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After the truck had reached the hospital, the
driver noticed that the little girl, though
still breathing, had been placed alongside a row
of dead bodies. When he urgently called her
condition to the attention of one of the
doctors, he was told that she was so near death
that it would be futile to waste time attempting
to save her.
Marie's
older sister, who also survived, and her parents
would later tell her the remainder of the story
once she emerged from a 10-day coma. "The
bread-truck driver--I never learned his
name--picked me up, put me back into his truck
and drove me to a hotel in Overton that was also
being used as an emergency hospital.
"In all these years," she says, " I never learned
that driver's
name. But I'll
forever be grateful to him. He saved my life."
Today, Marie, 73, is married to her school days
sweetheart, 75-year-old Ike Challis, who was
also dug from the rubble.
Mrs. Walter Harris had traveled from nearby
Overton to place flowers on the grave of her son
James, a fifth-grade student in '37, when we
met. Standing near the headstone, she spoke
softly. "James was going to be competing in the
county meet the next day," she said, " so I'd
gone shopping to buy him a new shirt. Then I
heard about what had happened at the school and
went immediately to see about him and if I could
help with the injured."
She had worn a pretty spring dress that day, she
recalled, and by nightfall it was bloodstained
and matted with grime. "I wasn't
even aware of it," she says, "until another lady
offered to take me over to her house and loan me
some clean clothes."
It would be three days before she and her
husband found their deceased son, his body
stored in a car shed adjacent to a funeral home
in nearby Henderson.
As she told her story she began walking away
from James' grave site, then stopped and turned,
silent for several seconds. "That day," she
finally said, "I sent him off with 35 cents to
buy his lunch. When the funeral home returned
his personal belongings to us, the money was
still in his pocket.
"Even now, all these years later, I still
sometimes find myself wondering if he missed
lunch, if he died hungry."
It was not until 40 years after the explosion
that old schoolmates Pete Miller and Ray Motley
returned for a reunion and met each other on the
steps leading up to the rebuilt school. Even
before they spoke, Motley embraced his friend.
He had been knocked unconscious that day when
debris began to fall, and it had been Miller who
hoisted him onto his shoulders and carried him
to safety.
Those who survived all have stories, some they
are eager to tell, others they hold too private,
too personal to be shared. Many, like Bill
Thompson, spent years struggling with "survivor's
guilt." He was in fifth-grade English class that
afternoon, flirting with a classmate named
Billie Sue Hall. To get nearer to her, Thompson
persuaded another girl to switch seats with him
just minutes before the explosion.
The next thing he remembered was hearing the
blast and being hurled into the air. When he
fell back to the floor, he looked up to see the
ceiling falling toward him.
Though hospitalized for cuts and bruises, he was
well enough to be on hand for roll call when
school reopened. "I can still remember hearing
the teacher call the name of the girl I traded
seats with," he says. "Then, a second later, I
heard someone say that she had been killed.
That's
the day I first felt the guilt that I've
carried for a long time.
"As the years have passed, I've
gone past that memorial monument many times and
seen her name. And I think to myself that it
should be my name there, not hers."
Though the 77-year-old Thompson had often spoken
of trading seats with his 12-year-old classmate
that day, he was always careful never to mention
her name. Until recently. "I finally called
Ethel Dorsey's
brother, Gordon, in Farmington, New Mexico," he
says. "He listened to the story I'd
been wanting to tell him for ages, then said
something that made me feel better than I had in
a long time. He told me, 'Don't
you feel guilty about it.'" |
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