Free Palisades Park by Alan Brennert

and began dousing the flames, or trying to.
    “There are still dozens of kids in there,” Adele told the fire captain.
    The smoke had now enveloped much of the midway; when Eddie looked back he could barely make out the rides through the sooty clouds. Captain McDermott organized his squad and asked for volunteers from among the park employees to help find and retrieve the remaining children. Eddie and about a dozen other men volunteered, and he soon found himself heading back into the conflagration.
    Adele said, “Eddie, be careful—”
    “I will,” he promised. “Find a phone and call your mom, tell her you’re okay. She’s going to be worried when she hears about this.”
    By the time the firemen and volunteers made their way back to the main midway it was totally blacked out by smoke. In the midst of this false night Eddie and the others could hear the sounds of children crying in the darkness. Captain McDermott had the men put wet handkerchiefs over their mouths, then form a human chain behind him, the last man standing just outside the clouds of smoke, Eddie somewhere in the middle. It was hotter than hell, and the handkerchief didn’t do much to filter the air. At the head of the chain the captain groped in the darkness until he found a child, passed him or her to the man behind him, then the next man, until finally reaching the end, where a fireman escorted the child out of the park.
    Eddie coughed constantly, wondering if he was breathing in the incinerated remains of his own stand … or worse, some luckless person who had been trapped in the path of the flames.
    Finally, after twenty minutes of shepherding children along the chain and assuring them everything would be all right, Eddie was relieved when McDermott called out, “That’s the last of ’em,” and gave the order to leave.
    Once back outside the Hudson gate, Eddie coughed up black soot and drank down as much water as Adele could hand him, his throat coarse as sandpaper. They walked around to Palisade Avenue, where long fire hoses sprayed arcs of falling water onto the flames. As the Stopkas approached they saw Chief Borrell talking with the fire captain from Cliffside Park; when the Chief saw Eddie with his face smudged black from the smoke, he hurried up to him and asked, “Jeez, Ten Foot, you okay?”
    “Yeah,” Eddie said, “but I got a feeling your stand’s seen better days.”
    “It’s just wood and money, Eddie,” the Chief said with a shrug.
    By six o’clock the fire was finally out. When the smoke cleared it could be seen that one-eighth of Palisades was in ruins: a charred forest of smoldering building frames was all that remained of the park’s northwest corner. Among the structures burned to the ground were the Old Mill, the Whip, the Spitfire, the Motor Parkway, the roller-skating rink, and fifteen concession stands and storerooms—including the Chief’s candy stand.
    But though ten firemen suffered from smoke inhalation, there were no serious casualties, and no fatalities. All the children, thanks to the quick thinking and heroism of the fire department, were sent safely home.
    Almost as remarkable, no sooner were employees and concessionaires okayed to enter the grounds than a squad of workmen roped off the burnt area and began cleaning the soot from the seven-eighths of the park that was undamaged. Despite the cataclysm, that evening at nine P.M. Palisades Amusement Park reopened for business. The indefatigable Arthur Holden performed his scheduled high dive, even though the tank he was diving into had been drained of a foot of its water in order to fight the blaze.
    Since both their concessions had been wiped out, Eddie and Adele left and took the trolley to Marie and Frank’s to pick up their children. There Eddie shouldered a drowsing Jack, who woke up long enough to sniff his shirt and declare, “Daddy, you smell.” Eddie laughed: “Don’t I know it.” Marie, grateful that her daughter and son-in-law had