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Before 1937, the biggest news to visit the
region was the discovery of one of the world's
richest oil deposits beneath its sandy loam
soil. An Oklahoma wildcatter named C.J. (Dad)
Joiner, using unconventional search techniques
such as fortunetellers and divining rods, hit it
big in 1930, and the area went from the
Depression-era doldrums to staggering riches
almost overnight. New London residents, in fact,
had proudly claimed theirs the richest school
district in the United States. Where else, they
would boast, could one find a 15-acre school
campus with 10 pumping oil wells located on the
grounds?
One of Joiner's
promises to a civic-minded local resident named
Daisy Bradford was that if she would allow him
to drill on her land, the oil revenue he was
certain would result could provide an improved
school for the children of New London. In 1934,
the new $1 million school was built. Teachers'
salaries were increased. New books, band
instruments and a piano were purchased. Soon,
the Wildcats had the first football stadium in
the state lighted for night games. The county's
population grew from a pre-oil boom 32,000 to
65,000.
Why, then, given the school's
unlimited wealth, had it risked students' lives
to save $3,000 per year on heating fuel?
The school board, at the urging of
Superintendent William Shaw, had voted to heat
their million-dollar school by siphoning off
free natural gas, then a worthless byproduct of
petroleum extraction, from a nearby refinery.
This although petroleum experts considered the
odorless and highly volatile gas too dangerous
for commercial use.
In the days before the disaster, numerous
students complained of headaches and burning
eyes. Still it apparently never occurred to
school officials that a pipeline might be
leaking, that 6,000 cubic feet of gas had slowly
collected beneath the foundation.
Ten days after the explosion, school resumed in
makeshift classrooms on the New London campus.
The 287 returning students--a little more than
half the previous academic population--assembled
in the gymnasium as somber teachers quietly
called roll. The names of many drew no response
except for the occasional "He's
dead," or "She's
still in the hospital."
Slowly, the townspeople's
grief turned to outrage. Embittered parents
threatened civil suits against the school
district and the refinery from which the deadly
gas had been siphoned. The U.S. Bureau of Mines,
now a part of the Department of Interior,
launched an investigation, calling
Superintendent Shaw before a court of inquiry.
Despite the fact he had lost a son and a niece
in the blast, talk abounded for a time that a
lynch party would visit his home. Though
ultimately exonerated of any wrongdoing, Shaw
resigned. "Years after the explosion," a friend
remembers, "it was all he could talk about. He
never got over it."
In time, a single lawsuit--a "test" case--was
brought to trial despite the opposition of many
families who worked for the oil companies and
were thus reluctant to challenge their
employers. The litigation divided the community
to a point where shouting matches and occasional
fights broke out on the steps of the courthouse.
Finally, after months of testimony--much of it
from young students who had survived the
blast--Judge R.T. Brown stunned a crowded
courtroom by ruling that none of those named in
the suit could be held directly responsible.
One good thing came from the event. The Texas
Legislature quickly passed a law requiring that
a foul-smelling substance called methyl
mercaptain be added to natural gas. Soon, the
regulation was being adopted worldwide. It is
because of the New London school explosion that
natural gas used now has an easily detectable
odor.
Today, it is no longer called the New London
School. Since 1995 it has been known as West
Rusk Consolidated, and enrollment has grown to
861 students--almost as many students as New
London has residents (987).
Across the street from the school, where
Charlie's
Drug Store was once a favored hangout of the
community's
teen-agers, the London Museum and Tea Room
offers visitors a moving reminder of the tragedy
that struck just a few hundred yards from its
front door. There are photographs and newspaper
clippings, the telegrams and letters of
condolence received and artifacts claimed from
the wreckage. There's
a copy of the edition of Life magazine that
featured a lengthy photo story on the aftermath
of the explosion, as well as the brief newsreel
footage that showed in the nation's
movie theaters the week after the disaster. |
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Overseen by Mollie Ward, a fourth-grader in
1937, the museum features one area that has been
labeled "Ms. Wright's
Classroom" and displays an antique blackboard
salvaged after the explosion. There are remnants
of papers written by her English students, along
with dented lunch boxes and tattered spiral
notebooks found and saved by those who searched
the rubble.
"While I felt it was important to keep the
memory of what occurred alive," Ward says, "I
have to admit that I was concerned about the
reaction some would have to the visual reminders
of what was the worst day of many of their
lives."
She need not have worried. Now, when survivors
make their biannual pilgrimages to New London
for reunions, Ward's
museum is the first place they gather.
It's
also a place, and a town, to which I'm
drawn. For years, I've
seldom made a trip into East Texas without
detouring off Interstate 20 to visit New London.
For reasons I can't
fully explain, I'm
drawn to its people, to the memorial, to the
quiet drive into the dogwood- and tree-laden
outskirts where the Pleasant Hill Cemetery sits
atop a rise. I'm
drawn to the headstones that bear the
photographs of smiling children, their date of
death all the same.
In that time, I've
wondered why, in the grand scope of the nation's
history, the New London explosion has been all
but forgotten. Another disaster that occurred
just two months later in Lakehurst, New
Jersey--the flaming crash of the
Hindenburg--eclipsed the nation's
memory of New London, even though fewer lives
were lost.
Only now, it appears, has the world beyond New
London decided to take notice. Sara Mosle, a
former New York teacher and journalist, was
recently signed by Knopf to do a book on the
event. "My grandfather worked in the oil fields
near New London," she says, "and my mother was a
first-grader at nearby Arp when the explosion
occurred." An aunt, she says, was in the fourth
grade. "I remember them talking about it when I
was growing up, and the story has stayed with
me. Yet it seemed to have dropped from the
history books." Mosle's
book, tentatively titled Boom, will be published
in 2003.
I've
come to know some of those who were there and
survived that infamous day. As a journalist, I
attended the first of their reunions in 1977.
For some, I learned, it took nearly a lifetime
before they could speak about it.
Claude Kerce, who now lives in DeSoto, was in
the sixth grade, a student in Ms. Ann Wright's
class memorialized at Mollie Ward's
museum. "I remember one minute the teacher was
talking, then all of a sudden there was nothing
but dust everywhere," he says. "I ran toward the
window and Miss Wright was standing by it. I
pushed her out and then went out right behind
her. We lived about two miles from the school
and I ran every step of the way home. I never
even looked back to see what had happened."
As Claude was making his way home, his father, a
welder for Humble Oil Co., was driving past the
school. Seeing the horrifying sight, he steered
his pickup across the school yard, through the
debris, and immediately went to work digging in
the piles of rubble. It would be 30 hours before
he reached home.
Claude's
late brother G.W. remembered talking to his best
friend, Billy Roberts, when the building
exploded. A brick sailed past his head. He ran
outside onto the football field, looking back at
the mushroom of dust and smoke. Only later would
he learn that just four of the 16 students in
his 10th-grade geometry class survived. Billy
Roberts was not among them. Until his death, G.W.--former
minor-league baseball player, Exxon employee and
past president of the local school
board--carried a faded old school photo of
Roberts in his billfold.
Decades later, Arthur Shaw, a 10th-grader in
1937, remained confused about the sequence of
events. "I can remember sitting in geometry
class, talking to a friend of mine about
hitchhiking to Fort Worth the next day to see
the fat stock show," he says. "And then I heard
this rumbling noise. The next thing I can
remember is being under a pile of boards and
dirt, yelling for someone to help me.
"I vaguely remember someone taking me to the
basement of the Baptist church where the local
dentist and a hairdresser sewed some stitches
into my head. Then, I was in somebody's
truck and finally at the emergency room of
Mother Francis Hospital in Tyler.
"A friend of mine, Elbert Box, was also
there--he later had to have a leg amputated--and
we talked. At the time, we both thought it had
been only our classroom that blew up. We had no
idea the whole school exploded."
Shaw, who suffered a fractured vertebra, was
also unaware of the extent to which the tragedy
had touched his family. An older sister had been
in the library and escaped serious injury when a
wall behind her fell and killed a teacher and
several students in an adjacent room. Among them
was his younger sister Dorothy, a sixth-grader.
"My older sister later found Dorothy in a row of
bodies outside the school," he says. Also lying
among the dead was his 16-year-old cousin Sambo
Shaw, son of the school superintendent.
Marie Beard was a second-grader waiting for her
older sister to get out of class when the school
exploded. Suffering a concussion, severe damage
to one eye and a broken pelvic bone, she was dug
from the debris and placed into a bread truck
that was being used as an ambulance. "There were
a lot of bodies in there," she remembers, "but a
boy named Billy and I were the only ones who
were still alive." |
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