The deadliest nightclub fire in history occurred just over 75 years ago on November 28, 1942, an hour’s drive north of campus at Boston’s popular Cocoanut Grove nightclub. The conflagration killed 492 people—the club was licensed to hold 460—and injured hundreds more. Even in the midst of World War II, it briefly became the biggest story in newspapers around the world and led to a reform of fire and safety codes and an international improvement in the treatment of burn victims. Among the dead was a Brown student, as recalled recently by his friend Richard Silverman ’45:
I started Brown in the fall of 1941. By the following year I had made many new friends. Among them were Ernie Savignano and Rod Prendergast. The only thing they had in common was that each had his own car, and any time I needed a ride home to Newton, Massachusetts, I would call one or the other. Ernie came from Newton, and Rod lived in Brookline, the next town.
Ernie was captain of the Brown football team and a great all-around athlete. He came from a family that had little money, and his tuition was being paid by a wealthy alumnus. Rod was not an athlete, came from a monied family, and had always gone to private schools.
Rod imagined himself living in the Roaring Twenties. He drove a finely tuned, newly painted Model T Ford. His hair was cut in the Roaring Twenties style, and he always wore a raccoon skin coat with his ever-present silver pocket whiskey flask.
It was a cool November Saturday morning, and I was in my dorm room hitting the books for a Monday exam. Rod came into the room.
“I’m taking you to Boston for the weekend. I have a date with a girl from Wellesley, and you’re going out with her roommate.”
“Rod, I have an exam on Monday, and I really have to study!”
“I’ll have you back by noon on Sunday. Don’t be an old stick in the mud.”
I was sorely tempted, but I turned him down.
I studied all Saturday, but took an hour off on Sunday morning to go to the Faunce House lounge. All the out-of-town newspapers were there, and a few of us gathered around the big Philco radio to hear the news: “Several hundred people were killed in the Cocoanut Grove nightclub last night. Among the confirmed dead was Roderick Prendergast, a Brookline resident and student at Brown University.”
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Class of 1945