![Survivors remember deadliest nightclub fire in US history](http://web.archive.org./web/20171126211851/http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2017/11/26/20/46B842E000000578-0-image-a-64_1511726626101.jpg)
Survivors of the deadliest nightclub fire in US history gathered on Saturday with families of the victims killed in the decades-old Boston blaze to share their stories of how they escaped death. Tuesday will mark the 75th anniversary of the November 28, 1942, fire at the former Cocoanut Grove club that claimed the lives of 492 people. An estimated 1,000 people were in the building at the time. Two survivors, Joyce S. Mekelburg (bottom right inset), 93, of Brockton, and Marshall Cole (bottom left inset), 92, who escaped the blaze joined former Boston Mayor Raymond Flynn and others at the Revere Hotel on Saturday afternoon. Mekelburg and Cole are two of eight living survivors from the tragedy. Mekelburg, then 18, went to the nightspot with her fiancé, Justin Morgan. She recalled how Morgan told her to leave and promised to meet her outside, but he never made it out. Cole, who was a tap dancer at the club, said he was waiting for his second performance of the night when the fire broke out. 'The place was just mobbed. It was standing-room only,' he said, adding that because of the crowd he waited in his dressing room. 'And that saved my life because I would have been in the Melody Lounge.'