FireRescue Magazine:
Remembering the Fire That Led To Code Changes
Timothy Sendlebach, FireRescue Magazine Editor-in-Chief:
Sixty-Eight Years and 492 Reasons to Remember

The Enterprise of Brockton, Mass.
www.enterprisenews.com
By Maria Papadopoulos, Enterprise staff writer

EASTON — As club patrons screamed for help and a thick cloud of black smoke filled the air, young Dr. Saul Davis grabbed his wife and boosted her up to a basement window in the Cocoanut Grove kitchen, away from the crowd pushing at the doorway.

It was a decision that would save their lives.

"There were about 10 or 15 people piled up trying to push out a door that opened in," Davis solemnly recalled from his Twin Brooks Drive home. "Those people I heard eventually died there."

For more than six decades, Davis has lived with the horrific memories of the deadly Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston: the futile cries for help from people trapped inside, the patrons burned beyond recognition, and the bodies lining the halls of the emergency room at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Nearly half of the 1,000 people inside the club that night nearly 65 years ago — Nov. 28, 1942 — did not make it out.