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Texas Monthly - March 2001 |
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The New London School Explosion
by Anne Dingus
It was the worst school disaster in U.S.
history. In March 1937 a gas leak in the
basement of the 1,200-student Consolidated
School in New London caused a massive explosion
that killed almost 300 children and teachers. So
chaotic was the scene that an exact count of the
dead was impossible, although the tally of the
injured was pegged at 184. In a grim irony, the
blast was caused by a petroleum product that had
greatly enriched the small town just east of
Tyler. In the rubble, rescuers found a
blackboard still bearing one teacher's message
for the day: "Oil and natural gas are East
Texas' greatest mineral blessings. Without them
this school would not be here and none of us
would be here learning our lessons." On March
18, students in the first through fourth grades
had been dismissed as usual at two-thirty.
Shortly after three o' clock, according to
witnesses, "the ground bounced" and they saw "a
giant cloud rising" and heard "a terrible roar."
Hundreds of horrified relatives rushed to the
school; some 1,500 oil workers helped clear
debris, recover bodies, and search for
survivors. Garages, churches, and even the
roller rink were used as makeshift hospitals and
morgues.
Thousands of people turned out to help, to gawk,
to sell tombstones and insurance, and (in the
case of a young Walter Cronkite) to cover the
story. Governor James Allred declared martial
law to regulate traffic and rescue efforts. The
many messages of condolence included a telegram
from Adolph Hitler.
Horror stories abound. One family lost all three
children; one mother could positively identify
her ten-year-old's body only because the little
girl, while playing dress-up the night before,
had used a crayon to color her toenails red.
Critics leveled charges of negligence against
the school's officials, who had eliminated its
monthly gas bill by tapping, with permission,
into a Parade Gasoline Company line. Ultimately,
though, federal investigators blamed a faulty
connection and inadequate ventilation in the
basement, where the flipping of an electrical
switch in the shop room was believed to have
ignited the gas.
Although dozens of grieving families filed
lawsuits against the school district, a judge
dismissed those that came to trial; no official
was held liable and no fine was ever levied.
Within two months, however, the Texas
Legislature had passed a law requiring refiners
to add a scent to natural gas, which is
otherwise odor-free. Today, because of the
familiar stink of a chemical called mercaptan,
another tragedy like New London is far less
likely to occur. |
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Texas Monthly - March 2007 |
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The New London School Explosion
by Katy Vine
On March 18, 1937, the combined junior-senior
high school in the small East Texas town of New
London exploded without warning, killing nearly
half of the students and teachers. To
commemorate the seventieth anniversary of that
tragic day, survivors remember the horrific
events -- and the heroic response -- that
changed their lives forever.
IT IS CONSIDERED the worst school disaster in
U.S. history. On Thursday, March 18, 1937, at
3:17 in the afternoon, some seven hundred
students and forty teachers were inside the high
school in New London, about 25 miles southeast
of Tyler, when natural gas that had been leaking
into the classrooms from the basement ignited,
leveling the structure with a force that could
be felt for at least four miles in every
direction.
Poverty-stricken families who had flooded the
area’s oil fields during the Great Depression
had been proud to send their children to one of
the wealthiest rural school districts in the
nation. Its taxable value in 1937 had grown to
$20 million, and additional revenue from fifteen
oil wells on district property contributed to
top-notch facilities on a 21-acre campus that
included an elementary building, a gymnasium,
and even a lighted football field. But the crown
jewel belonged to children in fifth through
eleventh grade (“senior year” at that time): the
$300,000 two-story junior and senior high
school, an E-shaped building fully equipped with
a chemistry lab, an auditorium with a balcony,
and an industrial-arts workshop.
On that fateful day, thirteen minutes before the
final class was dismissed, a spark from some
equipment in the workshop triggered an explosion
that ripped through the building, killing
approximately three hundred students and
teachers. Survivors wandered the grounds only to
discover they had lost classmates and relatives,
and frantic parents were handed the horrific
task of identifying the mangled remains of the
dead.
While investigations exonerated all parties of
blame, stating that no one could have known that
the odorless gas had been accumulating, some
parents were furious to learn that the school
had canceled its natural gas contract to tap
into a free residue gas line, a widespread
practice at the time. But when the faulty
connection leaked, the results were lethal. The
Legislature’s swift passage of a bill requiring
the odorization of natural gas provided little
comfort to grieving families in the town of one
thousand people, and few spoke of the grim
incident until 1977, when a reunion broke the
four-decade-long silence. On this seventieth
anniversary of the explosion, we asked survivors
to share their memories.
Bill Thompson was in the fifth grade. He still
lives in New London: I remember the morning of
Thursday the eighteenth being a fairly cool
spring morning. It was nice, sunshiny. The PTA,
which usually met in the auditorium in the
junior-senior high school building, moved out to
the gymnasium, which was separate from the
school. Normally we would have gotten out early
because of that meeting, but just before the
last-period bell rang, it was announced that
we’d go ahead with our regular dismissal time:
three-thirty. In that last class of the day, I
asked a student to change seats with me so I
could flirt with a little girl in front of her.
Reba Moseley (whose maiden name was Richardson)
was in the ninth grade. She now lives in El
Paso: Some of my friends and I were complaining
that our eyes were stinging that morning. I
thought it was just me, because my glasses
sometimes bothered me.
Robert Hatfield was in the fifth grade. He now
lives in Amite, Louisiana: I didn’t want to go
to school that day, but I asked my mother if I
could stay home and she said no. So I started
on, got ready, walked out of the door, then
turned around and went back inside. I said, “Can
I come home at study period?” And she said no.
So I went off to school, and I was nervous all
day. I just didn’t want to be there. In the
next-to-last period I was in math class, and I
told the boy behind me that I was going home. I
asked the teacher, and she didn’t care. I asked
the principal, Mr. [Felton] Waggoner, if I could
go home instead of going to study hall. He said,
“Okay, as long as you get your lessons.” So I
started home. I didn’t live but half a mile from
the school. Just before I got to the house, I
saw my mother come out the front door. Since she
had told me not to come home early, I was fixing
to get tore up. We were standing about ten feet
apart when the school blew up.
W. G. “Bud” Watson was in the eighth grade. He
now lives in Kingwood: I was in shop class,
which was on the first floor, with about thirty
other boys. It was getting close to quitting
time, and I was doing some welding in the front
of the room when our teacher, Lemmie Butler,
must have pulled an electrical switch to get a
machine to work. Next thing I knew, I was
picking myself up outside of the building. I
don’t remember flying out the window, but the
building was still coming down.
William Follis was in the seventh grade. He now
lives in Nashville: I was sitting in the
next-to-the-last seat in the back of class, and
the teacher called me up to the front. She said,
“Get up here! Hurry up!” I said, “What did I
do?” She repeated, “Get up here!” So I started
walking toward her. I had barely reached the
teacher and sat down when the room went whoom! A
blast came across straight horizontal. All these
steel lockers that had been embedded in the wall
blew kids out of their seats and fell on top of
us.
H. G. White was in the fifth grade. He now lives
in Lindale: I started turning my head to the
left to look out the window, and then I heard a
big boom. It felt like something hit me beside
the head. Then it was dark. I was not
unconscious; I was awake. But I was sitting in a
hole and could barely make out moans and groans.
Everything slowed down.
Ledell Carpenter (whose maiden name was Dorsey)
was in the eighth grade. She now lives in
Kilgore: I heard a boom and a hissing sound,
just like splintering wood. I jumped out of my
seat and started a step or two. That was the
last thing I remember for a while.
Juana Fay Toennis (whose maiden name was
Beidleman) was in the sixth grade. She now lives
in Houston: I went up—I could feel myself go
up—and then the silt and cement and stuff came
down around me and then I came down.
Margaret Nichols (whose maiden name was Siler)
was in the seventh grade. She now lives in
Bowie: I had a headache that day, and I had gone
out to my uncle’s car to lie down in the
backseat. I guess I was asleep when a boulder
came through the front windshield. All of a
sudden I was covered with dust.
Nathan Durham was in the eighth grade. He now
lives in Pasadena: A concrete girder came
smashing down on the table in the library, where
I had been slunk down in a chair reading Moby
Dick. I had gone to the principal’s office
earlier that day to see if I could switch my
last class to general science, and he turned me
down, which was lucky for me. Everybody was
killed in general science except one, who was
crippled for life. As I sat there under the
table, scrambling to pull my legs free, I still
had the denial from the principal in my pocket.
When I finally got my legs free and stood up, I
remember seeing the study hall teacher;
everybody loved her. She was calm and directed
the kids out. “Don’t get excited,” she was
saying. “Don’t worry.” The kids weren’t crying.
They were in shock. They were walking down to
the stairwell, where you went down to the first
floor.
Dorothy Box (whose maiden name was Womack) was
in the eighth grade. She now lives in Henderson:
I was working in the library and checking out
this book to a boy when the blast knocked me
under a wood counter. Through the rubble, there
was a hole about the size of a cantaloupe—just
enough to get my head through. But I couldn’t
get through there. It was just enough for me to
see the light.
Ledell Carpenter: All that plaster and mortar
formed a white haze, like a thick fog. While I
couldn’t see my way around, I could hear people
talking by the teacher’s desk. So I started
stumbling over there, but I was walking on
injured children, because I couldn’t see where I
was going. I heard some girls by the window
talking, so I walked over to them. Two of the
pupils in my class were fixing to push another
one out, but I thought it was too far for them
to jump since we were on the second floor. I
said, “Come back down! Somebody will find us and
rescue us.”
“There was a deathly silence. Nothing. Like you
were in a vacuum. then all the sounds started
coming…”
Carolyn Frei (whose maiden name was Jones) was
in the fifth grade. She now lives in Lewiston,
Idaho: My teacher, Mrs. Sory, pushed Barbara
Page and me out a classroom window and crawled
through after us.
Barbara Page (whose maiden name was Moore) was
in the fifth grade. She now lives in
Weatherford: When Carolyn and I got outside, we
just stood there. We didn’t know what to do.
There was a deathly silence. Nothing. Like you
were in a vacuum. Then all the sounds started
coming—screaming, moaning—and people began to
run all over.
Billie Mathews (whose maiden name was Bullock)
was in the sixth grade. She now lives in
Kingsville: I had been shielded by my desk, but
it was covered with concrete boulders. One boy
was screaming, “My leg’s cut off!” We had been
in a classroom on the top level, but the whole
floor was now ground level—or just about—when we
landed. We didn’t remember feeling or hearing
anything. We just woke up and there we were. One
minute you’re listening to a book report, the
next minute you’re stuck under a pile of debris.
Maxine Lawson (whose maiden name was Kelley) was
in the sixth grade. She now lives in Caldwell:
Billie was saying, “Maxine, help me out!” And I
didn’t; I know I didn’t. She doesn’t remember
that. All the people in the front of my room
were killed: the girl reading the book report,
the teacher. I guess the wall fell on them.
Dorothy Box: I could hear the sirens coming in,
and I wondered if there was a fire. I could hear
a student screaming, “Don’t go down the stairs!”
There was a big boulder hanging over the
stairwell about to come crashing down. I was
yelling to my friend Pearl, who had been
standing to my left, and she never answered me.
I didn’t know at the time that she had cement
dust in her mouth.
Charles Dial was in the sixth grade. He now
lives in Houston: I had run home to get my band
uniform and was just sitting down to put on my
shoes when the school exploded. We heard
explosions all the time from boilers in the oil
field, but my mother said, “Something happened
over there.” I said, “It’s probably one of those
steam buildings blown up,” and she said, “It’s
too loud. You get over there and see about your
brothers. Get!” So I started off toward the
school, and on the way I ran into my older
brother, John, coming across the field. He was
in rough shape. He said he was in shop class,
and he asked the teacher to turn the band saw
on, and when he opened the electrical box and
pulled the switch, the electricity arced.
I told John to go home, that I’d find our
brother Travis. I couldn’t believe what I saw
when I got to the school. On the east wing there
were a few bricks that didn’t get knocked down;
on the south side there was a little of the
building left. The rest was all gone. Flattened.
The children were lying all over the ground.
Amos S. Etheredge was in the seventh grade. He
now lives in Ridgecrest, California: Just before
my brother jumped out a second-story window, a
girl got caught on some glass and died. So he
was careful not to touch the glass.
Martha “Peggy” Melton (whose maiden name was
Harris) was in the eleventh grade. She now lives
in Overton: I thought we had been bombed by
Hitler. I crawled out from what used to be the
ceiling and saw the children jumping out the
windows. One was hanging on there and bleeding
to death.
Marion Steen (whose maiden name was Walker) was
in the eleventh grade. She now lives in Houston:
I remember seeing a redheaded girl whose hair
had turned the color of cement. She was lying
outside. I don’t remember seeing anybody to talk
to. The people I saw were dead. I was walking
around and realized I still had a pencil in my
hand, and I remember thinking, “What am I doing
with my pencil?” I threw it down.
Reba Moseley: My friend Kay Challis and I
crawled under the table in the library to where
the wall should have been; it was blown out. We
sat with our feet on the outside of the wall,
surveying the area, and all the way up to the
highway we couldn’t see anything but piles of
debris.
Lucy Wells (whose maiden name was Eipper) was in
the tenth grade. She now lives in Diboll: When I
got out, I saw a body in a black suit, a
teacher. He looked like a big doll that someone
had dropped on the floor and was asleep. Then my
brain began to work a little. I could see the
building was gone. I knew that the body in front
of me was dead. But it was all like a dream.
Betty P. McBride (whose maiden name was Harden)
was in the seventh grade. She now lives in
Austin: When I emerged from the building, I made
my way toward the front, near the street. I saw
a playmate’s body almost covered in concrete
with a Popsicle still in her mouth. I went
around a car that was upside down with the
wheels spinning wildly. When I got to the front
of what had been the school building, I saw a
man crying and holding a little girl’s body, and
as I walked along, I saw what looked like the
child’s brain, which had fallen out of the back
of her head.
H. G. White: Once I got out, I walked over to a
water fountain in the gymnasium to wash off a
cut above my left ear, and an older boy walked
up with deep cuts on his face. A teacher threw
some water on him, and he fell down and expired
right there.
Max Holleyman was in the tenth grade. He now
lives in Lakeland, Florida: I went down the
stairway to where my sister’s room would have
been, and there was a child who was breathing
his last breath in the stairwell.
Nathan Durham: I worked my way over to the study
hall, and kids were streaming out and down the
stairs. Out the window I could see a good friend
rolling over and over on the ground.
Barbara Page: The mothers and teachers who had
convened for the PTA meeting started running out
of the gym.
Juana Fay Toennis: When I finally got out, the
first person I saw was my mother, who was
president of the PTA. She was climbing over the
wall to my classroom. She grabbed me and asked,
“What happened?” and I said, “I have no idea.”
Ollie Wyatt (whose maiden name was Bullock) was
in the third grade. She now lives in Austin: I
had just finished performing a minuet in the
gymnasium for the PTA and had walked up into the
stands to sit down next to my mother when all of
a sudden the building, which was wooden, started
rocking back and forth. There were just a few
doors in the whole gymnasium, and we all started
rushing outside. My mother grabbed me and we
kept going. We were rushing away from the
building because it was still moving. I was
standing near Mr. Waggoner when we finally
realized what had happened. He put his hands
over his face and said, “Oh, my God! It’s our
children!” People were yelling, “The world is
coming to an end!”
Nadine Dorsey (whose maiden name was Beasley)
was in the seventh grade. She now lives in
Kilgore: I never heard a sound. The teacher had
been giving us her assignment up in the front of
our second-story classroom, and all at once I
looked up and stuff had fallen in on me. I don’t
know how long I was unconscious. Some students
who had been on the football field climbed up,
and I could hear them talking. I yelled, “Get me
out of here!” and they pulled up whatever was on
top of me. But when we went to the door, it was
blocked. The wall to the outside had fallen out,
and Mr. Waggoner was standing down on the
ground, below. He said, “Can you get out,
Nadine?” And I said, “No, the door is blocked,”
and he said, “Well, jump and I’ll catch you.” So
I jumped.
“The rescue workers weren’t always checking to
see if kids were live or dead. They were just
getting them out.”
Within minutes, oil field workers began to
arrive and dig through the rubble. By nightfall,
as word of the disaster spread, at least two
thousand workers were tearing apart the site as
parents searched for their children.
William G. Moore Jr. was in the eleventh grade.
He now lives in Franklin, Tennessee: Once I
found my brother, Ira Joe, we started digging,
trying to get to the kids who had been covered
up. They’d say, “I’m over here!” and we’d dig in
that area. We were already working before the
oil field workers arrived.
Ira Joe Moore was in the tenth grade. He now
lives in El Cajon, California: We’d carry the
bodies to the buses and trucks that were parked
nearby and lay them out on the seats. I don’t
know what happened to them after that.
Ed Crudup was in the ninth grade. He now lives
in Mesa, Arizona: After lunchtime I had decided
to cut out of school and sit under a persimmon
tree on a nearby hill. When I saw the explosion,
I ran to search for my stepbrother. When I got
to the room where I knew he’d be, steel beams
were still holding up part of his room. I
hollered in, and a few kids hollered back. I
told them where I’d start clearing so they could
start working to the same area and crawl out.
Charles Dial: It wasn’t very long till the oil
field workers came. They started picking the
kids up and lining them against the fence on the
south side of the building. Ambulances and cars
began picking them up and taking them to
hospitals in the surrounding area, since New
London had no hospital. Some of the ambulances
were picking up dead children and taking them to
temporary morgues.
Marjorie Kinney (whose maiden name was Bryan)
was in the sixth grade. She now lives in Fort
Worth: When the parents began to arrive, they
took the buses and tied the horns down, turning
them into sirens. That went on all night long.
William Follis: After I came to, several minutes
after the blast, I started helping the rescue
workers dig kids out. Right in front of me there
were three little girls wedged together. They
had mortar dust caked in their eyes and noses
and mouths, and all we would have had to do to
save them was reach down and pull the mud out. I
knew the kids. One looked up and said, “Save
me.” Thirty or forty men were trying to dig them
out completely. I watched them die. Later on,
outside, I spotted one of my best friends, who
was still alive, but it looked like someone
split his brains open with a hatchet. The rescue
workers weren’t always checking to see if kids
were live or dead. They were just getting them
out. One girl was completely twisted around. The
poor thing—she was trying to cover herself up
because she was exposed. Everyone was working
just like they were in a daze. Nobody said
anything.
Mary Lou Moring (whose maiden name was Upchurch)
was in the sixth grade. She now lives in
Gladewater: I thought I had fallen asleep and
was having a nightmare and that if I screamed,
I’d wake myself up. Those sitting on the side
and in front of me were killed. I’m sure being
knocked under the desk was my protection.
Someone pulled me out and placed me on the
ground.
James Kennedy was in the sixth grade. He now
lives in Kilgore: The rescue workers were moving
toward me, and I couldn’t move anything but my
eyes but I could breathe fine. We were all
screaming for help. I heard Mary Lou screaming.
When some men came into our area, I said, “Get
her out first. I think she’s hurt worse than I
am.”
Nadine Dorsey: I started wandering around, and
Mother and Dad were already looking for me. I
found my mother. She was standing in front of
the building, crying. I had blood all over my
face, and my hair was white. She didn’t
recognize me. I walked up to her, and she looked
at me and did a double take. I said, “Mother?”
and she went into hysterics.
Mollie Ward (whose maiden name was Sealey) was
in the fourth grade. She later founded the
London Museum and became the mayor of New
London, where she still lives: When I got home
on the bus, there were about eight mothers at
the stop. They started screaming, “Have you seen
Geneva?” “Have you seen Brenda?” My mother came
out and started hugging and kissing me. She
carried me into the house because the mothers
kept screaming. Six of them lost their child.
Fran VanAssen (whose maiden name was Begley) was
in the fifth grade. She now lives in Fort Bragg,
California: My throat was so dry from the dust I
tried to get across the street to a lunch place
where I thought I could get a drink, but the
ambulances and cars were racing across so fast I
couldn’t get over there. I sat down beside a car
and leaned against a tire and watched the bakery
and cattle trucks unload so they could help
carry children to hospitals and morgues. It
seemed like I sat there for an eternity. My dad
had been looking for me in the room where I had
class and found a girl with a foot hanging off
who was wearing a dress that was similar to
mine, but he noticed she had on black
patent-leather shoes, and he knew mine were
lace-ups. Finally, someone told him where I was
waiting. He said that every step he took toward
me seemed like I was taking two away from him.
Max Holleyman: My dad had found my sister. She
was dead. He recognized her because the dress
she was wearing and the socks she had on were
material he had picked out for her twelfth
birthday, which she’d just had.
Opal Hamill (whose maiden name was Barton) was
in the ninth grade. She now lives in New
Braunfels: Mr. Waggoner laid my dead brother at
my feet. My brother was seventeen, almost
eighteen. He was a beautiful boy. He was captain
of the football team, co-captain of the
basketball team. Mr. Waggoner didn’t say
anything to me. I sat down beside my brother,
and he wasn’t obviously hurt. All he had was a
little round hole in his forehead, like maybe
the point of a nail hit him. He always carried a
handkerchief in his pocket, so I took it out and
wiped the mortar dust off his face. I sat there
too shocked to cry. Two ambulance drivers picked
him up and strapped him to a stretcher, and I
started following along behind them. Finally, I
said, “Where are you taking him?” They said they
were taking him to Longview [which was 26 miles
away]. Now, I was a kid; Longview seemed awfully
far. So I said, “No, that’s too far.” They
didn’t argue. They lifted him off the stretcher
and put him on the ground and went on to the
next body.
Marjorie Kinney: There was one area by the fence
for the dead and another area for the injured.
My friend’s daddy picked her up and laid her
with the ones who were dead, but she was only
unconscious. I don’t know how she got up.
Bob Clayton was in the fifth grade. He now lives
in Pittsburgh: When I finally came to, some guy
pulled me out from under the lockers and said,
“Sonny, where do you live?” I said, “Selman
City. I have to catch the bus.” He said he’d
carry me up to where the buses were, and he set
me down and said, “Wait right here. I’ll get my
car.” Then some other man saw me, and he could
see my head was bruised up, and he put me in the
front seat of an ambulance. In the back, kids
were stacked up like wood. I was thinking about
just taking the bus? I was half-crazy, I guess.
Lois Johnson (whose maiden name was Rainwater)
was in the seventh grade. She now lives in
Henderson: My dad was helping with the rescue
effort, and one of our neighbors told him that
she had seen me and that I was dead. He told her
he didn’t doubt it. When he came home and saw
me, he nearly dropped dead himself. He stood
there with his mouth open. He said he wasn’t
surprised at all to hear I was dead but more
shocked to find out I wasn’t.
William Follis: The impact of the devastation
didn’t hit me until I started riding my bike
home, and I started bawling.
Fran VanAssen: My mother was standing out in the
backyard, under a trellis over the gate, when
she saw my dad’s car drive up. I got out and
started going to her. I had blood all over me
and was skinned on my right-hand side. My hair
was snow-white from the plaster dust. I guess I
looked a fright. She wouldn’t put her arms out.
She kept saying, “That’s not my baby. That’s not
her.”
“… everyone was operating on adrenaline.”
After nightfall, martial law was declared in a
five-mile area around the school, and only
doctors, nurses, peace officers, rescue workers,
newsmen, and relatives of trapped children were
allowed near the area, now lit up with
floodlights.
Ira Joe Moore: It got cold as the devil, and it
had started raining when some workers from the
oil field finally brought the heavy-lifting
equipment. I think everyone was dumbfounded; I
don’t recall a lot of conversation. I think
everyone was operating on adrenaline.
William G. Moore Jr.: There were big slabs that
needed moving, but some you could handle with
enough people. When we’d come across a child or
a teacher, we’d try to get the rubble away from
them and get help to get them out.
H. G. White: Most of the rubble was moved with
bare hands, not machinery. A guy came by with a
truckload of peach baskets, and the workers
formed a line and passed the baskets filled with
body parts and cement chunks.
Nathan Durham: My dad and I helped our neighbor
put his injured daughter, Irma Hodges, in our
car; then we took off for the Henderson
hospital. Irma had been blown out with the main
debris. I could tell her hip was broken because
her legs were crooked, and she was unconscious
but she was breathing. She died in her father’s
lap in the rear seat of my dad’s car.
Ed Crudup: As soon as I got my stepbrother out
of the rubble, I ran home and told my mom I was
taking the car. I started picking up bodies and
taking them to Henderson. I’d pull up and say,
“I can take somebody to Henderson,” and they’d
put a child or a teacher in the backseat. When I
got to a hospital, I’d ask for help, and someone
would take the body out and I would leave.
Martha Moore (whose maiden name was Leath) was
in the eleventh grade. She now lives in Lufkin:
My daddy had a country grocery store on the
highway between Henderson and Kilgore, about six
miles from New London. He carried food over to
give to the Salvation Army, which was passing
out anything people could hold.
Nathan Durham: We stopped at the hospital in
Henderson and told everybody about the
explosion. We were the first people from New
London they had seen. Then we took Irma to a
funeral home, and just as her father was making
funeral arrangements, a fire truck pulled up,
loaded down with the bodies of kids. Some men
took the children off and began stacking them
along the hall.
Ed Crudup: After a while, hospital staffers told
me not to bring any more children; they were
filled up. Since I didn’t know where else to
take them, I quit taking bodies.
Mollie Ward: Sometime in the night a worker
found a blackboard that had been on the wall
that read “Oil and natural gas are East Texas’
greatest mineral blessing. Without them this
school would not be here and none of us would be
here learning our lessons.”
“Hospitals were the first place you looked.”
As hospitals in the nearby towns of Henderson,
Kilgore, Jacksonville, Tyler, and Overton filled
up, rescue workers set up medical and embalming
stations all over the region. Because there were
few telephones in the area, the Western Union
office in Overton was responsible for
dispatching most of the news of the disaster. By
ten o’clock Thursday night, reporters from major
media outlets had arrived. (Notable among these
was a cub reporter with the Dallas bureau of the
United Press Association, Walter Cronkite.) As
the news spread around the world, President
Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a statement asking
for the Red Cross and all government agencies to
render assistance, and world leaders, including
Adolf Hitler, paid their respects via telegram.
Jean Pearson (whose maiden name was Farmer) was
in the sixth grade. She now lives in Los
Angeles: I got most of the news from the radio
reports. The announcer would say, “A little girl
with a red checkered dress about ten years old
…,” and you’d hold your breath, because he’d
either say she was at such-and-such hospital or
such-and-such mortuary. It went on for days.
W. G. “Bud” Watson: Somebody had misidentified
me as one of the dead, and that night they were
calling out my name on the radio, saying I was
in the Kilgore morgue.
Randall Rogers was in the fifth grade. He now
lives in Bullard: I don’t remember anything
until I woke up in the Overton hospital. I had a
big cut on the top of my head, and my right arm
and right leg had been crushed. My nose and face
were caved in. I don’t know how they fixed me
up. I must have stayed there a few weeks or
more, so I didn’t know my brother had died until
a good while after that.
Bob Clayton: I had an ice pack on my head. I
wasn’t supposed to walk ever again. My reflexes
were gone. I guess my brain was swollen. One guy
in the hospital asked, “Is there anything you’d
like to have?” and I said, “Yes, sir, I’d like
to have a bicycle.” He said, “You get well and
I’ll buy you that bike.” But the other hospital
staffers told him that I wasn’t going to be able
to use it.
Katherine Owen (whose maiden name was Yeldell)
was in the tenth grade. She now lives in
Henderson: A neighbor of mine took me to a
doctor, who sewed up my busted lip. We didn’t
realize at the time that I’d been whomper-jawed
so badly on the inside that I’d never be able to
have children.
Bill Thompson: I was in a ward-type room with
several kids, and sometime in the night they
moved me to a cot to make room for an
unconscious boy who had jumped out of a window
and suffered a broken neck. In the early part of
the next morning he died.
Bob Clayton: Parents tracked blood on their
shoes from one building to the next. Before I
got to the Overton hospital, the rescue workers
took me to a hotel that had been taking in
injured children. They laid me on one of the
many mattresses they had placed out on the patio
as a sort of waiting room next to a little girl
named Marie Beard. The doctors came around and
said, “Let’s look at this boy,” and I said, “No,
take her,” and they did. My mother heard about
that later and thought I was brave, but I was
scared of getting a shot.
Gloria Gay Henson (whose maiden name was Davis)
was in the fifth grade. She now lives in Humble:
I was in the Jacksonville hospital for 29 days.
My forehead was cut deeply, split open, and
pieces of the blackboard I had been sitting next
to got in there. Pieces of granite and bone
would work themselves out of my skin over the
next few months. My nose was broken, and I
couldn’t sing anymore without sounding like I
was singing through my nose.
Mary Lou Moring: When I got home from the clinic
in Overton, my dad asked, “Is there anything you
want?” I told him, “I want pink shoes.” And he
bought me pink patent-leather shoes. To this
day, I think to myself, “They asked me what I
wanted and that’s what I said?” I was a little
girl, I guess.
Doris Morgan (whose maiden name was Shoemate)
was in the seventh grade. She now lives in
Freeport: I was with my parents, and we were
looking in surrounding towns for my little
sister. Hospitals were the first place you
looked. Then morgues, where lines of people were
going past children who were covered up with
blankets.
William Follis: I was asked to go to Overton the
next day to help identify bodies. Parents were
walking through a makeshift morgue, trying to
identify one-hundred-some students who were
lying side by side covered with sheets. I saw
fathers fight over dead children like dogs over
a bone, yelling, “That’s mine!” “No, mine!” I
saw children who looked like road kill; you
couldn’t tell if it was a boy, girl, or what.
And when I came to my buddy, my best buddy—his
head was flat as a newspaper. That’s when I lost
it. I went home.
Charles Dial: On Friday night we found my
brother Travis in Henderson. At first, I had
identified the wrong kid, because we all wore
blue overalls and the destruction had destroyed
children’s features. Then my little sister
brought me to another body and said, “No, this
is him over here.” We reached into the coat
pocket and found a cord that Travis had been
using to play with a top. I was thirteen and a
half, a kid myself. Something like this makes
you run around about half-there, you know?
Doris Morgan: I stayed in the car when we drove
up to a morgue in Henderson to look for my
little eleven-year-old sister. Somebody went in
with Daddy, and two people came out on both
sides of him, holding him up. We knew then that
he had found her.
Reba Moseley: I knew what my sister had worn
that day: a pretty red blouse, one I made in my
home economics class. In fact, I was upset
Thursday morning when she came out of her
bedroom wearing it. I said to her, “You knew I
worked on that and was waiting to wear it this
weekend!” I didn’t talk to her on the bus. That
Thursday night about dark we started looking for
her, driving through the cold and misting rain
to the surrounding towns within a ten-,
twelve-mile radius. We were looking for that red
blouse.
Verda Mae Harris (whose maiden name was Holland)
was in the seventh grade. She now lives in
Liberty: I can’t remember how I processed my
sister’s death. We didn’t get to see her. My
older sister asked my uncle Jessie if Daddy told
him how she looked. He said her head was gone
except for a few teeth up front. But she had
been in PE, and her tennis shoes had her name on
them; that’s how he identified her. About a
month later, my daddy had a nervous breakdown.
Looking at those mangled children just got the
best of him.
Ira Joe Moore: I don’t recall being sleepy, even
though it was daylight when I got home on Friday
morning. By that time, my friends and I were
just getting in the way of the activity.
Ed Crudup: I worked without going home. I didn’t
sleep. I was on a high. We were finding bodies
and pieces of bodies. I was seventeen years old.
What maturity I didn’t have came at that time.
“I don’t know how they found enough pastors.”
On Friday morning, after the drizzling rain
turned into a full thunderstorm, the weary
rescue teams dug out the final remains. By noon,
as skies cleared, exhausted workers began to
leave, saluted by National Guardsmen. Ten days
later, on Easter Sunday, after most families had
buried their loved ones in nearby cemeteries,
hundreds of visitors arrived for a memorial
service at the explosion site. Many of the
victims were brought to Pleasant Hill Cemetery,
located between New London and Henderson.
Jeanette Martin (whose maiden name was Freeman)
was in the fifth grade. She now lives in
Northport, Alabama: They held one funeral after
another at Pleasant Hill. I went to my sister’s
service, and there were many others going on at
the same time. I don’t know how they found
enough pastors.
Marjorie Kinney: We went to as many funerals as
we could. There were three or four every hour.
Myrtle Fay Hayes (whose maiden name was Meador)
was in the tenth grade. She now lives near
Hallsville: I was in such shock I couldn’t cry
for three days. My dead brother’s head had to be
tied up like you would a sore thumb.
Reba Moseley: I didn’t want to see my sister’s
body at her funeral, but someone guided me down
toward the casket, and when I opened my eyes, I
saw that her head was big as a dishpan, it had
swollen so much. It didn’t look like her at all.
That stays with you a long time.
Ledell Carpenter: We had a hard time finding
caskets, but once we got the affairs in order,
we had a combined funeral for my two sisters at
the First Baptist Church in Overton. All of us
were in shock. My mother had to be sedated. My
daddy took it hard; all of us did.
Nathan Durham: I was in shock for at least a
week. The doctors told my dad that I’d snap out
of it, so he took me on a little vacation to
Louisiana. We were fishing when I started having
these feelings, like my dad was keeping
something from me. I started asking him
questions, and when he began to tell me about
the accident, I started to remember: the
explosion, Irma Hodges dying in her daddy’s lap.
But I didn’t cry until I was back in New London
with the parents of my friends who had been
killed. I had missed the funerals and
everything.
Charles Dial: Some families lost two or three
kids. The moms and dads were devastated. A lot
of them didn’t want to go on. Afterward, a lot
of them moved away.
Bill Thompson: Everything had been changing
since the first oil blew in, people coming in
from everywhere. Lots of vice comes with the
boom, of course, and the good people who came
got lumped in with the dark side. Some referred
to the newcomers as “oil field trash.” That
changed after this disaster.
“It dawned on me then that my friends were
probably gone.”
Within two weeks of the explosion, children and
teachers returned to finish the school year in
portable buildings and makeshift classrooms.
There was little talk of the disaster, and prom
and graduation went forward as planned. To
prevent similar tragedies, Carolyn Frei
testified before a special session of the Texas
Legislature, which enacted the country’s first
law requiring the odorization of natural gas on
May 17. Yet some hard feelings remained as the
district rebuilt the school in front of the
previous site.
Bill Thompson: About ten days after the
explosion, we were trying to assemble classes in
the gym, but we had no gas in there and it was
cold. On March 29 it started snowing, and when
we got out, everything was solid white, a
blanket of snow.
The teacher called roll for our class to see how
many were there. Someone would answer, “He’s in
the hospital” or “His folks moved back to
Arkansas.” And sometimes it was that he had been
killed. When they called the name of the little
girl I had switched seats with, I realized she
had been killed sitting in my seat. I didn’t
know that till that day. I buried the guilt for
many years before I came to deal with it. I took
the blame for a lot of things.
Amos S. Etheredge: Today, if something happens,
they send in 1,500 psychologists to talk to the
kids. We didn’t have that.
Nadine Dorsey: I wanted to go to the school.
Finally, about a week later, Mother took me.
That was a shock. Even though I had been in the
blast, I didn’t realize the building had been
completely destroyed. It dawned on me then that
my friends were probably gone. I asked one of
the teachers wandering around outside the school
about the kids in my class, and he said they had
survived, but everybody in the two other
seventh-grade classes had died. I can’t explain
how that hit me. We’d been in school together
from first to seventh grade.
Margarett Woods (whose maiden name was Stroud)
was in the seventh grade. She now lives in
Henderson: Our class was quite a bit smaller
when we reconvened, and everybody was on edge.
One day, my teacher’s crutch fell on the floor,
and we were so startled we ran out the door.
Marjorie Kinney: I was in sixth grade at that
time, and there were four sixth-grade classes.
After the blast, about fifty students from those
classes were dead. This grade was hit harder
than any other.
William Follis: There were four rooms of us in
seventh grade. I’m guessing 120 kids, with 30 a
room. And when we went back to the temporary
rooms, there were only 20 of us. Where were
they? Killed?
H. G. White: While I was in the hospital in
Henderson, with my head wrapped in a turban, a
Shreveport Times reporter interviewed me. She
wrote that in one of my answers to her questions
I said, “Gee whiz.” Well, I don’t know where she
got that; I never said that phrase. But the
article was reprinted in the local paper. So
when I started going back to school, they called
me Gee Whiz. I could’ve shot her.
Martha Moore: The senior class held the prom at
a hotel in Henderson in the latter part of
March. Some of the students arrived in
ambulances, on stretchers, but we got everybody
there. There were about one hundred of us that
were supposed to graduate, and we had about
fifty at the end of the year. The prom was sad,
in a way, but we tried to make it as happy as we
could. Nobody danced because too many people had
broken legs. But we signed each other’s
yearbooks. When graduation time came, we held
the ceremony on the football field. It was just
a regular graduation. Those that were able to
come in wheelchairs and stretchers arrived and
did their best to participate.
Carolyn Frei: I was a very outgoing little girl,
so I wasn’t nervous when I got up before the
Legislature. I had just been through an
explosion! I met the governor and the
legislators; then I spoke for about five
minutes, asking them to pass laws preventing
this from happening again.
Billie Mathews: One lady told my dad to talk to
her husband, who was getting ready to shoot the
superintendent or whoever let this happen. My
dad went up and talked to him and calmed him
down. Then people threatened to sue and all
that.
Lois Johnson: Lawyers came to my uncle’s door
asking him to help in a lawsuit against the
school, and he almost got his shotgun.
Bill Thompson: The superintendent, Mr. [W. C.]
Shaw, was brought into court time and time
again. He was acquitted. Still, a lot of people
blamed him for switching to this raw gas. That
man had a burden no one else had. He had a
nervous breakdown. Some people wanted to tar and
feather him. Eventually, he resigned and left
town.
Charles Dial: Yes, they were angry. Especially
my father. He wanted to hurt somebody because
they took his child. I told him, “Papa, the
superintendent lost family too. He didn’t do it
on purpose. You can’t blame him.”
Amos S. Etheredge: That summer a lot of us went
to work scraping the mortar off the brick from
the old building. They were reusing it for the
new building. I turned fourteen in July that
year, but I got my Social Security number, since
you had to have one to work. I think we got 15
cents an hour, which was good pay back then.
Fran VanAssen: My parents heard that some
parents were saying that if they opened another
school, they’d kill all the kids in there.
Margaret Nichols: A lot of the parents of
friends who were killed found out that I’d
survived and threatened to kill me. It was just
the shock of it, I guess.
Barbara Page: One day my mother went to garden
club, and the women were talking about the
explosion. My mother said, “The Lord was so good
to me, because my two sons and daughter weren’t
hurt.” And of course she was grateful. But
another woman spoke up and said, “Well, why
wasn’t he good to me?” It broke my mother’s
heart. She never mentioned it again.
Marjorie Kinney: Two mothers of children in our
class never came out of their depression. They
had emotional problems. I can understand why. A
lot of people said, “God took the best children
and left the others.” That hurt. But man caused
it, not God. I guess people did what they
thought was the best at the time. That’s all we
ever do.
Amos S. Etheredge: In 1938, when we started
school in the new building, the students decided
to have a holiday on March 18. So we left the
building and gathered under a memorial that had
been built. And Mr. [Willie] Tate, who was a
science and math teacher, talked us into going
back to class. He said, “You’ve got to forget
this. You can’t keep thinking about it the rest
of your lives.” So we went back and finished
classes. Life goes on. It has to.
Max Holleyman: We tried to be as normal as we
could. Carried on with our regular activities.
Our sports teams played, and our band performed
as it had before.
Nadine Dorsey: No one mentioned the school
explosion after they built the new building.
With kids, it was just like it never happened.
It’s the strangest thing to me. But you know how
kids are. They can put things behind them. They
were more resilient than the parents in a way.
“When I got the invitation for the fortieth
anniversary, I thought, ‘Okay. I’m ready.’ ”
The success of the first reunion, held forty
years after the disaster, prompted biennial
gatherings, and in 1998 the London Museum opened
its doors, dedicating a large portion of space
to the explosion. On the weekend of March 16, an
estimated five hundred survivors and their
friends will gather at the high school
auditorium for the seventieth anniversary.
Opal Hamill: None of us could even cry when it
happened. We didn’t for years. At that reunion
we finally talked and cried, you know?
Nadine Dorsey: When I got the invitation for the
fortieth anniversary, I thought, “Okay. I’m
ready.” That’s the first time I cried. Before
that, I wouldn’t think about it. I blocked the
memory out of my life.
Amos S. Etheredge: I think we had two hundred
people at the first reunion. It wasn’t sad, like
some people thought it would be. It felt good to
think about it after all those years.
Bill Thompson: Around fifty years after the
explosion, I called the sister of the girl I’d
traded seats with and told her that I had to
unburden myself of this guilt.
Ledell Carpenter: I didn’t know Bill Thompson
from Adam or Eve. He told me he had asked my
little sister, Ethel, to swap seats with him
just before the school exploded. He said if she
had been in her seat, she wouldn’t have been
killed. I told him, “Well, Bill, it was her
appointed time. I could have gotten killed, but
it wasn’t my time. My brother was in the
explosion and he survived. This was Ethel’s
time.” He said he had never looked at it like
that.
Carmen Peppe (whose maiden name was Osburn)
started first grade in September 1937. She now
lives in Garland: There is never a day when I
don’t have thoughts about the New London event.
The day that my mother passed, she was holding
up her hands and saying, “Do you see all those
children up there?” We are sure she was
referring to the schoolchildren of New London.
Margaret Taylor (whose maiden name was McCune)
was in the third grade. She now lives in
Shreveport, Louisiana: This sounds morbid, but
the entire experience left me with a feeling
like I had stepped on that thin line that joins
this world with the other world. I remember
dreaming I was in a body of water and I could
hear my dead brother yelling, “Over here! Over
here!” Then I’d wake up. I’d almost resent, as a
young person, people who were old, who were
grieved for. Because they had lived all those
years.
Billie Mathews: I want to go to the next
reunion. Some survivors tell me, “I don’t live
in the past. I live in the future.” But so few
of us were left in that sixth-grade class! And
now there are even fewer left. I want to see
them. |
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