Gone at 3-17

by David M. Brown

  “The Wildcats were invaded by a four cornered situation last Friday afternoon and were unsuccessful in their attempt to take first place; they, however, took fourth which was better than nothing,” Rainwater reported, adding glumly that just one team finished lower than the Wildcats. Henderson won first place, Overton was second, Gaston placed third, and Carlisle High School was last. “London was fourth because they had only two men that could take a little punishment,” Rainwater said.

  Star athlete Alvin Gerdes was one of the two standouts. Of the nineteen points scored by New London, Gerdes won twelve. His injury from football season clearly was mended.

  Students grabbing the school newspaper, then as now, were more interested in gossipy chatter and whose names were dropped, especially if they were theirs, than actual news items. In this regard, Gerdes again was a frontrunner. Besides appearing in the sports news, Alvin was mentioned prominently elsewhere. Under a column called “Believe It or Not,” the item was a teaser: “Alvin Gerdes and Winifred Diamond seem to be getting friendly.”

  When New London math teacher J. H. Bunch left his class unattended for a few minutes during the last period, his students had begun talking, laughing, and cutting up. It got so noisy, recalled tenth-grader Arthur Shaw, that English teacher Katie Mae Watson, finishing a lesson in an adjacent classroom, sent one of her students to Bunch’s class to order them to quiet down.

  Sambo Clifton Shaw, Arthur’s cousin and close friend, sat at a nearby desk in Mr. Bunch’s classroom. They were double cousins—their fathers were brothers and their mothers were sisters—and grew up as brothers. They were both seventeen—adventuresome, fun-loving tenth-graders. Sambo, Chesley and Leila Shaw’s youngest child, showed an independent streak also evident in his headstrong and rebellious older brother, Rayford. Unlike Rayford, who had had a confrontation with his father and dropped out of school, Sambo managed to steer clear of Chesley Shaw’s wrath, although Sambo told some whoppers to do so.

  Once, when Sambo stayed overnight at Arthur’s house, Sambo decided he would be the first person to ride a young, unbroken stallion the family kept in a corral on the farm. He managed to straddle the wild horse for a few moments before it bucked him head over heels through the air. Instead of breaking the horse, Sambo fell so hard he broke one of his legs. Knowing his father would be angry at him for trying to ride the horse without permission, Sambo invented an elaborate tale about how he had tripped on a tree root when running down a hill to jump into a swimming hole.

  On another occasion, Sambo tagged along with Rayford and several of his older cousins when the boys went to a beer joint outside Henderson. His mother and father thought he was going to a picture show. When the boys were getting ready to leave the honky-tonk, somebody dared Sambo to slip out with a small table lamp as a souvenir of his first visit to a bar. He made it to the parking lot before the bartender caught up with him and cracked him on the head with the butt of a pistol. Sambo received a gash on his scalp but counted himself lucky the bartender hadn’t called the sheriff. The boy didn’t have to think long to come up with a story. Chesley Shaw often remarked that downtown Henderson’s brick streets became dangerously slippery when wet. Sambo told his father he slipped on a wet patch of street, fell, and struck his head on a license plate bolted to the back of a parked car. Chesley Shaw bought the story, though by then he had to be thinking Sambo was hopelessly accident prone.

  After Katie Mae Watson sent a warning to Bunch’s classroom that the students must immediately cease their noise, a frantic hush fell across the room, Arthur Shaw recalled.

  Nobody was going to risk getting called out and spanked—then forced to stay after school and write “I will not talk without permission” five hundred times on a blackboard—with only a few minutes to go before the bell would free them for a three-day weekend.

  The Reverend Robert L. Jackson drove toward New London High School. He heard the sudden thumping of a tire going flat and pulled off to the side of the road. He had a spare tire and jack in the trunk, so he wouldn’t be stranded; the blowout meant, however, Jackson probably wouldn’t make it to the school before classes let out. It was already three o’clock, and it would take at least a half hour to change the flat. Jackson had a small typing project he’d hoped one of the typing students would do for him, but now he’d have to find another way to complete the project. He stepped onto the road and walked back to the trunk.

  While Jackson knelt to jack up his car, a woman he knew, Euda Alice Walker, drove past in the direction of the high school. She was probably heading to the PTA meeting, Jackson figured.2 They exchanged a quick wave.

  12

  Last Dance

  Dozens of women, some dressed in Sunday finery and others in the plain clothes of housewives taking a break from afternoon chores, walked in pairs and small groups from the parking lot in front of New London High School toward the main entrance of the school. The double doors acted like a dam, blocking their flow, backing many of the mothers onto the schoolyard on both sides of the front walk. Word passed quickly among the women that a sign posted at the front door was directing them to the gymnasium behind the high school. The PTA meeting was being held in there instead of the school’s auditorium, the regular meeting place, the sign informed.

  The group, more than fifty mothers in all, set off for the gym, some of them going on into the high school and down a hall toward a rear entrance and others walking around the building on the outside, through a sun-warmed afternoon as pleasant as any March day they could remember.

  While the women formed a line to enter the gym, streams of grade school children dressed in dance costumes marched single file to the command of teachers who had them halt and stand quietly until the mothers filed inside and found seats on the wooden bleachers.

  One of the mothers filmed snippets of the crowd with a home movie camera.1 Cameras sold for use by amateur filmmakers in the 1930s were nearly as costly as new cars, but one or two of the more affluent families in nearly every community owned one and brought it along on vacations and to events precious enough to be preserved on expensive film.

  In the barn-shaped, wooden gymnasium, the women waited for their children to dance the Dances of the World.

  The small movie camera whirred as a chain of second graders dressed as feathered Native Americans whooped and bounced, arm in arm, across the floor. Older boys in Spaniards’ sleek, black garb and banded, flat-brimmed hats danced the flamenco with young ladies, gilded in mantilla veils of delicate lace and long dresses that swayed to the rhythm of castanets.

  Minuet music, haunting and mellow, coaxed another round of dancers across the polished hardwood floor of the gymnasium. The girls wore white blouses, the boys white shirts.

  The finale, the Mexican Hat Dance, brought boys bobbing beneath sombreros and girls whirling in white blouses and green and orange skirts. They floated like wind-strewn wildflowers. The grainy film captured the reflected light of dancers moving as children should—deliberate and rapturous.

  It ended. The mothers applauded wildly. Some celebrated their private, winsome moment with a deep sigh.

  The children bowed, filed out the door, and walked toward waiting school buses or clustered here and there near the high school to play games with their classmates until their mothers’ gathering broke.

  The dance show had ended on schedule at 3:15. The clocks now showed approximately 3:17 p.m.

  Part II. Terror

  13

  3:17 p.m.

  Shop teacher Lemmie Butler, seated in his classroom on the lower level of the rear of the building, finished fiddling with the temperamental electric sander. He walked toward the power switch—a short metal blade, hinged on a wall-mounted plate, with two contacts open to the air spilling through the basement crawlspace door beside it.

  John Dial, a fifteen-year-old freshman, bent his palms around the sides of a board and lifted it toward the band saw’s blade. He turned his head to the right and for a frozen moment caught Mr. Butl
er’s eye.1

  Butler turned and lifted the switch. Metal neared charged metal. A blue filament of plasma arced. The air caught fire.

  A violent heat, the concussive single beat of a monstrous heart, conjured chaos from oxygen. The shop became a blast furnace, white hot. Scorched and twisted inside a burning shock wave, Lemmie Butler died first. The blast flicked Dial and his classmates backward into the sharp concrete cloud of a disintegrating wall.

  Flames raced back through the four-foot door into the crawlspace. The atmosphere fed madly on itself in a frenzy of deflagration. Every molecule of 62,500 cubic feet of air screamed and rent itself away from every other. A concrete basement wall, 250 feet long, cracked from the ground and tilted on its heels. Soil below and sturdy foundations around would yield no more, caging the relentless pressure, leaving one way out. The dragon spread its wings.

  At its base the school trembled. The motion intensified to a menacing rumble until, mere seconds later, the entire structure shuddered violently. The explosion burst skyward with the force of seventy pounds of trinitrotoluene (TNT) detonated beneath each square foot of basement ceiling.

  In the English class above the shop, teacher Lizzie Ellen Thompson felt the tremor sweep through the building as the foor, walls, and ceiling rattled and shook.

  “Jesus help us,” she said.2

  The maelstrom swallowed her.

  The first foor shattered like porcelain as a blazing torrent erupted through the poured concrete slab on which the long building stood. Cement, timber, and brick splintered. Rolling balls of gas, burning blood orange, howled upward in a dense, searing, forty-ton hurricane. The first foor, blown to shrapnel, rushed toward the ceiling. Windowpanes shattered in sprays of glass. Desks and chairs hurled apart. Drinking fountains snapped loose from plumbing fixtures. Classroom walls disconnected and were pulverized into clouds of chalky gray powder. Throughout the chaotic scene were children and teachers, faces, fingers, nerves, and bone. All was being torn to pieces.

  Helen Beard, walking through the hall with her sister at her side, suddenly was propelled upward, higher and higher, until she seemed to float alone and terrified in the sky. Twisting downward as her consciousness began to flee, she saw toylike cars and tiny men. The men were running. Nothing made sense.3

  The blast enveloped Marie Beard within a chamber of chaos, instantly knocking her unconscious.

  Steel lockers shot through brick walls like cannonballs. A textbook soared up through the ceiling and pierced the roof, leaving part of the book protruding through the top. A phonograph few out of the music room and burst against a wall. A pair of scissors, riding the blast wave, stabbed deeply into the plaster of another wall. Thick timbers snapped like pencils. Iron girders, doubled over and twisted, fell, slicing in two the people between them.4

  Students in Miss Louise Arnold’s room braced as the second-story floor buckled beneath them, tearing free from its walls. Children felt their stomachs reach for their throats as the room dropped and banged down against the ground floor. The children, scattered and dumbfounded, gazed at one another with faces powder white from plaster dust. Miss Arnold and four students lay dead.5

  The sound of the explosion reached the rear of the north wing, where twenty-two students were taking a test on Treasure Island in Grace Mc-David’s English class. The building began crackling.6

  Miss McDavid screamed for the children to hurry to the front of the room. They rushed toward her and huddled around her as the roof crashed down behind them and a gritty, choking cloud of gray dust swirled into the room.

  Shrapnel in Miss Lizzie Thompson’s English class spun through the air, slashed open Corine Gary’s scalp, and crashed into the girl’s shoulder. A mass of tumbling bricks and mortar collapsed on Miss Thompson, crushing her.

  In a study hall next to the library, Juanita Gibson was in the middle of drawing a circle on a sheet of paper when her pencil made a sharp jut—away from the circle’s curve.7

  Books in the library spilled off the shelves. Joe King, reading a news article about Amelia Earhart and daydreaming about a sports event scheduled for the next day, was thrown from his chair as a deep, rolling rumble shook the floor. The walls split and the explosion’s fierce pressure forced a mass of thick dust through the gap, filling the library in seconds.8

  At calamity’s fringe, some perceived the explosion as eerily muffled. Joe Watson, a running back on the football team, was in study hall reading Gone with the Wind when “all of a sudden, it came.” A wall fell toward him.

  Clinton Barton felt a powerful vibration just before the glass partition between the library and study hall shattered. L. V. Barber and Olen Poole, both in study hall, saw an ugly cloud pouring into the room. The building was shaking apart.

  Clarence Slater, one of Lizzie Ellen Thompson’s students, saw the walls burst out and the ceiling rip upward. He flung himself beneath his desk as debris fell and shifted all around him, pinning him down.

  At the end of the building opposite the shop, the detonation tore through a classroom where Mrs. Lena Hunt’s math lesson was nearly done. A moment later, the teacher and twenty-five students were gone, engulfed by whirling rubble and collapsing beams.

  “Crawl under your desks!” screamed Mrs. Homer Gary, a teacher in charge of the study hall, as the building shook and the room darkened with dust.9

  Unbridled, force and fire passed through the scrambled mess, licked away the corners of the roof and leapt, roaring, into the open air. A sheet of flame flickered red against the blue March sky.

  A two-ton concrete slab, tossed into the sky, hurtled toward the car that grade-school student Bobby Joe Phillips had been ordered by his mother to go sit in a few minutes earlier. The long rectangle slammed into the driver’s side with the force of a highway-speed collision, tearing through the door and side wall. Shards of metal and glass filled the interior.

  Seventh-grader Lillian Anderson was nearing the building, just about to go inside to get a drink of water, when a broken brick crashed through her skull.

  Fifth-grader Bill Griggs was outside, emptying a wastebasket from his classroom, when the area of the building he’d just left disintegrated, instantly killing nearly all those in his classroom.10

  Superintendent Shaw, standing on the front walk, began to turn. A deep, muffled sound came first, and then the blast wave, which threw him to the ground. Debris, small and sharp, sliced one cheek, then the other. On his back, the superintendent saw the red-tiled roof of his school rise into the air. D. C. Saxon, the janitor lying next to Shaw, tried to stand and flee this unthinkable, irrational spectacle, but the rushing debris cloud toppled and pummeled him from behind.11 Farther away, a man stood frozen, watching the school bulge outward and snap apart. The entire structure lifted and dropped in on itself. Debris shot upward, tearing through the slower-moving floors and roof. The high school’s side door exploded off its hinges and shot toward Junior High Principal Felton Waggoner, as he was approaching it from the outside steps. It missed, but another missile grazed his head, stunning him. He fell on his back and saw pieces of the building arcing across the sky above, trailing tendrils of reddish brown dust. Exterior walls collapsed outward, toppling down into the schoolyard. The disintegrating roof, still rising high above, cracked into massive sheets and began to fall. The pieces smashed into the school’s ruined center, sending a second wave of dust and wreckage spiraling against the sky. Smoke and steam and dust swirled from beneath what eaves of the roof remained.

  “Oh my God!” cried the mother of Helen and Marie Beard, who was sitting in her car in a parking lot in front of the high school. She’d been watching for her girls to come out the front door; instead she saw the building mushroom into the sky and pancake down. A force spun the car around in the opposite direction. Bricks smashed through the rear windshield and bombarded the right fender.12

  The blast wave pushed a wall of fine sand, broken cement, and pulverized glass. It sheared walls even with the ground and scoured paint from wind
ow frames and door casings. It stripped flesh from bones, leaving some as bare and bleached as if they had been drying in the sun for weeks. It roared through the thick brick exterior of the school, carrying tiny, broken bodies into the air. Its freedom found, the blast began to fade into the atmosphere, relinquishing to gravity the children it had stolen. Twisted forms dropped onto the lawn, the road, and the giant pile of rubble. A bread truck passing on the road in front of the school, about seventy yards from the building, screeched to a halt as the driver tried to avoid hitting the small boy who had fallen from the sky. The driver jumped out and found the boy sprawled on the pavement, bleeding and unconscious. He loaded the child into his bread truck and sped away to find help.

  Elementary school children, lining up to board their buses, screamed in panic. A teacher herded as many as she could into a nearby ditch as the rolling gray cloud erupted toward them. Debris—concrete, wooden, and human—rained on the vehicles.

  Molly Sealy, ten, felt something jar the bus she was sitting in in front of the grade school. A teacher on the bus stepped outside, and Molly and other students followed her. They saw smoke and debris rising into the sky.

  “Get these children back on the bus!” another teacher shouted. The group fled back into the bus trailer.

  “The children were wild with hysteria,” Louise Taylor, principal of the elementary school, said. “Some tried to run toward the school. Some fled toward our building. Others tried to crowd onto buses.”13 She knew what lay beneath the collapsing wreckage across the way, but could do nothing to help them. She turned to her children and ordered them into the buses.

  “Drive away!” Taylor yelled at each driver. She came to Lonnie Barber’s bus. “Get them away from here!”