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Message: [QUOTE="UConnNick, post: 3185816, member: 1526"] When we moved to CT, we had a neighbor who had been caught in the Hartford circus fire back in the 1940's. It was the Ringling Bros. circus when it was a big top circus with tents. She had brought her young son to see the circus. When the fire started, she was somehow able to grab her son and she carried him out. She must have been able to wrap him up because she prevented him from getting burned. She wasn't quite so lucky. She ended up with horrific third degree burns over most of her body. Miraculously, she survived, but she needed a lot of plastic surgery. You could always see the burns on her arms and legs. What she endured is unimaginable. She raised her son on her own because her husband had died. He went on to be an honor roll student and was a great athlete in HS. He was also a wonderful person. Unfortunately, the trauma took a horrible toll on his mother. She was a very nice lady, but as she grew older she became a little senile and eventually slipped into full scale dementia. She still lived alone during that whole time. She would have good and bad days. She used to let us play in her yard, the back side of which was the size of a football field. They had owned a farm but sold most of it for an athletic field at an elementary school. On her bad days she could be quite nasty, but she was never physically abusive. We knew about her troubles. She got to a point where she would wrap herself in a shroud and go around her house blessing the shrubbery. None of us, including the young kids in the neighborhood, would have ever done anything mean spirited to her. The kids didn't even make fun of her. Her son would come over very frequently to help her and he'd always spend time with us. He became a schoolteacher. Nobody in our neighborhood would have ever dreamed of doing anything to her. People treated each other that way in neighborhoods of a bygone era, and it's sad that it's not like that anymore. [/QUOTE]

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