The Invisibility of Inflammability
If a person wanted to trace how American newspapers covered incidents of children burned “playing with fire” in the 1940s, new commercial databases that have digitized hundreds of newspapers, especially from small and mid-size cities across the United States, would be all one needed. Newspapers in the 1940s were filled with brief stories of children, mostly boys, seriously and fatally burned at play. But if the goal was to find every incident in which a child was burned wearing a Gene Autry cowboy suit, even digitized newspaper databases fall short. Some absolute number of children were burned in these cowboy suits. We will never know it. Consider that in two years, as far as I can judge, there had been news reports of only four children burned, three of whom died, in what seem certainly to have been Gene Autry cowboy suits. The cowboy suit with the inflammable high-pile viscose rayon on the chaps was sold across the United States from 1942 through 1945, and in some places much later. Long after it was sold in stores, it continued to be worn by children. In 1944, to take one year in that time frame as exemplary, there were 1,754 English-language dailies published in the U.S. There were 11,474 weekly papers. There were hundreds of daily, weekly, and monthly newspapers in languages other than English. Most newspapers from the 1940s remain undigitized. Many no longer exist in any form.
It is one thing to identify broad patterns, to trace change over time; it is altogether another to uncover the full scope of a tragedy that played out across a nation over more than a decade that no one at the time knew was happening. Many Gene Autry cowboy suit incidents never made the news. Many that did did not identify the clothing a child was wearing. Any number that identified the clothing misidentified some important element of it: mistaking a cowboy suit for an Indian play suit, fur for fringes, suggesting it was not the same kind that others had been wearing. To undertake a search thinking one might find even every reported instance in this dramatically incomplete database is like asking an archive to be organized by the categories salient to the researcher who knows something that was not apparent at the time.
But what can be gleaned is nonetheless important to understanding how it was that despite many incidents making the news, the press and in turn its public continued to see these events as like all those other incidents of children burned at play that they knew about from life experience or read about in the paper. News reports reflected and reinforced the narrative of a serious national problem. That problem was children and fire. The lesson was one that public fire-safety campaigns had been teaching since at least the 1920s: Matches should be kept away from small children; playing with fire costs property and lives.
The individual, serial character of the incidents involving children wearing cowboy suits obscured their underlying shared or collective character. News coverage reflected and conveyed the sense that these were accidents, individual family tragedies, local news. During the summer of 1944, 167 people lost their lives, with 700 more injured and thousands of others imperiled in a matter of minutes when the Big Top of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey circus went up in flames in Hartford, Connecticut. The Hartford circus fire was the kind of mass public event that was front-page news in newspapers across the United States. It remained in the news as the death toll rose. It was understood from the moment it happened as national news. “Big Top Bursts into Flame,” read the headline in the Cincinnati Enquirer. “5 Accused of Manslaughter as Circus Deaths Reach 139,” read the headline of the Passaic Herald-News. “Death Toll is 145 in Big Circus Fire,” reported Royal Oak’s Daily Tribune.
The circus itself was the kind of public event that would have been reported on in local papers, the rare public entertainment that received both AP and UP coverage, and so reporters were on the scene and captured pictures of terrified women and children running, with the flaming big top burning behind them. The scale of the human loss demanded investigation, immediately triggered criminal charges and individual lawsuits for injury and death.
In contrast, even where one incident involving a child burned in a cowboy suit in the same town or city followed closely on another that made the news, the connection went unexamined, unrecognized. In March 1945, the Yonkers Herald Statesman reported: “Two Young Boys Suffer Burns as Bonfires Set Clothing Afire.” The boys — five-year-old William Wetherell and four-year-old Guy Tortenson — had been injured in separate incidents, one day apart, in different parts of the borough. The common thread highlighted in the police report of the two incidents was boys and bonfires. The story and headline noted that their clothing caught fire; it did not note that both boys were wearing cowboy suits.
On Sunday, April 8, 1945, a double headline spanned the columns of page 1 of the Washington, DC, Times-Herald: patton seizes nazi gold hoard and yanks smash japs naval power. But just beneath these headlines, in columns 2 and 3, was an investigative report by Times-Herald journalists Roland Nicholson and Spence Drummond: d.c. parents warned: inflammable cowboy suits kill one child here, burn 7 and fuzzy ‘chaps’ flare like torches; stores are notified, probe launched. Here was what for so long had been lacking: a story clearly identifying the danger.
The opening sentence of the article noted that the chaps on the suit were “highly inflammable and capable in a split second of turning children into flaming torches.” Each of the children had been wearing the same outfit: a cowboy suit made by a New York firm, M.A. Henry Co., and sold under the trade name of Gene Autry. Tests by the DC fire marshal had determined the “woolly material designed to simulate fur” to be highly inflammable.
The article identified the children by age and by when they were burned, and their parents by name and address: Tony DiTrapani, five, from Alexandria, who had died just a week ago; Arthur “Toby” Cumberledge, eight, burned on March 25; Lawrence Gates, seven, burned on February 11; Edward Bradley, six, burned six weeks ago; and Willie Wilks Jr., nine, “Negro,” burned on January 23, all being treated in Children’s Hospital; William “Billy” Greatorex, four, burned a year ago and still being treated twice weekly at the same hospital. It included pictures of several of the boys in the hospital and a family photo of Tony DiTrapani, who had died. The article also noted that the fire marshals’ investigation had begun “on the strength of an anonymous phone call in the latter part of March.” Both the Times-Herald reporters and the fire marshal had interviewed hospital officials and parents of the burned boys and in so doing alerted them that the tragedy that had befallen them was not just an accident.
The news report was more important because notice was all they could give. As the DC fire marshal noted in the article, “the District has no laws governing inflammable clothing.” They could investigate, alert parents, retailers, and the manufacturer — and they had. As the article noted, the store had immediately withdrawn the suits from sale. The Merchants and Manufacturers Association had notified local retailers and the National Association of Retail Credit Stores. Recalling the “circus tragedy” of a year ago, the paper suggested its reporting would add pressure to the demand for fireproofing of materials. But as the story noted, the danger likely was not confined to Washington, DC. “Because their trade name is that of a famous screen cowboy, it is likely that they are sold all over the country and that tragic experiences here have been duplicated many times over.”
For five straight days, the tragedy was major news in the nation’s capital. The Washington Post and the Washington Evening Star joined in covering the story, but it was the Times-Herald’s investigative reporting that really broke the story. Each day there were new details. More boys in the DC area had been injured; more boys had died. The potential scale of the tragedy grew as the Times-Herald revealed that the Henry Company claimed to have sold “some 200,000 of the suits to stores throughout the country.”
The Times-Herald called Gene Autry in Houston, where he was in the Air Transport Command. With headlines proclaiming, autry to probe fabric of togs bearing name and gene autry, movie star, will join probe, the Times-Herald reported that Autry had “expressed genuine distress,” said he would get in touch with Mr. Henry, and that he would do “‘anything I can for the children burned here.”
It mattered that the news had broken in the capital. The Bureau of Standards was based in Washington, DC, and S.H. Ingberg, chief of the fire resistance section, tested the “fur” chaps and confirmed the DC fire marshal’s assessment. The Merchants and Manufacturers Association and the American Retail Federation were based in Washington, DC. In its April 11 coverage, the Times-Herald reported that the associations’ warnings about the suits had gone out to retailers across the nation. And it mattered that the news had broken in Washington, DC, because congressmen were there and responded to the news. On the second day of the Times-Herald’s coverage, Democratic Representative John E. Rankin of Mississippi, on the floor of Congress, demanded an investigation, legislation, and possibly criminal action against the manufacturer. His words and demand for legislation too became part of the coverage.
Times-Herald reporter Roland Nicholson, reporting from New York, told his DC readers on April 10 that New York City’s fire marshal, Thomas P. Brophy, would conduct tests the next day of the suit. On April 11, the Times-Herald’s headline read, laguardia asks for fulll report on cowboy suits made in n.y. Nicholson described a test of the suit’s inflammability that newsmen made. They mounted a Gene Autry cowboy suit on a frame near the East River and then took a match to the lower edge of one leg of the chaps. With stop watches and cameras they captured the event. “Death Wears a Child’s Cowboy Suit … In Only 82 Seconds!” read the caption to the photo sequence of the burning suit. As Nicholson wrote, “It was not difficult to see that a child inside the suit would have been hopelessly trapped.” Spectators had gathered to watch. As the “intense flame totally consumed the garment,” Nicholson wrote, “a tenant woman … muttered ‘My God!’”
Timing is everything in what becomes news. And news or its absence in turn shapes the course of events, the course of lives. Late on the afternoon of April 12, 1945, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died. It is impossible to know how news coverage and in turn the hazard itself would have developed had Roosevelt not died when he did.
It seems possible, in at least some news markets, that other papers would have undertaken their own investigative reports on the cowboy suit hazard. As it was, they did not. The Philadelphia Inquirer had run a front-page story on April 12 reporting on the hazard, noting one boy in nearby Conshohocken, five-year-old David Speaker, who had died in January, and listing two New Jersey boys whom the Times-Herald’s coverage had highlighted as having been injured in Gene Autry cowboy suits. The Inquirer’s story alerted citizens of Philadelphia to the hazard, identifying the cowboy suit by name and describing it. But the story was not an investigative report. There was no follow-up. Had reporters for the Inquirer surveyed Philadelphia-area hospitals, they would have found at least four boys seriously burned in the last seven months in Gene Autry cowboy suit incidents who were still hospitalized. Only one of those incidents — Joseph Moore, burned in August 1944 — had made the news when it happened.
The New York City fire marshal’s investigation, announced just three days earlier, was also completed and submitted to Mayor LaGuardia on April 12. There clearly had been pressure to work quickly. The report was just over a page, less without its heading. It identified the M.A. Henry Co., with a showroom on Broadway in Manhattan and a factory in Passaic, New Jersey, as the manufacturer of the suit and the Woonsocket Falls Mill in Rhode Island as the source of the fabric, E.F. Timme & Son acting as sales agent. It confirmed the inflammability of the fabric: “It is a highly combustible material, easily ignited by an open flame or spark from a bonfire and it is particularly dangerous for children to wear cowboy or play suits trimmed with it. When this material is ignited, the flames spread with great rapidity.” As was true in Washington, DC, the fire marshal reported that “there is no City Ordinance or law prohibiting the manufacture, use or sale of this product.” The report included material misstatements of fact which could only have come from the principals themselves that downplayed the scale of the hazard. It stated that the Henry Co. had only used the rayon pile “for a brief period” and that it was “now using a material known as ‘Timme Tufts,’ a combination of alpaca and cotton, which is slow-burning.” The Henry Company never used Timme’s trademark fabric.
But perhaps most shocking of all was the confidently expressed statement, “There is no record of any death or injury by fire to a child in this City while wearing the subject play suit.” One wonders whether the fire marshal’s investigators in fact looked beyond their own records. They certainly had not checked area hospitals. Tommy McCormack lay at that moment hovering between life and death at Mt. Sinai Hospital. A boy named Michael Blessington had died in a New York City hospital less than two weeks before. Arnold Weinstein, a Brooklyn boy, remained in Long Island College Hospital, and William Wetherell, a Yonkers boy, was in St. John’s Hospital. And there were others.
But in a city the size of New York, even where the police or fire department were called, these incidents hardly had a chance of being “other than routine.” William Wetherell’s injuries, along with those of another boy, Guy Tortenson, had been reported in the Herald Statesman, but the report had not mentioned that the boys were wearing cowboy suits, and Yonkers fell outside the fire marshal’s jurisdiction. Neither the New York Herald Tribune nor any other daily in the city had reported the incidents in which Tommy McCormack, Michael Blessington, Arnold Weinstein, Dennis Duffy, or any of the other boys I know to have been injured in Gene Autry cowboy suits in the city were hurt.
Had President Roosevelt not died when he did, Mayor LaGuardia might have commented to the press on the report, and families of children who had been injured or died might have contacted the fire marshal or mayor’s office or a newspaper. But as it was, the report did not make the news. The day after receiving it, Mayor LaGuardia wrote to Representative Rankin sharing the substance of the investigation and noting that though there was no local law which would prohibit the sale of the cowboy suit in the city, “We have had no similar experience in New York City at any time.”
Reading the coverage in the Times-Herald from April 8 through April 12, it would be easy to believe that now everyone knew. And it seems likely that most adult residents of Washington, DC, did. Perhaps more so than in any other place in the United States, the adult population in the capital was attuned to the news. The Times-Herald had the highest circulation numbers of the four Washington, DC, dailies and broke the story on a Sunday, a day on which newspaper circulations were highest. Moreover, the Times-Herald’s investigative reporting expanded news coverage of the hazard beyond the capital. Its coverage was what had led to attention to the issue in Congress with a demand for investigation and legislation; it had triggered an investigation in Virginia; it had triggered Mayor LaGuardia’s demand for an investigation in New York City; it had triggered the warnings of national retailer organizations to their members. And because the news broke in Washington, DC, it was taken up by major newspapers that had their own news bureaus in the capital and by the AP and UP and reprinted in newspapers scattered across the U.S. The warnings by national retailer associations to their members undoubtedly saved many children’s lives as the outfits were taken off store shelves. Here was an instance where chains were a positive good. News, in this respect at least, reached into small markets it otherwise might not have reached. It was extended further by local chambers of commerce.
But despite all these things, outside Washington, DC, the news did not break for the vast majority of Americans in April 1945.
In the wake of President Roosevelt’s death, newspaper coverage of the hazard changed. But the reasons for that change went beyond Roosevelt’s death. The scope of the hazard itself changed. A week after the president’s death, the first hearing on inflammable fabrics, what would come to be called “flammable fabrics,” was held in the office of Representative J. Leroy Johnson (R– CA). In January, California had become the first state to consider and pass a state law making it unlawful to sell inflammable wearing apparel. The California law — spurred by an incident in the state’s capital, Sacramento, involving brushed rayon — targeted items made from synthetic fabrics: things like children’s bathrobes, shower curtains, and women’s evening gowns.
And just like that, the hazard of the Gene Autry cowboy suit was absorbed into a more generalized hazard, a broad field of inquiry that would require study and testing, the development of standards and testing equipment, all by experts in the textile field. A generalized inquiry was less attention-grabbing than headlines of burned children. Coverage would slip further back into newspapers, the sort of thing that might appear as a small item on a business page or not at all. The effect was something like that of an individual slipping into a crowd and disappearing.
During the war years, the circulation of newspapers had been at an all-time high. The total daily circulation of English-language daily newspapers in 1943 was well over 44 million. Circulation numbers remained high after the war. But circulation is not the same thing as reading. Reading did not mean every story. Then, as now, readers focused on different parts of the paper. And even as everyday life remained profoundly rooted in the local, news increasingly came from and was about somewhere else.
Knowing, too, is a complicated thing. A story about a boy fatally burned in a distant city or even a stranger in one’s own was tragic. It could call forth donations of money, blood, or even skin from strangers. But it was a story about an accident to one child. I suspect that even among those who may have read or heard something about some cowboy suit that had led to injuries, their knowing dimmed with the passage of time. Or with the belief that it had been a wartime thing of shoddy merchandise. Or with the assumption that the hazard had been addressed. Or with the notion that this is simply what happens when children play with fire. Readers did not have the opportunity you have had to see how coverage of this tragedy played out over time. There were no search engines. Nothing that collated news relating to particular topics. The newspaper went out with the trash. It was itself an ideal fire-starter.
The news broke in a limited way, at a point when thousands, maybe several hundred thousand, of the suits had been sold. And in most places, there never was news at all about the hazard the Gene Autry cowboy suit posed. And so, it is unsurprising that long after April 1945, more children were burned in Gene Autry cowboy suits, and when those incidents were reported at all, they were stories of a tragedy to a local child and his family or some child in a distant city.
Excerpted from Writing with Fire: The Cowboy Suit Tragedy and the Course of a Life by Barbara Young Welke. © 2026 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
