Cuyahoga (scene)

Tonight Fire On The Water opens at Cleveland Public Theatre, which is inspired by the Cuyahoga River Fire of 1969. I am really looking forward to seeing this play, a collaboration between five West Side theater companies, combining as it does local history and theater, and features the work of some of my favorite artists anywhere.

Several years ago while I was reading up on the events of 1936, I discovered that the Cuyahoga had caught fire several other times during the past one hundred and fifty years. I wrote a brief scene as part of the These Are The Times which I later cut.

This scene is not part of Fire On The Water, either ... I just felt like sharing. Enjoy!


CUYAHOGA
by David Hansen © 2011

VOICE OF THE LIVING NEWSPAPER
The savage peoples who clung to the banks of the Great Lake Erie prior to the white man’s arrival called itself the Iroquois. And they had a name for the mighty river that wended its tortured route to that great inland sea - CUYAHOGA, meaning “crooked river.”

CITIZEN 1
So ... “Cuyahoga River” means “crooked river river”?

VOICE OF THE LIVING NEWSPAPER
Yes! The banks of the Cuyahoga, called the Flats are the powerful digestive system of this tremendous Midwestern economy. Shipping vessels make the impossible turns, bringing freight from the Erie Canal to the rest of the world! The petroleum giants - Shell, Gulf and of course, Standard Oil - store tanks of tens of millions of gallons of fuel right on the water’s edge for easy transportation. And one fateful day in 1936, John Hanzel set the river on fire.

Enter JOHN HANZEL, 36, a working man with gauze wrapped around his face and hands.

CITIZEN 2
Says what? You can’t set a river on fire!

VOICE OF THE LIVING NEWSPAPER
Apparently, you can! What happened to you, sir?

JOHN HANZEL
I were on a team breaking the freighter Spokane down into scrap on the East Bank. They tell me a spark from my acetylene torch caught oil and debris on fire ... but all i know was I fell into the river and it was like being boiled in the fires of Hell.

CITIZEN 1
I saw it! The conflagration headed across to the West Bank where that gasoline was stored. The whole damn Flats could have blowed up!

CITIZEN 3
The fire lasted for five days.

JOHN HANZEL
By the time I got fished out I was burned up pretty bad.

VOICE OF THE LIVING NEWSPAPER
You’re a lucky man, John Hanzel.

VOICE goes to slap HANZEL on the back. 

JOHN HANZEL
Please don’t do that.

End of scene.

Source: The Plain Dealer, August 2, 1936

Fire On The Water continues through February 14