The weekend after Thanksgiving in 1942, a teenage Ina Fay Cutler was glued to her radio. There was news of a terrible fire that broke out at a nightclub in Boston where her mother, Jeannette Zall had spent her evening.
“You held your breath to hear your mother’s name” listed among the injured, Cutler remembered. “It was such a shock.”
But she wouldn’t hear her mother’s name. The 35-year-old Jeannette Zall had tagged along with a group of people to the Cocoanut Grove nightclub, an “it” spot in Boston at the time. She’d never been to a nightclub before. The decision would be a deadly one…