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Today, A Generation Died
Dallas Observer
February 21, 2002
Revisiting the story of the 1937 New London gas
explosion
the worst tragedy involving schoolchildren in
American history
By Carlton Stowers
Lonnie Barber, janitor-driver for the New London
School, watched as young children climbed aboard
his bus, laughing and horse playing. The
elementary school students--released 10 minutes
earlier than their junior high and high school
classmates--were in particularly high spirits
that spring like Thursday afternoon of March 18,
1937. The next day had been declared a holiday
so students could attend the annual district
scholastic and athletic competition in nearby
Henderson. It was an otherwise unremarkable day,
except that because the much-anticipated casting
for the annual senior play had begun, only four
of the 740 students had been absent, a record
for the new school year.
The lanky, gray-haired Barber shifted the bus
into low gear and began a slow climb up a dirt
road on the outskirts of the East Texas
oil-field community. It was 3:20 p.m.
As Barber reached the crest of a hill, a sudden
force of air shook the bus. There was a growing,
loud rumble, then the shattering echo of an
explosion. Simultaneously, Barber and the
children turned their attention to the source of
the noise. Two dozen horror-stricken faces
stared back toward their 4-year-old school
building--which was no longer there. In a
bizarre, catastrophic moment that was to find
its way into the history of American tragedy,
there was nothing left but black smoke mixing
with a spiraling cloud of red clay dust and
sprayed rubble where the E-shaped building had
once stood.
Had Barber looked back a split second earlier,
he would have seen the same grotesque scene
eyewitnesses would later recall: a rumble as the
ground shook, then the walls of the two-story
brick building seeming to expand outward. The
red tile roof was momentarily lifted into the
air, then crashed back down. Natural gas, used
to heat the school's 72 steam radiators, had
been accumulating from an undetected leak in the
building's sub-basement for days, apparently
ignited when a teacher flipped the switch to
start an electric sanding machine in the school
workshop.
Barber hesitated only briefly, then squared
himself in his driver's
seat and pressed the gas pedal to the
floorboard. He knew the parents of the children
he was transporting would be worried about their
safety. Thus, even as word of the worst tragedy
involving schoolchildren in American history was
being flashed around the world, Barber, his face
twisted with agony, dutifully completed his
hour-long route just as he'd
done for years.
Only then did he hurriedly return to the school
to find out if his own four children were among
the survivors.
He was met by chaos. People were digging with
bare, bleeding hands into the smoldering rubble
in an effort to reach screaming victims trapped
beneath the twisted steel beams and brick. The
gruesome remains of dozens of young victims had
already been removed and placed along the edge
of the school yard. Those drawn to them,
searching madly for their children, quickly
realized that identification was going to be a
difficult task. Almost immediately, speculation
of the number of deaths began to climb: 400,
500, maybe more. A form of insanity swept
through the town. First on the scene were
parents who had escaped death themselves only
because a PTA meeting they were attending had,
at the last minute, been moved from the school
auditorium to the gymnasium. Soon, truckloads of
oil-field roughnecks, released from their jobs
as soon as word of the catastrophe reached
drilling sites throughout Rusk County, arrived
with bulldozers, winch trucks and acetylene
torches. Local Boy Scout troops were called into
action. Texas Governor James Allred, upon
learning of the disaster, immediately dispatched
National Guard troops. Red Cross and Salvation
Army workers poured into the isolated community
from throughout East Texas. Radio stations in
nearby Tyler and Kilgore discontinued regular
programming and served as a communications
network for the rescue operation.
From Dallas, 120 miles to the west, came 30
doctors, 100 nurses and 25 embalmers who,
because of the magnitude of their task and the
lack of facilities, were forced to perform their
work on tables set up on the school grounds.
Every available form of transportation--buses,
automobiles, pickups--was enlisted as ambulances
or hearses. Bodies were pulled from the wreckage
and lined up along a fence with school principal
Troy Duran assigned the task of identifying the
dead before they were transported to makeshift
morgues.
The thunderous blast claimed the lives of 280
students and 14 teachers. One of them was
11-year-old fifth-grader Arden Barber, the bus
driver's youngest son. His three other children,
including high school senior L.V. Barber, were
among the nearly 100 who escaped with injuries.
"I was in the study hall, which was located in
the far end of the building," L.V. Barber
recalls, "and I wasn't injured, except for a few
scratches. But my sister Pearl, who was sitting
next to me, was hit by a part of the wall that
fell and suffered a back injury. My younger
brother Burton was in the shop where the
explosion took place and somehow came out of it
with only burns and a few cuts. As soon as I got
out of the building I ran straight home to tell
Mother what had happened. She'd already heard
and was getting ready to go up to the school. My
dad was there when we arrived, and he told us
that Arden was dead but he hadn't been able to
find his body.
"My parents finally located him later that
night, in a funeral home over in Overton."
It was a story L.V. Barber rarely told during
his lifetime. "Even Dad never talked much about
the explosion after Arden's funeral," he says.
"I guess he, like everybody else, just decided
to try and put it behind him. He retired the
next year, then died in 1969. I can remember
newspaper people coming around every now and
then, asking him questions about that day, but
he never had much to say."
In modern Texas history, only two disasters have
claimed more lives: the Galveston hurricane of
1900, in which nearly 8,000 died, and the 1947
Texas City chemical-plant explosion that killed
more than 600. For years, in fact, many of those
who lived through the nightmare chose simply to
lock away their memories, as if by doing so they
could somehow move past that horrific day when
an entire generation had died.
Texas newspapers have occasionally dispatched
reporters to do "anniversary" stories on the
event that once made headlines worldwide,
briefly reviving the horror story and repeating
the question of why such a wealthy school
district flirted with the danger of piping free
natural gas into the school. Until recently,
however, the tale of enormous grief and guilt,
courage and triumph has remained a well-kept
East Texas secret. Only now, with word that a
New York journalist has received a high
six-figure advance to write a book on the
subject, does it appear the remarkable story
will be told to a national audience.
That night brought a cold driving rain. Ignoring
the weather, rescue crews dutifully went about
their work. Bill Rives, an Associated Press
reporter at the time, estimated that 2,000 men
dug and carried away more than 5 million pounds
of rock, brick and steel, moving it 100 yards
from the explosion site, in less than 24 hours.
Before they would finish, Rives wrote, "the area
where the blast had occurred looked as if it had
been swept clean by brooms."
Dallas' Felix McKnight, 26 at the time and also
working for AP, opened his first dispatch with a
sentence that would become a journalism classic.
"Today," he wrote, "a generation died." |
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Now 91, the former Dallas Times Herald executive
editor is quick to list the New London story as
the most memorable he covered during a 65-year
journalism career in which he also wrote the
lead story for the Herald on the Kennedy
assassination.
"It was dusk by the time Rives and I arrived,"
he recalls, "and workers were already clearing
away the rubble, searching for survivors. A long
line had formed and they were passing along
peach baskets filled with debris. We identified
ourselves and were immediately told that helpers
were needed far more than reporters." Thus
McKnight and Rives joined the brigade of
oil-field roughnecks and distraught fathers in
helping clear the area.
"I finally broke away after an hour or so and
ran over to this little oil-field shack where
there was a telephone," McKnight recalls. "It
was being guarded, and I was told it was for
emergency use only. But, finally, they let me
use it for two minutes and I was able to dictate
a brief bulletin."
After learning that a skating rink in nearby
Overton had been converted into a makeshift
morgue, McKnight went there in an effort to get
a more accurate body count. "The enormity of
what I saw there has never left me," he says.
"There were lines of small bodies laid out on
the floor, each covered with a sheet. I don't
remember seeing a one that was identifiable.
They had all been so mangled and torn apart by
the blast." He remembers parents identifying
their lost children only by the remnants of
clothing on the bodies.
A doctor gave McKnight a bucket of formaldehyde
and a sponge, telling him to sprinkle it onto
the sheets. "I'd do it for a while," he says,
"then, when my eyes began to burn so badly I
couldn't see, I'd have to go outside for a few
minutes."
Every building in the area--church basements, a
drugstore, the gym, a garage--was converted into
either a morgue or a field hospital. Every
funeral parlor within a 50-mile radius was
filled with victims. In Dallas, workers at a
casket company were put on around-the-clock
shifts to fill the sudden need. In Tyler, the
grand opening of the new Mother Francis Hospital
had been planned for the following Monday. The
ceremony was quickly forgotten, and it opened as
soon as word of the explosion reached the
hospital administrator. The need for bandages
and medication depleted the stock of every
drugstore for miles. Traffic in and out of the
community was bumper-to-bumper as the injured
were being carried away and the curious were
arriving.
Another Dallas-based newsman on hand was
22-year-old Walter Cronkite, a newly hired
United Press International reporter. Cronkite,
who would become a journalism icon covering
major events worldwide, now says that nothing
had prepared him for the scene he would find
upon his arrival in New London.
"I got my first inclination of just how bad it
was," the retired CBS Evening News anchorman
says, "when I got to Tyler and saw all the cars
lined up at the funeral home. It was dark by the
time I got to New London. I'll never forget that
scene.
"I can still see those floodlights they had set
up and the big oil-field cranes that had been
brought in to remove the rubble. Men were moving
around like a colony of ants, climbing up and
down the piles of debris, literally digging with
their hands."
Cronkite says he was there for four days, filing
stories on the explosion, its aftermath and,
eventually, the around-the-clock funerals.
"Grief was everywhere," he recalls. "Almost
everyone you ran into had lost a member of his
family. Yet they went about doing everything
they could to help each other. The men were
digging out the bodies and removing the rubble
while the women were helping the injured and
supplying coffee and meals for the workers."
For many parents the search lasted days. A
mother located one of her dead sons on the
school grounds and placed his body in the
backseat of her car. Then she began driving from
one funeral home to another, finally locating
the remains of her other child two days later.
Another went from body to body, clutching a
small piece of fabric left from a new dress
she'd sewn for her daughter. Only when she was
able to match the swatch to the clothing on one
of the dismembered bodies did she learn that her
child was dead.
Soon, an unsettling barrage of stories spread,
some true, some embellished, many wholly
fabricated. For a time, a rumor circulated that
one of the students, angered by the reprimands
of a too-strict teacher, had stolen several
sticks of dynamite from one of the nearby
drilling sites and had blown up the school. One
story that was true, however, involved a father
who earlier in the day had found his children at
a nearby fishing hole, playing hooky. He'd
scolded them and personally delivered them to
school just hours before the explosion killed
them.
Another woman, finding her dead 16-year-old
daughter, suffered a fatal heart attack. Two
mothers engaged in a hysterical fight over a
mutilated corpse, each insisting it was her son.
A young girl, uninjured by the blast, had jumped
to safety from a second-floor window but had
suffered a deep cut to her inner thigh when she
landed on a pile of rubble. Before her condition
was noticed, she bled to death.
A student, bleeding and in shock, approached
rescue workers, begging that they help his best
friend. When asked where he was, the boy pointed
upward toward highline wires that stretched
between two still-standing poles. Lying across
them, 30 feet in the air, was a body.
A young Boy Scout from a neighboring community
wandered through the debris carrying a sack, his
assignment to collect scattered shoes. Many of
them still contained the feet of mutilated
victims. A number of the bodies, in fact, were
unrecognizable. One youngster was finally able
to identify his dead brother only after reaching
into his pocket and locating the string he used
to spin his prize top.
Funerals were soon held at an assembly-line
pace--as many as a dozen were conducted
simultaneously. When all hearses in the area
were in use, pickup trucks were used to
transport caskets to the Pleasant Hill Cemetery.
Pallbearers literally raced from one grave site
to another, as did members of a local church
choir who had volunteered to sing a hymn during
each ceremony. Oil-field workers dug the graves.
As word of the tragedy spread, a sympathetic
world shared in the grief that had visited the
isolated community. First lady Eleanor Roosevelt
wired her sympathies, as did German dictator
Adolf Hitler. A Japanese elementary class sent a
telegram, expressing its sorrow. Soon a memorial
fund was established and donations arrived from
around the world. A Girl Scout troop in Kansas
sent 25 cents it had collected. A 5-year-old
Galveston girl who had been saving her pennies
to purchase a doll mailed them to New London,
saying she would rather they be used to
memorialize the dead children. Students at the
Cherbourg School in France conducted a drive and
collected $9.50.
The funds helped pay for a permanent reminder of
the tragedy that now stands across from the
rebuilt school: a 34-foot-high, $20,000
cenotaph, carved from 120 tons of Texas granite.
Engraved at its base is the name of each person
who died in the blast. |
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Story
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