Cocoanut Grove
Last Survivor
Stories

At age 96, on the 78th anniversary of the Boston Cocoanut Grove Fire, survivor Bob Shumay of Naples, Florida, was interviewed by Sommer Senne, Journalism Major, Florida Gulf Coast University, on November18, 2020.

Seventeen-year-old Bob Shumway sits on the edge of his seat at Fenway Park in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1942. He is watching Holy Cross College beat rival and undefeated Boston College in a huge upsetin college football, 55-12. After the game, Shumway and his friend, Dick Moulton decided to visit the Cocoanut Grove nightclub on their way home. They have no idea their lives are about to change forever.

Although Shumway’s memory is fading, he will never forget the horrors of that Saturday night. “We were open to anything fun,” said Shumway. “We just happened to be there.”

Shumway and Moulton mingled with people inside the club, walked outside and then went back into the main floor of the nightclub near the Caricature Bar. “We weren’t there too long,” said Shumway. “We were there, and then all of a sudden, something exploded.”

The explosion was a blue and orange ball of fire that started in the basement of club where the Melody Lounge was located.

“l kept thinking, “Gee, you gotta have a way out of here,” said Shumway.

On the night of the fire, the only way out of the nightclub for patrons was through one revolving door. Shumway and Moulton along with hundreds of club patrons sprinted to their only escape: the front revolving door of the nightclub. Panic and fear rose as people were stuck inside the revolving door.

“When you get excited, you forget which way the door is supposed to go,” said Shumway. Shumway and Moulton pushed and pulled several people out of the door and onto the street. Once outside the nightclub, Shumway and Moulton helped injured people into cars and taxis that took them to Boston City and Massachusetts General Hospital. ln a little over an hour, the fire was out, and 490 people had died.

Shumway recalled in an interview with the Springfield Union, 11/27/1959: “The scene was indescribable but it is still vivid in my mind. It doesn’t seem that it happened 17 years ago.”

Shumway and Moulton drove back home to Easthampton, Massachusetts, after the fire. Shortly after the fire, Shumway was drafted into the Army in World War ll and was in the 89th Infantry Division under General George Patton. He was deployed to France and Germany and was one of the first soldiers over the Rhine River.

“I’ve seen plenty,” said Shumway. “That’s just another thing. lt (the fire) was pretty bad but so was the war.”

Theories have developed over the years, but no one knows for sure how the fire started. Shumway will always remember one detail about the Cocoanut Grove nightclub and that dreadful night.

“Every time I see those (revolving) doors, it reminds me of the big fire,” said Shumway.

Shumway was the last living of approximately 450 known Grove fire survivors upon his June 2025 death.

Marshall Cole grew up on Emerson Street, in South Boston. At age 17, he was a tap dancer at the Grove. The night of the fire, he was in his second floor dressing room, next to the dressing room of the chorus girls, when the fire broke out. A waiter ran up the staircase to alert the chorus girls and then burst through a window to get to the roof. Cole and the chorus girls followed. A waiter found a ladder and he and Marshall held on to it as the girls made their way down to safety. That left the waiter and Marshall still on the roof with no one to help them. The waiter went to the backside of the roof and jumped. The fire fighters finally got a ladder up to the roof and Marshall was rescued.

He later went into service and he never tap danced again. He had not been to the site of the Cocoanut Grove until he came to the Cocoanut Grove Lane street dedication on November 30, 2013. He also attended the 75th Anniversary Memorial on November 28, 2017.

“A wonderful gentleman. So pleased we could help preserve hisevents of the Cocoanut Grove,” recalled Michael Hanlon, co-founder ofthe Cocoanut Grove Memorial Committee.

Cole died on June 28, 2020, at age 94. He was the last living club entertainer present at the blaze.

https://www.chapmanfuneral.com/obituaries/Marshall-S-Cole?obId=20629151

Christian Murray-Allen was an 18-year-old Radcliffe student in1942 when she went with three friends to the Cocoanut Grove. They were seated in the northwest corner of the basement Melody Lounge near an artificial palm tree. She went upstairs with her friend U.S. Naval Ensign Arthur Lee, age 22, for a dance in the main dining room.

They were returning when, as she later testified, “I saw a boy stand up in the corner and strike a match...Immediately a large flame started in a palm tree in the corner. It spread across the ceiling. “ She and Lee hurried back upstairs and left through the revolving door. However, her Radcliffe College classmate Sydney McKenna, age 19, and Ensign Alonzo Hearne, age 24, U.S.N.R., both died in the fire.

Gerhard was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and lived in Scotland, Switzerland and England before her family moved to the United States at the outset of World War II. At Radcliffe, she focused on music studies.

Upon graduating, she served as a coder from Britain’s Royal Naval Service. She later attended Texas Christian University. She graduated from George Washington University with a doctorate in education and became a reading specialist and teacher. She married her second husband Hans W. Gerhard in 1952 in Texas.

She died at age 97 in her Bethesda, Maryland, home. One of three known survivors at the time of her death, she rarely spoke about the fire.

Washington Post obituary
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/washingtonpost/name/christian-gerhard-obituary?id=31208122

Boston Sunday Globe
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/washingtonpost/name/christian-gerhard-obituary?id=31208122

Don Peterson was an ensign in the U.S. Naval Reserve, training at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, on November 28, 1942. He and his fellow ensign, Nick Pagonis and Lt. John Senft, attending MIT, all escaped the Cocoanut Grove fire. They arrived at the nightclub about 9:30 pm and were seated in the new lounge that was located on the Broadway side of the club.

Peterson told the Boston Police the day after the fire on November 29, 1942, “All I know is the fire started and people stared to rush out, and a cloud of smoke came up behind them.” Ensign Pagonis said the threesome tried unsuccessfully to hold crowd back. Once outside they grabbed fire axes and smashed glass brick windows facing Broadway.

“Both my friends ...got hatchets off the truck and broke in the glass.

They shouted in to the people and they did get one fellow up on the brick wall and they couldn’t get him over,” said Senft.

Peterson was born and raised in Chicago and attended Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, NY. He married his wife, Doris, and they were longtime residents of Balboa Island, Newport Beach, CA.

Peterson passed way at age 96 in 2017. He was the last known living survivor to escape from the Broadway Lounge, after the death of his fellow ensign, Nick Pagonis.

> Interview with Don Peterson Video Link

Eighteen-year-old Joyce Spector, described as a slender brunette, with dark eyes and an abundance of short curls, was attending courses at Fay Secretarial School, Boston, with plans to apply for U.S. Naval Reserve WAVES. About 9:45 pm, she was in the Melody Lounge with fiancé Justin Morgan, of Cambridge, MA. She would tell the Boston Globe a few days later, “Someone threw something that hit a bulb in a light on the wall behind us...So this waiter scratched a match to see to screw in the new bulb. And right away the dried grass decorations crackled into flame, right over our heads. We got up, so they could get at the fire...’ She was told to go upstairs by her fiancé while he stayed behind to help.

She clung to the new leopard skin muff and blindly crawled across main dining room floor in the dark. She said she was finally grabbed and thrown outside. “More people were pulled out and tossed down beside me. Some of them were dead.” She suffered second-degree burns to right hand and shoulders, burns to legs, blisters on face, and her hair was singed. She was of two survivors featured in Paramount newsreel about blaze.

She went on to marry twice and raised a family.

She worked as an administrative assistant at Lord & Taylor and Bank of America and was an executive assistant at Massachusetts General Hospital.

For years afterward, even though she knew that her then-fiancé, Morgan, had died in the fire, “I would look for him on the street — but of course could not find him,” she wrote in a memoir for her family. “I loved him then and I love him still. You never really stop loving your first love.”

She was one of two Grove survivors (the other was Marshall Cole) to speak at the November 2017 75th anniversary observations, her first on-site return since the blaze. When she died at age 100 in Dedham, she was second to last known survivor.

Boston Globe obituary https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/04/20/metro/joyce-spector-mekelburg-second-to-last-known-survivor-cocoanut-grove-fire-dies-100/

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PDF OF HER 1942 GLOBE INTERVIEW