June 22

Stephen Sondheim’s Send in the Clowns is a somber little number. It had, however, a very successful introduction in the play A Little Night Music. Perhaps Sondheim should have considered writing a song more along the lines of Send in the Paramedics because on the 22nd in 1918 an unoccupied passenger train slammed into the caboose of a slow moving Circus train when the passenger train’s engineer fell asleep at the controls. This event remains the most catastrophic of any train accidents involving circuses.