and ammunition so that the boats could be decommissioned. They had just taken a breather and were about to eat lunch, when Johnston, facing the Commercial Street wharf, heard a rumble and began shouting at the top of his lungs …

  Twenty-year-old Walter Merrithew, a freight clerk for the Boston & Maine Railroad Company, walked under the covered platform at the Number Three freight shed on the Commercial Street wharf. He saw Ryan, the deaf mute laborer employed by the railroad, stacking crates and preparing them for shipment. Merrithew didn’t envy the fellow, unable to hear a word or make a single sound. Ryan worked hard, but could never join in the banter with the fellows on the docks and loading platforms, an activity Merrithew considered the best part of the job. Even now, Merrithew could hear boisterous laughter from the cellar of the freight shed, where other men were storing boxes and barrels that had arrived from ships and would be transported by train up and down the East Coast. It was laughter that Ryan could not hear and could not share.

  Merrithew paused for a moment in the doorway, his bulk cutting the light. Ryan looked up as the shadow crossed his face. At that moment, Merrithew heard a long rumbling sound behind him, similar to the passing of an elevated train over Commercial Street, only louder.

  Then something happened that Merrithew would never forget. The deaf mute, the boy Merrithew had never heard utter a sound, pointed a trembling finger in Merrithew’s direction, but beyond him, and let out a long, painful screech that sliced through to Walter Merrithew’s soul …

  Babe Ruth was complaining again and the boys at the Engine 31 firehouse found it laughable. The Boston Red Sox star, who had led his team to a World Series victory over the Chicago Cubs in October, was threatening to retire to his forty-acre farm in nearby Sudbury if his demands for a big salary increase were refused by the team. Ruth earned $7,000 in 1918, four or five times more than most firefighters, for playing a game, Bill Connor scoffed as he dealt a hand of lunchtime whist. Plus, the Sox ace had earned another $1,100 for his winning World Series share. “We should all be so lucky,” he said to his fellow players around the table—firefighters Fred McDermott, Nat Bowering, and Paddy Driscoll—and to George Layhe and the stonecutter, John Barry, both of whom were watching the friendly card game.

  The firefighters played whist almost every lunch hour, and Barry enjoyed the visits, found that the hour passed pleasantly. Sometimes he joined the games, but mostly he filled his pipe, relaxed, and talked with the guys, about sports, like today, or about politics or what was happening around the city. Today he had felt a chill outside, despite the warm-up in temperature, so he welcomed the warmth of the firehouse during the noon hour.

  Connor had just finished dealing another hand when the men heard a tremendous crashing noise, a sound Barry later described as a “roaring surf” and one Connor likened to a runaway two-horse team smashing through a fence. Driscoll, who was closest to the window, jumped from his chair and looked out onto the wharf. “Oh my God!” he shouted to the other men, who were already scrambling. “Run!” … />
  Royal Albert Leeman, a brakeman for the Boston Elevated Railroad, stood in the front vestibule of the third car of the passenger train bound for North Station. He was working the 12:35 shuttle train out of South Station, traveling on elevated tracks above Commercial Street, a trip he had made hundreds of times before. The train, filled with midday shoppers and workers, had just made its stop at the Battery Street station and was chugging up to the big left-hand bend in the track near Copp’s Hill, traveling between fifteen and twenty miles per hour, on its way to North Station. Leeman looked out at the molasses tank and the harbor through the closed vestibule window as the train began its turn, its steel wheels screeching and straining against the rails. A moment later, he saw a black mass bearing down on him, pushing toward the elevated track, darkening the sky. As Leeman blinked in disbelief, his ears filled with the scream of tearing steel and, behind him, a thunderclap-like bang! Then he felt the overhead trestle buckle and his train start to tip …

  A few moments later than she was supposed to, Teresa Clougherty tiptoed across the room and gently shook her brother, Martin, awake. He had less than an hour to get ready for his meeting. Their mother, Bridget, had lunch ready downstairs. Teresa turned away from the bed, caught movement through the window from the harbor area, and just as Martin murmured, “I’ll be right down,” she heard a deep growling sound, felt the house shaking, and was thrown to the floor …

  Boston Police patrolman Frank McManus approached the call box on Commercial Street to make his regularly scheduled report to headquarters. It was the kind of day Frank McManus had been waiting for—warm and quiet. The temperature had climbed past 40 degrees, which was practically a heat wave after the previous few days. Aside from the danger of saboteurs during the war, and the noise the Italian anarchists were making even now, there was nothing he disliked more about walking the waterfront beat than the bone-chilling wind and dampness that numbed his fingers and toes, and burnished his face raw. Today, though, was like the arrival of an early spring, and there was an extra buoyancy in the activity around the wharf that McManus attributed to the unusually fine weather. Horses stepped lively as their teamsters drove them onto the wharf to deliver produce, beer, and leather goods. City workers sat outside the paving yard buildings, eating lunch and talking, and McManus heard occasional laughter carry across the street.

  McManus picked up the call box and began his report to headquarters. A few words into it, he heard a machine-gun-like rat-tat-tat sound and an unearthly grinding and scraping, a bleating that sounded like the wail of a wounded beast. McManus stopped talking, turned, and watched in utter disbelief as the giant molasses tank on the wharf seemed to disintegrate before his eyes, disgorging an enormous wall of thick, dark liquid that blackened the sky and snuffed out the daylight.

  McManus froze momentarily, wanting to flee but unable to move. Then he recovered enough to bark into the phone words that sounded unbelievable even to him, let alone the dispatcher at the other end:

  “Send all available rescue vehicles and personnel immediately—there’s a wave of molasses coming down Commercial Street!”

  SEVEN

  ENGULFED!

  January 15, 1919, 12:45-5:00 p.m.

  Midday turned to darkness as the 2.3 million gallons of molasses engulfed the Boston waterfront like a black tidal wave, 25 feet high and 160 feet wide at the outset.

  Several years would pass, and a raging debate would ensue, before people knew why the tank had burst, but almost instantly they saw that the power of the molasses was more devastating than any crashing ocean wave. Its crushing weight unleashed a terrible force that pulverized the entire waterfront and a half-mile swath of Commercial Street. Worse, too, unlike an ocean wave, whose momentum is concentrated in one direction, the wall of molasses pushed in all directions after it escaped the confines of the tank, so that it was more like four separate walls of viscous liquid smashing across the wharf and into the street. Add to that the speed with which the molasses traveled—thirty-five miles per hour initially—the fact that the tank itself disintegrated into deadly steel missiles, and that thousands of fastening rivets turned into lethal steel bullets, and the result was destruction in a congested area equal to that of even the worst natural disaster.

  The molasses tore the North End Paving Yard buildings into kindling, ripped the Engine 31 firehouse from its foundation and nearly swept it into the harbor, destroyed the wood-framed Clougherty house, crushed freight cars, autos, and wagons, and ensnared men, women, children, horses, dogs, rats, wood, and steel. The molasses wave crashed across Commercial Street into brick tenements and storefronts, rebounded off of the buildings, and retreated like the outgoing tide, leaving shattered windows and crushed walls in its wake. Rolling walls of molasses, fifteen feet high, scraped everything in their paths, carrying a wreckage of animals, humans, furniture, produce, beer barrels, railroad cars, automobiles, and wagons, and smashing them against other buildings, into the street, or sweeping them into the harbor.

  This landscape photo, taken from atop a nearby building, shows the massive damage caused by the molasses wave. The top of the tank can be seen in the top quarter-center of the photo, just below the white building on the harbor. Flattened buildings that had been part of the city-operated North End Paving Yard are seen in the foreground.

  (Photo courtesy of Bill Noonan, Boston Fire Department Archives)

  Molasses inundated cellars of businesses and residences along Commercial Street and in the freight sheds on the wharf, smothering men who were working below ground level. Electrical wires were torn down from their poles, smoking and sputtering, until they sank into the molasses. A one-ton piece of the steel tank sliced through a column of the elevated railroad, causing the tracks overhead to collapse nearly to the street. Thousands of rivets that fastened the steel plates had torn away as the tank collapsed, becoming deadly projectiles that sprayed the waterfront like machine-gun fire—the rat-tat-tat sound McManus heard—ricocheting off brick and stone and embedding themselves in wood buildings. In minutes—in seconds—the landscape in the North End inner harbor area resembled a bombed-out war zone.

  Rescue teams of police, firefighters, doctors, and nurses from the nearby Haymarket Relief Station were on the scene quickly, stunned by the unthinkable scene before them. “Molasses, waist deep, covered the street and swirled and bubbled about the wreckage,” a Boston Post reporter wrote. “Here and there struggled a form—whether it was animal or human being was impossible to tell. Only an upheaval, a thrashing about in the sticky mass, showed where any life was … Horses died like so many flies on sticky fly paper. The more they struggled, the deeper in the mess they were ensnared. Human beings—men and women—suffered likewise.”

  Police and fire rescue teams worked feverishly, along with more than a hundred sailors from the USS Nantucket and the Bessie J., to free those who were trapped. Firefighters crawled out on ladders stretched across the molasses to pull victims from the quicksand-like morass, careful not to get sucked in, clearing molasses from the breathing passages of the living, dispatching the dead to the mortuary for identification.

  Rescuers were too late to save Maria Distasio, who had stood directly in the path of the mountainous wave and perished immediately from asphyxiation. A firefighter spotted her tangled hair swirling in a sea of dark molasses and pulled out her small, broken body. Her brother, Antonio, survived, though he suffered a fractured skull and a concussion when he was thrown against a lamppost; a firefighter managed to snatch him up before the molasses swallowed him. The third child, Pasquale Iantosca, disappeared. None of the dozen or so city workers whom patrolman McManus had seen minutes earlier survived. They had been smothered, buried by debris, or swept into the harbor.

  Five minutes after the tank disintegrated, the North End waterfront had been obliterated, property ruined, lives snuffed out. The question now was: How many were dead and how many could be saved?

  As the elevated railroad car tipped and settled back onto the trac
ks, Royal Albert Leeman cracked his right shoulder against the window. He reached up and pulled the emergency cord. His train had just cleared the wreckage, rounding the bend seconds before the weight of the molasses and the large piece of the tank had buckled the support trestle behind him. Leeman had stopped the train about three car lengths beyond the damaged track; had the train arrived just a moment later, it likely would have plunged onto Commercial Street.

  The massive piece of the steel tank that caused the overhead tracks to buckle is shown at the bottom of the photo. Workers used torches to cut up the steel before carrying it away. The building’s windows were shattered by the molasses that slammed into the wall like a tidal wave. Note that the windows above the “molasses line” are not shattered, which plaintiffs argued was clear evidence that no concussive force normally associated with an explosion took place.

  (Photo courtesy of Bill Noonan, Boston Fire Department Archives)

  Opening the vestibule door, Leeman jumped off the train, glanced behind him and down at the horror. The destruction the molasses had caused in just minutes made him shiver. There was nothing left of the waterfront. All the buildings were flattened, and it appeared that every square inch of ground was covered with molasses. Closer, he could see the elevated trestle, broken and twisted, the track sagging nearly to the ground.

  Leeman moved fast, first a few yards north to the trackside guard shack, where he issued instructions to the railroad worker to stop the train coming from North Station. Then he ran back, south, past his stopped train, made his way carefully across twisted track and support beams, and scrambled beyond the broken trestle until he reached undamaged track on the other side. Then he ran again, full speed down the track, for another hundred yards. The next northbound train that had originated at South Station was approaching, the one behind Leeman’s, and it was just beginning to pick up some speed after stopping at the Battery Street station to discharge passengers, about a half-mile before Copp’s Hill.