cleveland

Pretty much everyone these days has been to a music concert. It may have been Rock-and-Roll, Country, Pop, Rap, or any number of others, but concerts are here to stay. So, how did they get here? The event that is now recognized as history’s first major rock-and-roll show actually started out as a dance called the Moondog Coronation Ball, held of March 21, 1952, in Cleveland, Ohio. It was initiated by host Alan Freed, at the suggestion of Cleveland record-store owner Leo Mintz, who decided to sponsor three hours of late-night programming on WJW to showcase rhythm-and-blues music. Alan Freed was then installed as host. Freed quickly took to the task, adopting a new, hip persona and vocabulary that included liberal use of the phrase “rock and roll” to describe the music he was now promoting. It must have been an exciting time for him, to be there for the invention of concerts.

The name of the event came from Alan Freed himself, who hosted the enormously popular “Moondog Show” on Cleveland AM radio station WJW. He was initially hired in 1951 to be the host of a classical-music program, but when Mintz told Freed about the trend he was watching among his young customers…of all races toward rhythm-and-blues records by black musicians, Freed took his career in a different direction. The two men got together and decided to promote the new show by having a dance and concert to promote those hot new artists. With that, the Moondog Coronation Ball was born. With the promotion kicked into high gear on the local radio station, tickets sold out in a single day. Still, that didn’t stop thousands of teenagers from lining up outside the biggest venue in town in the hours before show time. These days, we would think a riot was about to take place, and…maybe it was. It was a chilly Friday night in Cleveland, and outside the Cleveland Arena the scene would look quite familiar to anyone who has ever attended a major rock concert. But no one on this particular night had ever even heard of a “rock concert” before, much less stood in line for one.

On tap for “The Moondog Coronation Ball” were headliners Paul Williams and his Hucklebuckers, as well as Tiny Grimes and the Rocking Highlanders (a black instrumental group that performed in Scottish kilts). While musicians who have to cancel, or problems with equipment have been known to shut down an event, no one could have expected that the incredible demand for tickets proved to be the event’s undoing. The problem was exacerbated by massive ticket counterfeiting and possibly by overbooking on the part of the event’s sponsors. The arena had a capacity of 10,000 people, but an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 fans turned out for an event. Those fans who could not get in, though they held a ticket, legal or not, were trying to gain entry. Less than an hour into the show, the massive overflow crowd broke through the gates that were keeping them outside. In an effort to save lives, the police quickly moved in to stop the show almost as soon as it began. The angry fans wanted an explanation. On the radio the very next evening, Alan Freed offered an apology to listeners who had tried to attend the canceled event. The only thing he could do was to be honest with them and apologize. Freed told his fans, “If anyone…had told us that some 20,000 or 25,000 people would try to get into a dance, I suppose you would have been just like me. You would have laughed and said they were crazy.” The “failure” of the Moondog Coronation Ball was actually its success. Who could have known?

On October 20, 1944, in the city of Cleveland, Ohio, workers at the East Ohio Gas Company spotted a white vapor leaking from the large natural gas tank at the company plant near Lake Erie. It was 2:30 pm on that Friday afternoon, and a leak is never a good thing, but this one would prove to be disastrous. The circular tank had a diameter of 57 feet and could hold 90 million cubic feet of the highly flammable gas. Ten minutes later, a massive and violent explosion rocked the entire area. Flames went as high as 2,500 feet in the air. Everything in a half-mile vicinity of the explosion was completely destroyed. In the ensuing explosion, a smaller tank also exploded. The out-of-control fire that followed the explosion necessitated the evacuation of 10,000 people from the surrounding area.

Originally built in 1902, the East Ohio Gas Company plant, spanned from East 55th to East 63rd Streets taking up a full ten acres. It provided natural gas to most of Cleveland, including many businesses in the neighborhood in which it was located. By 1940, part of the plant was converted to a liquefaction, storage, and regasification facility, which was one of the most modern gas plants in the country, safely storing large quantities of liquefied gas in four separate holding tanks. These days, we would not have these types of volatile substances stored in a residential area, but back then, before transportation became much more affordable, laborers in those early industrial cities had to be close to their places of employment. A gas storage facility was just one among many industrial operations that were located in a typical working-class neighborhood of that era. However, because the plant was modernized and had many safety features, people living in the area felt they had no reason to fear. That is, until a fateful day in October when “fire fell from the sky.”

The call went out to every firefighting unit in the Cleveland area. It took all of the city’s firefighters to bring the horrific industrial fire under control. In the end, the fire killed 130 people, destroyed two entire factories, 79 homes in the surrounding area and more than 200 vehicles. The total bill for damages exceeded $10 million. When the fire was out, rescue workers found that of the 130 people, killed by the blast, nearly half of the bodies were so badly burned that they could not be identified and in fact, 21 of them were never identified. Two hundred and fifteen people were injured and required hospitalization. The cause of the explosion had to do with the contraction of the metal tanks. The gas was stored at temperatures below negative 250 degrees and the resulting contraction of the metal had caused a steel plate to rupture. The East Ohio Gas Explosion has since been calculated to be equal to a 2.43 kiloton TNT explosion or 1/6 of the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb. In the aftermath of the fire, everyone knew that changes had to be made to protect laborers, and the people in the neighborhoods. Newer and far safer techniques for storing gas and building tanks were developed in the wake of this disaster.

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