The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 10

10 The Boston Globe Monday, December 28, 1970 Busboy still faces accusations in Cocoanut Grove holocaust 1 bidden the right to forget the 12 minutes which every other survivor of the holocaust has had the right to try to forget. But its not only the mem "I'm delighted with it," he exclaimed. "I've always i hoped for exoneration. Sometimes I thought I would try to conduct my own investigation to prove I did nothing wrong, in- tentionally or unintenition- ally, that night. But I just didn't have the resources to do it." "Now," he says with re-1 lief, "if anyone raises the question, I have something I can point to and say it is not only my opinion but the findings of the experts.

Although I've always known I was innocent, some people had always felt, 'Well, maybe he did cause the I hope this report eliminates the over the calls are revealed when he tells you: "You wonder if some time, maybe a generation or two away, all this will have an adverse repercussion on someone in my family. "Somebody could have a vendetta because of the fire and I wouldn't know about it. Then some day he might come across someone with my name and say, "Oh, you're the kid, and "Persons with my name might always be discriminated against because of "The he suggests, admitting that Tomaszewski is not a name so common as to offer him anonymity. "I certainly hope there aren't." But he is too proud and certain of his innocence to change, his name. Doing so, he feels would be an admission of having done some wrong act in the Cocoanut Grove.

But, more importantly, he explains, "I have never denied who I am. A fact is a fact. My name was Stanley Tomaszewski at the time of the fire, it is now, and I will die with the same name. And maybe, by keeping my true name, I will be able to do something some day to which people can point and say: "Well, I guess that guy wasn't so bad after all." He says this acceptance of him might not come until he's dead. But it might come now because of the Boston Fire Dept.

report. In his gripping book about the fire, "Holocaust!" (Henry Holt and New York), Paul Benzaquin, a Boston Globe reporter when he wrote it and now a Boston television and radio personality, describes Tomaszewski's valor in the moments after the first flickering flames were noticed. Stanley looked up to see the flames moving among the billowing satin of the ceiling," Benzaquin wrote. "When the fire was directly over his head, he jumped up and clutched a wide armful of the burning material and pulled hard. It shredded in his hands, showering him with fire and sparks that singed his hair and seared his face and forehead.

"The smoldering trunk (of a burning cocoanut tree) which he held burst into flame. Stanley threw it down quickly, but felt the pain of intense heat on his palms and fingers. Over his head the fire raced on, its fury undiminished by his effort. Moments later, with a stairway from the basement lounge blocked by the dead and panic-stricken, Tomaszewski took decisive action. Benzaquin describes it this way: "Stanley Tomaszewski glanced at the patrons pressing hopelessly toward the stairway.

No good that way. He ran to the camouflaged door which led to the kitchen. He opened it all the way shoving it back flat against the wall so that it would not be swung inward by people squeezing toward it from the other side." "Through here," he shouted to those around him. "Into the kitchen!" "Twice Stanley nearly went down in the rush for the door. He helped unscramble people until 10 or 12 had passed into the dark hallway beyond.

Then he heard their screams and shouts and realized that none of them could know which way to go. "He shoved through the door and groped along the way, shouting to them to let him show them the way." The depths of his concern proofing chemicals. There is no evidence before me to support a finding that any of these or any combination of them caused the fire." That report, to some persons, went unnoticed. And so ever since, Tomaszewski-has been harassed with charges of causing the fire. But if his tormentors have compassion and put credence in the findings of a 28-year investigation, they will now grant him surcease.

It was with this hope that Tomaszewski discussed with the Globe his years since the fire He was apprehensive that reviving the facts of the fire would, by some perverse reaction, "recreate the monster" which has haunted him. He was hopeful that those who have blamed him didn't know how much it hurt, and will now give him peace. He told of the days immediately after the fire, difficult ones for his mother and father who, he says fondly, "took a lot of the brunt." "Several days after the fire," he declared, "40 or 50 people, a vigilante group, marched on our home. My father saw them before they got to the door. He opened it and asked what they wanted.

They hollered back, 'We want your son'. In essence, they were saying, 'He's the guilty one. Let's string him up." "I was in the house at the time. Believe me, it was quite a feeling." Boston police took him to a hotel to protect him. The following1 year, he went to Boston College to which he had won a four-year scholarship.

This gave him some escape. But he still went home every night to the neighborhood where he'd lived most of his life and he could not escape identification nor chose to hide. In 1944, he joined the Army. "I was away for six years, five of them out of this country," he says. "But even overseas, I couldn't completely escape the past.

The word would eventually get around that I was the kid at the Grove." When he returned home, people continued to confront him with accusations or ask him point-blank: "Do you think you started the Cocoanut Grove fire?" The question, its directness, always hurt. "I have always felt," he told the Globe, "definitely, that it was not my match which started the fire." He talks about the fire and its affect on his life in slow, deliberate words marked by interruptions in syntax and changes of the callers, he said, even though wakening in the night to such telephone calls upsets his family and himself. "Obviously," he said in slow, measured tones of sadness, "the caller is emotionally upset, possibly mentally disturbed. And I try to sympathize with him and tell him that perhaps if he would give a little more thought, he would see things in a different light." Sometimes they hang up quickly, as thev did this night. Other times they talk about the fire, the busboy, what caused it and how many died.

"But basically, they threaten me," says the onetime busboy who worked that night at the Cocoanut Grove to earn money to contribute to his father, who, due to the Depression had not had a steady job in nine years. They threaten and blame and torment him in defiance of the facts facts which the Boston Fire Department last Nov. 28, on the anniversary of the fire, declared exonerate Tomaszewski. In officially ending its probe of the fire, the department declared the cause could not be determined. "A busboy, 16," the report said, referring to Tomaszewski, "had testified to lighting a match in the process of replacing an electric bulb in a corner of the Melody Lounge, where the fire started, and dropping the match to the floor and stepping upon it "After a careful study of all of the evidence and an analysis of the facts presented, the department was unable to find the conduct of the boy started the fire," said the report to Fire Comr.

James H. Kelly from Dist. Fire Chief John P. Vahey which officially closed the probe. "No proof of incendiarism could be found." "The Boston Fire reads the final line, "is unable to determine the original cause or causes of the fire." This report follows almost exactly the wordings of a report submitted a year after the fire to the State Fire Marshal's office by William Arthur Reilly, who was then Boston's fire commissioner.

His 64-page report, which followed exhaustive public hearings, after absolving the busboy further stated: "I have investigated and carefully considered, as possible causes of the fire, the following suggested possibilities: Alcoholic fumes, inflammable insecticides, motion picture film scraps, electric wiring, gasoline or fuel oil fumes, refrigerant gases, flame- 5 DMV STAY OKI Only Anti-Perspirant That Keeps Spraying and NOW AND LATER! BUSBOY Continued from Page 1 He picked up the phone said hello. The caller gave no name, no reason for calling, no apology for awakening a family in the night. A crank-caller never does. "Look, Tomasewski," a man's voice said harshly. "I know you started that fire.

You'll get your day in hell." The receiver clicked as the man hung up. Stanley returned the receiver slowly to its cradle, and recalled the horror of the Cocoanut Grove fire. It was Saturday night, Nov. 28, 1942. Stanley, i then 16 years old, was working as a busboy in the Melody Lounge, the basement cocktail lounge in South Sea Island motif which had helped to make the Cocoanut Grove Bos- ton's most popular and in-triguing nightclub.

This night, as most, the i- dining room, Caricature Bar and New Bar upstairs I were crowded, and there were so many people jam- med into the Melody Lounge that it was difficult detect in the room's dim light anyone at the op-. posite end of the bar. At about 10:08 p.m., Stanley, upon instruction of the head bartender, -v 6tood on a settee in the Melody Lounge and, stretching to his fullest, probed the ceiling, trying 4 to feel a light socket he 4 knew was there. Its bulb had been removed, and he v. could not locate the et in the dim light and be-thind the profuse decora- tions.

Bending to a table, he 4 picked up a book of match's? es. He stood erect once 'C more, ripped a match from book and folded back the cover. He struck the match and held it in his aright hand, careful to keep heat and flames safely away from the palm fonds and blue satin backdrop of the ceiling. He could spot now, creted in the hollow of a cocoanut husk, a tiny socket, so he carefully blew on the match. With his left hand, he retrieved from a jacket jjocket a bulb and, reaching I upward, screwed it into the socket.

The boy then ,5 blew again on the match which he continued to hold in his right hand, and stepped to the floor. Moments later, the Mel- ody Lounge was afire. In 12 minutes, flames, smoke and panic killed 491 per-sons or so badly injured they died later. Another 200 were injured survived. It was the worst disaster of its kind in history.

The burns to his hands and forehead which Stanley received that night while pulling flaming satin the ceiling trying to jstop the fire's spread and directing scores of persons to a hidden escape door only employees knew about eventually healed. But the agony of that night remains, not from his refusal to drive its hor-ror from ha memory, but ri- because of the thought- Jessness of others who con- ttnue to blame him for the fire. His match ignited a frond and the fire pread to the decorations, conclude. I night after night, year after year, he is har-. rassed by unknown callers, blamed for the fire, for i i i't'Jk- in.il jjj STANLEY TOMASZEWSKI, as a captain with the Yankee Division in September, 1952, maneuvers.

thought direction which imply a reluctance to bring up the subject, a fear that some people will never absolve him of the blame. He alludes often to the strict moral values he was taught as a child of immigrant, economically hard pressed parents to respect others and be honest with others and oneself. And you know he must have respected such values to succeed, as he has, in college (he went back to Boston College and graduated), as an auditor of contracts for the US Government, as a high ranking military officer. That's why you believe him when he tells you: "If I had ever believed that it was my match which started the fire, I would have faced the facts from the very beginning and admitted it. I would have told the hearings into the fire, 'Yes, I did it.

But I told them exactly what transpired, what the facts were that I felt there was no misdoing on my part." He feels he was the victim of circumstances, but seeks no pity. "Do you think you wound up the scapegoat?" "That's about the extent of it." "It appears the public's reaction makes you feel like a criminal." "That's true." "But weren't you actually heroic during those terrible moments in the lounge?" "I sort of think so. I did get quite a few people out." mmmmmmm St'f 'v t5 oz. 1 .29 vol 8 or. 1 .79 vol ories of the fire which still torture him.

It is the blame the blame which every investigation of the Cocoanut Grove fire has concluded should not be directed at him. 'It's been a long time since the fire," Stanley, now 44 years old, told the Globe, a few nights after receiving another accusatory telephone call "I've been through a lot of grief. I've been spit upon, called every name under the sun. My life has been threatened hundreds of times by people who blame me for the fire. I've been through the tortures of the damned." The calls in the night are less frequent now than they were the first few years after the fire.

But they still come in every few weeks, every time reviving the horror of that night, causing Stanley, his wife, their two sons and daughters to wonder, "why do thy do it? Why won't they let time heal? "The calls usually come in the middle of the night," said Tomaszewski in one of his few public statements since he testified at two public hearings which followed the fire by several months. "The callers are always anonymous. Their voices vary. I have no way of knowing who these people are, if they are wives or sons and daughters of i people who died in the or people who got out. "And I never know their reason for calling.

Maybe they are looking for sensationalism. Maybe they just don't have anything else to do. But maybe their lives were so disrupted by the fire that every now and then something causes them to think deeply about that night maybe its alchohol maybe the person just lighted a cigarette and the flames brought back those memories and he got terribly upset and said to himself. 'I know the guy that did it', and then he telephoned my home." He never hangs up on them, denies who he is, denies he was the busboy at the fire or denies he lighted a match and that later the Melody Lounge was aflame. "Facts are facts," he told the Globe "and besides, I know and have always known that I never in-tentially or unintentionally did anything wrong that night." He never gets angry with mmm msbkhm mm mm mmmt Exclusively yours 1 I Send Today i for 1 irrtian SWT 1971 i Cat Calendar Hiindy iiz with I stand-up easel, spiral bound, pages flip over.

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