On the 28th of November, 1942, a hanging decoration in one room of the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Boston, Massachusetts caught fire. The flames were, initially, quite trivial – some of the patrons who witnessed them were even amused by the efforts of waiting staff to extinguish them using glasses of water and seltzer bottles. They could not possibly have known, at that moment, that this tiny flame would within minutes grow into one of the deadliest nightclub fires in American history.