Gone at 3-17

by David M. Brown

  A mix of shock, confusion, and fear crowded Barber’s instincts. Four of his children were inside or near the building that had just exploded. Barber wanted to spring from the bus and plunge into the disaster, to tear apart the pile of stone between him and his children. He realized, too, that the parents of the children on his bus would soon feel the same way, once they heard what had happened. Duty and love battled fiercely for primacy. Clenching the steering wheel, Lonnie Barber drove away and took the children home.

  The cavernous wood-frame gymnasium behind the school, where the parent-teacher association was meeting, quivered from the explosion’s tectonic thump. A rafter shook loose and clattered onto the bleachers. Heads swiveled around, and eyes snapped wide as hunted doe. Red dust billowed through the joints in one of the doors, and seeing it, Lorine Zylks Bright took a halting step back.

  Drawn by the sound of windows shattering near the gym’s roof, Mildred Evans looked up and saw treetops outside lash about like willows in a gale. Teacher J. H. Bunch and senior high student Catherine Hughes had just reached the gym. Bunch pivoted toward the nightmarish scene. Nearly everyone in Catherine’s business class had already died.

  “It was just like a West Texas sandstorm—black, heavy fog. The heavy brick dust covered the grounds. Bricks and glass fell around us. We couldn’t see for three or four minutes. It was black as night,” he said.14

  The dust cloud rushed toward Carroll Evans, his neat white home, and his young son playing outside. Evans scrambled out of the house, racing the debris arcing through the air toward his boy. He reached his son and, bending over, shielded the child’s head in his chest. The cloud enveloped them, and they began coughing, gasping. Picking up his child, Evans ran. They were suffocating. Bricks, heard more than seen, hurtled through the air. Evans nearly tripped down the ditch between the school and his house, and scrambled madly up the other side, his son wailing. Mildred Evans dashed out of the gym. She saw her husband race toward their child and vanish into the cloud. She ran to their house and arrived with the opaque dust. Putting one hand on the door lest she lose her way, she screamed for Carroll and Duane. Her voice, shrill and terrified, carried Carroll’s name through the murk. He followed the sound, clasped her arm, and together they stumbled inside their home.

  A throng of mothers rushed the other way, pushing out of the gym and into the choking powder. They scrambled, blind, toward the wreckage hiding their children. Lorine Bright began a frantic search for her daughter, Georgia Lorine, who went by the nickname Darween. After finishing her dance at the start of the PTA meeting, Darween had asked to go out and play in front of the high school with a friend. Her mother had consented.

  “With returning awareness, I realized that something had to be done,” Lorine Bright recalled in her memoir of that day. “I thought, ‘I must lift every bit of that rubble to find my child crushed beneath.’ I felt the urge to claw at it with my hands.”

  As Bright stumbled around the corner of the building, she saw a girl standing behind a second-story window. The girl looked terrified, mouth agape in a scream, her eyes drawn to Lorine Bright’s eyes. The girl’s eyes spoke: Save me. Bright could do nothing for her, and she saw no sign of Darween between boulders and boards scattered across the lawn where her daughter had gone to play. Lorine Bright briefly snapped and started walking in circles, bent at the waist, clucking nonsense at first, and then praying over and over: God, don’t let my child die!15

  A short distance away, hidden behind wreckage, Darween Bright’s face was turned toward the sky, frozen. She felt certain she saw her mother shoot out of the gym like a rocket soaring into the heavens.

  Mrs. Phillips, Bobby Joe’s mother, ran to the parking lot, blood pounding in her ears, to find her seven-year-old son. She emerged from the choking cloud of dust and saw the remains of the car to which she’d sent her boy. Falling to her knees, she screamed. The car was crushed nearly flat. She was unaware that Bobby Joe was huddled out of sight, frightened, clinging to the children whose games he’d joined after disobeying his mother’s order to stay in the car.

  Eleven girls in the home economics cottage directly behind the high school rushed outside into the dust storm. A great crashing noise, a cascade of broken glass and metal, had followed the roar they had heard. Outside, a student lay on the ground with her leg shorn off at the knee. The girls picked her up and carried her away, looking for help. Cletis Wells, a senior, broke away from the group and began searching for her sister, Doris Lucille. She quickly found her, slumped on the ground. Cletis’s small hands wrapped around her sister’s wrists as dust billowed around them and bricks fell to the grass. Her eyes welled with tears. She could find no pulse. Cletis stood and ran, her cries for help joining a rising chorus of screams.16

  Inside the tangled wreckage, hundreds of children awoke in a nightmare. A thick, gritty dust cloud obscured all but the closest chunks of rubble around and on top of the living and the dead. Consciousness brought with it pain and the knowledge only that something monstrous had come. Bill Thompson wondered if the school had been bombed from above. The roof had collapsed on his class, breaking in such a way that it pinned Thompson’s face and arms against the desk he’d swapped with Ethel Dorsey. Many of his classmates were crushed. Under another rubble pile, Walter Freeman struggled to breathe in the thick air. He did not know it, but his back was broken. He bled and felt the weight of another person’s body pressed against his. Somebody nearby moaned, and then fell silent.

  Eighth-grader Erwin McMilton, thirteen, had jumped to his feet when the building began to vibrate, and he plunged under the teacher’s desk. Now the dust stung his eyes and clogged his throat. Panicked, he picked his way over sharp concrete and brick, and heaved himself from a window to the ground outside. At the other end of the ruined building, Corine Gary’s head stung from the grit-filled gash in her scalp. Warm blood streamed down her face. She clawed for her friends, Chloe Ann Carr and Irene Emma Hall, who had been sitting on either side of her. She tried to pull them free, but they would not move. A hand gripped hers. “They’re dead,” the person said, helping Corine stagger to her feet and leading her off into the dust-filled cave of broken hallways.17 Juanita Gibson, at another end of the school, ran with her study hall classmates through the same suffocating cloud. Jostling blindly through a corridor, she tripped and felt the bracelet her mother had given her begin to come loose. Juanita paused, pressed against a wall, the gritty air rushing in and out of her lungs in gasps. With shaking hands, she fastened the bracelet and then followed others to a bank of windows. They saw a drain pipe attached to the wall outside but could not reach it. Through their feet they could feel the shifting vibration of parts of the building still collapsing. Juanita climbed through the window, hesitated, then leapt. She caught the pipe, scratching her hands on the rough brick exterior and zipped to the ground.

  The windows, ringed in shards of glass, beckoned all who could see them. They were hinged at the bottom and opened outward in a half-V. Most had already been blown open. Children in the second-floor library peered out. The drop to the ground looked to be twenty feet at most. L. V. Barber squeezed through the opening first and shoved off, pushing himself far enough away from the building to clear the same open windows on the ground floor. He landed hard on his feet, jarred but unscathed. Barber looked up and saw Evelyn Rainwater ready herself on shaky knees and leap. She did not push hard enough and fell too close to the building, plunging through a window below. Others landed badly on soft grass or hard, angled debris, snapping their legs and arms. Olen Poole had started to jump but, seeing this, decided to try another escape. He and the students remaining in the library formed a human chain and shuffled along a dust-filled, sagging corridor. Shaved brick and glass, suspended in the air, stuck to their eyes and coated the insides of their mouths. They felt their way toward a stairwell, but the stairs were gone. They pushed on to the next stairwell. It was mangled and clogged, but passable. They picked their way down and escaped through a gaping hole in t
he wall.

  On the lip of a destroyed wall of what had been the second story, a group of children huddled together. Donald Mathis and others from his class were stranded. The structure—a classroom a few moments ago—teetered on the verge of collapse. Donald found a piece of pipe running down from the wall, apparently still securely attached to it. He told the other students they could use the pipe as a slide and helped them swing from the wall to get a grip on it. One by one, his classmates clung to the pipe and slid haltingly, a few feet at a time, until they passed out of sight into the wreckage below.

  Joe Watson climbed up through a maze of debris and pulled himself out onto a portion of roof. The roof had fallen across the collapsed wreckage, a pile nearly half as tall as the school had been. The boy looked back into the hole from which he had freed himself and saw eyes staring up at him, some darting and frightened, others glazed and unblinking. He climbed back toward them and began helping classmates out of the wreckage.18

  Rubble blocked the twenty-two students in Grace McDavid’s English class from the windows. She asked Calvin Corrie, William Fredericks, and another boy “to go find a way out.” “We found a place about four feet wide in an adjoining locker room,” Corrie said.19 The boys returned to the classroom and led the others out through the tight, jagged opening. On the other side, the windows were unobstructed. “We let ourselves out of the window on the second floor.” The slope of the school grounds meant that here, the drop was only about ten feet, but the thought of falling to rubble-strewn lawn terrifed some of them. One at a time, they slid out. With their hands on the jagged window sill, they lowered themselves as far as their arms would allow and let go.

  The dust cloud began to clear above Clarence Slater. Still pinned beneath the ruins of his first-floor English classroom, he looked up and was stricken with fear. Clarence was staring into the sky. He lay still, trying to calm his pounding heart. Somebody screamed, “Fire!” Adrenaline clambered into his blood stream, commanding heart, lungs, and muscle fibers to twitch and surge. The chemical roared. Clarence tore himself free and scampered away.20 Small, disjointed crowds, remnants of classes bumped into one another, catching hands and stumbling through a haze of plaster powder. Joe King ran with them toward the only light they could see. They made their way out of the wrecked building even as parts of it continued to fall. Joe Watson, his mouth thick with brick dust, joined a group that climbed out onto the roof. Here, the air sang with screams, some crisp from the lawn below, others muffled and weak. The children found a stairwell that was wobbly but still standing.

  Outside was a new horror.

  King looked up and saw “the body of our neighbor’s little girl... hanging up in the wires next to the telephone pole,” he recalled. “I recognized her by the coat she was wearing.”

  “There were heaps of dead bodies lying all around. It was awful. You couldn’t look anywhere without seeing a pile of dead boys and girls,” Joe Watson said. Though badly bruised, Watson would not leave. He began pulling bricks from the pile, digging into the wreckage toward the cries still ringing in his ears.

  “Everybody was saying, ‘What happened? What happened?’” King said. “You could hear people hollering and crying.”

  Just then, Della Westbrook arrived, panting, at the chaotic scene. She had walked across campus to a lunch stand just before the explosion. “I started running across the grounds to where children were dying,” said Westbrook, the high school’s librarian. “Many already were dead. The screams and cries were horrible.”

  Louise Taylor watched the last school bus shut its doors and drive off. She turned and rushed toward the ruined building. She saw the crowd from the gymnasium reach the rubble, “screaming, frantic mothers clawing with bare bleeding hands” at the wreckage.

  The explosion spent itself, the debris settled, and the enormity of the tragedy began to mark its witnesses. A town had lost its future.

  With blood streaming down his face, Superintendent Shaw gazed in horror and disbelief at the ruin of a generation. Sambo, his youngest son, was right in the middle of it. Hundreds have perished, Shaw realized at once. Screams and moans surrounded him. From somewhere inside the miasma a woman cried out, “Good God, all our children are dead!”21 Shaw threw his hands to his face. His glasses had vanished.

  Nearly every pane of glass in every building had shattered or cracked. Trees stood bare, their thickest branches ripped away. Combat veterans of the final years of World War I looked, disbelieving, at a landscape they’d seen before.

  Ralph Estep rushed in his ambulance to New London with a load of emergency supplies, including glucose and caffeine. This man who had seen people cut to pieces beneath train wheels and faces blasted away by buckshot looked upon the carnage at the school and began to weep. He helped those he could and collected those he could not.

  “I gathered two tubs full of hands, arms, legs, and feet for which we could find no bodies,” Estep said. “I helped to gather nearly a bushel basket full of shoes—tiny shoes that kiddies wear—in which we found no feet. They were just shoes, laced and tied and which had been blown completely from the victims’ bodies. I watched a doctor administering morphine to a little slip of a girl. Still conscious, she was suffering the agony of the damned.”22

  Estep watched another man rush to the doctor. His chest heaving, the man said they’d found the remains of the doctor’s son.

  Other fathers and mothers needed no intermediary. Estep remembered watching a red-eyed man digging for his son amid the rubble. The man found an arm protruding from a heap of bricks and boards. As he tugged to pull the body loose from the pile, the man’s face turned white with recognition.

  J. B. Dial, a decorated veteran of the Great War, rushed into the wreckage to find his sons. Dust still sifted down through the dead air. Panicstricken, with a surge of adrenalin, Dial grabbed a slab of concrete and heaved it upward. A little girl wiggled out from a narrow space behind it.23

  “That’s my child!” a woman shouted with hysterical joy.

  The first wave of responders—oil men, shopkeepers, truck drivers, preachers, barbers, a professional violinist—washed onto the wreckage. Nearly all had someone to find, but to look at this great disjointed mass was to lose hope. L. A. “Tiger” Mathis, Donald’s older brother, did not even know where to begin. He joined a group of men who formed a line and started pulling debris from the huge pile and passing it, hand to hand, away.

  A blizzard of paper from loose-leaf binders lay scattered throughout the wreckage and across the campus. Hundreds of textbooks had been tossed helter-skelter. On a small blood-smeared pamphlet, mashed into the debris, was written, “Tips on First Aid.”24

  Felton Waggoner’s eyes swept the detritus and locked on the monstrosity at its heart. He muttered a prayer at the wreckage, even as its worst came into focus. Waggoner walked numbly forward into a field of small bodies, crushed and torn and missing pieces, and it was too much even to cry. John Nelson, the son of math teacher Johnnie Marie Nelson, walked into view, and in his face Waggoner saw what he was feeling. Nelson asked Waggoner if he’d seen his mother. Waggoner would not find out she was dead until the next day, so he told Nelson he had not. Nelson thanked him and turned around, and Waggoner saw the hair had been burned from the back of his head. The boy walked away, looking for what he’d lost.25

  14

  Thunder on a Clear Day

  A boy sat on the front steps of an unpainted wooden house. Five-year-old Ben Meador’s thoughts were lost in the vast blue expanse of the afternoon. The sunshine and warm breeze were enough to make him content for the moment. Birds flitted over a patch of woods in the distance. The day smelled like flower petals and earthworms.

  Ben’s father was at work in the oil field. William Floyd Meador Sr., forty-one, was a roustabout gang pusher. The oil patch title described a roughneck who goaded laborers, the roustabouts, to keep busy on the task at hand. Ben’s mother Mattie, thirty-seven, was in the kitchen.

  Ben’s brother, William
Floyd Meador Jr., thirteen, and his sister, Myrtle Fay Meador, seventeen, were at school. He hoped that they would come home soon, so he and Junior could play.

  A small red wagon, Ben’s Christmas present, stood near the driveway where the family’s 1936 DeSoto sparkled in places sunlight touched glass and chrome. The car was the latest model and still smelled new inside, thanks to work in the oil fields staying on an even keel the past couple of years.

  Junior Meador had delighted Ben that morning by pulling him around the house in the wagon a few times before the older brother had to catch the school bus.

  Ben was daydreaming when a sound wave crested the treetops. The steps where he was sitting, the front porch and house, everything under him, shuddered. He heard a long rumble and then a ferocious boom that even as it vibrated through space was ripping into the fabric of the Meador family.

  “I saw big chunks of stuff go up in the air and then I saw what looked like smoke or dust that billowed up,” Ben recalled.

  Mattie Meador few out the door and grabbed her boy.

  “Look,” Ben said, pointing.

  His mother gasped, “My God, that’s the school.”

  She clutched Ben, yanked him up and flung him into the front seat of the DeSoto. They rushed off toward the strange cloud on the horizon, puffing upward, to the southeast not too far down the road.

  Reverend Jackson tightened the last lug nut on his spare tire and began lowering the car down from the jack. All of a sudden, the ground shook, an earsplitting boom rocked across the sky, and trees along the road bowed backward in a wild gust of wind. Jackson’s white fedora flipped into the air and sailed across the road.1 The explosion came from the school campus, or just beside it, the preacher realized immediately. A broad cloud of smoke and dust rose over the tree line, not a half mile away. Jackson jumped into his car, cranked it, and gunned the engine. He raced toward the school.