Billie Sue was not hurt badly, although she was scared speechless and in a confused daze. She glanced around, looking for her teacher. She had seen Miss Wright an instant before the room blew apart. The teacher had clutched a student with her arms and dived under a table, pulling the girl underneath it with her.6
When ten-year-old Molly Sealy hurried off the school bus, she saw her mother standing at the side of the road with four other mothers who were neighbors. The neighborhood was not far from the school, separated only by a deep ravine and patch of woods. The women had come running from their homes to the bus stop soon after they heard the explosion.
Catherine Sealy grabbed Molly and gave her a tight hug. The other mothers watched as the door closed and the bus pulled away. No other children had gotten off.
Clarence Moore left work and hurried to the high school as soon as he heard about the explosion. He hoped to find that his sister-in-law, Marie Patterson, had gotten out of the building without harm.
Clarence went straight to the part of the building where Marie worked in Superintendent Shaw’s office, and his heart sank when he saw the destruction. His brother-in-law, Pat Patterson, was already there, searching in the ruins.7
“Any word about Marie?” Moore asked Patterson.
“No,” Patterson said.
Moore asked if his wife, Billie—Pat and Marie’s sister—had been told yet.
Billie was in the office with Marie, Pat Patterson said. “We’d come by to give Marie a ride home, and now I’m afraid we have lost them both.”
Olen Poole thought a radiator near the study hall had popped a seam. The fifteen-year-old heard no massive explosion. “It sounded like—you take a big sack of nails and dump them out—then hot gas and dust came boiling in,” he recalled.
The boy felt his way through the cloud until he found an open window. It seemed as though he was all by himself, although he knew other students must be all around him. He was scared.
“So I dropped out of one of them windows and it wasn’t about four or five feet to the ground, because the building was kind of built into that hill,” he said. On the opposite side, it would have been a much steeper drop.
Near the school, he saw a teacher’s parked car with a big hole shot through it. “I knew then it was worse than a radiator blowing up. So I went around and there’s a concrete wall coming out the back of this building and there was a body laying on this wall. I didn’t recognize him. His head was in bad shape. I knew he was dead.
“I come right around... and I got to where I could see the building was just a pile of brick,” Olen said.
Only part of the easternmost wings—the ends of the prongs on the E-shape of the building—were standing amid the ruins. The middle prong, which had been the auditorium, had collapsed, with the end toward the stage sticking up out of debris.
Olen located his three younger brothers, who attended the elementary school, waiting on a curb about to board a school bus. He made certain they were okay and then took off running down the road toward his home.
“People would stop me and ask me what the explosion was and I’d tell them, ‘The school!’ They didn’t believe me.”
When he raced into the house, Olen caught his mother off guard. She knew nothing about an explosion. “When I told her, of course, she went to crying. I told her all my brothers were all right.”
Olen couldn’t stop thinking about the dead boy against the wall. The sight of it, so shocking at first, now caused an unaccustomed anguish in his heart. He thought and thought, but he couldn’t decide who the boy might have been. There was just no telling, because he was so beat up. Olen was almost sure it wasn’t his best friend, Charles Hasbrook, although the boy had been about Charles’s size.
Oil-field worker Homer White, thirty-seven, was at the wreckage soon after the explosion, helping remove debris and bodies and searching for his son, also named Homer, whom everybody called by his initials, H. G. The boy’s dad and his wife, Edna, had quickly located another son, Max Wade, who was okay.
A small girl who knew the Whites told them she saw H. G. soon after the explosion and his head was bleeding, but she didn’t know where he was now. Homer and Edna White felt their hearts sink.
Edna White, a thirty-year-old homemaker, scurried about, looking all over the place for her boy. Her neck and shoulders ached with spasms of grief, which she compressed by catching her breath, clenching her teeth, and balling her fists. Each time her eyes pooled with tears, she wiped her face on the sleeve of her dress.
Many of the bodies she saw were crushed beyond recognition.
“What was he wearing?” Homer White asked Edna.
“Khaki pants, a plaid shirt, and little high-top boots,” she said.
Homer made another round to reexamine bodies that already were laid out on a grassy place near the ruins. Halfway through, he spotted a body about the size of H. G.—dressed in khaki pants, a plaid shirt, and high-top boots—with blood-spattered sheets of notebook paper over the upper portion. He lifted the paper and nearly doubled over in horror. The child’s head was gone.
He started to go look for his wife and break the news, but then had a second thought. A few weeks earlier, he had taken the boy’s boots to a shoe shop for repairs. The shoemaker replaced the worn-out leather across the sole of each boot with a strip of new leather. White went back to the body, gently picked up one small foot, and examined the boot. The bottom was crusted with dirt. Taking out his pocketknife, the burly oil-field worker scraped the boot bottom clean enough to see that this boot had never been half-soled. With a reprieve from the anguish that had surged into his chest, Homer White resumed his search.
Out in the country, a school bus stopped on a lonely stretch of road, and a first grader stepped down out of the bus trailer. “Go straight home,” a grown-up told the child.
The bus disappeared around a bend in the road, leaving six-year-old Billie Anderson standing alone, more frightened than ever before in her life. She knew only that something terrifying had happened to the high school, and her sisters Allene and Lillian didn’t meet her as usual to ride the bus home with her.
Billie stood at the edge of a big field with oil wells scattered here and there. She could see her house, small and dark, far off in the distance, all the way on the other side of the field. Her mother had told her to never cross the field alone. She was supposed to cross it only with her older sisters, but now she had no choice.
Trembling, Billie took a few steps into ankle-high grass and found the path, a narrow strip worn smooth; for years many feet had beaten down the grass and wildflowers until it was just a ribbon of red dirt. She walked as fast as she could, imagining that wolves might come out of the woods before she could reach the house. Clouds had drifted across the sky and made it seem later than it was—dimming the landscape and setting off a chorus of crickets chirping.
Billie was almost in tears by the time she reached the front steps of the Andersons’ small house. A woman was sitting on the porch, but she wasn’t Billie’s mother. Billie recognized the woman as a maid who worked for a family living near the Andersons. The woman stood up immediately and took Billie by the hand.
“Come with me, child,” the woman said. “Your mother and father are out looking for your sisters, so you’re going to stay with us until they get back.”
Bud Price, manager of the Overton Chamber of Commerce, raced to New London as quickly as possible. He followed a line of police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances with lights flashing and sirens blaring. He had expected his sister, Mattie Queen, to leave school early and meet him at her apartment in Overton. He had dropped by the apartment, but Queen apparently hadn’t been able to leave as early as she had expected.
At the school, Price first checked the parking lot for Queen’s car. When the school exploded, it cast slabs of concrete, desks, rows of steel lockers, wooden beams, and chunks of smaller debris across the thirty to forty cars parked in front of the high school. Price hurried through the
lot, glancing into each car. He felt sure he’d recognize it easily, but now many of the vehicles looked very similar.
After they had met for breakfast that morning, Queen had walked to her car, stopped and strolled over to see Bud before he left. “She told me to be sure to come by her house that afternoon because she had something important to tell me and was going to leave school early to meet me,” Bud Price recalled.8 “I walked over to her car, which was new. I noticed a pair of wooden shoes in the car. Queen often took items to show students. I watched as she drove off and wondered why at the corner she turned back to her apartment rather than to the school. I found out later she had gone back to the apartment to tell her roommate to be sure and be there that afternoon because she had important news to tell. She kissed her good-bye and left.”
Bud couldn’t find Queen’s car anywhere in the parking lot, so he figured the music teacher must have left early after all, and they had missed each other coming and going.
He walked over to where rescue workers were pulling the wreckage apart to look for the survivors and the dead. They obviously needed all the men they could get, so Bud rolled up his shirt sleeves and went to work. It was a ghastly task.
“At this time there were no stretchers to carry the bodies on. We used the metal window frames,” Price said. “I was working with a man I didn’t know. I heard him mutter, ‘This is worse than the Battle of Marne [a bloody World War I battle in France, during which thousands were killed and wounded].’”
A father approached Price and asked if they had been able to find his daughter.
“We have,” Price said.
“Did she die innocently?”
“Yes.”
Later, Price confessed, “I hope God will forgive me that lie because in fact she was trapped in metal and concrete and died while we were cutting her out with a torch.”9
A truck raced down the oil lease road boiling up a cloud of dust behind it.
The crew working at the site had finished loading tools onto its truck and was ready to call it a day. The men looked up and saw the boss’s truck speeding toward them. The truck stopped fast, and the manager called out the window, “The London school exploded! Men, they can use all the help they can get.”
Oil-field worker Marvin Dees and the four men on his crew now understood where the loud boom they had heard originated. The crew truck had first-aid supplies aboard, and most of the men had at least a smattering of emergency medical training. The foreman said, “Let’s go and see what we can do.”
“We jumped in our truck and went on up,” Dees said. “Traffic was beginning to congregate, and they weren’t letting people through unless they could help. They could see that we had a truck with a winch on it and we also had first-aid equipment, so they flagged us right onto the perimeter of the disaster area.
“Oh, my gosh. It was just a big pile of rubble where there used to be a school. We couldn’t believe our eyes. Parts of the building—some of them were the jagged pieces of concrete in the walls—were standing a little bit. Rubble was just scattered everywhere. There were big chunks here and there. It was an awful scene.”
The men jumped off their truck and started running helter-skelter to help wherever they could, Dees remembered. “There were a lot of bodies scattered around, and you could see blood here and there and parts of flesh here and there. There were a lot of shoes scattered around. I guess they were just blown out of their shoes.”
The first task was to load the wounded onto vehicles so they could be rushed to clinics and hospitals, Dees said. They separated the living from the dead and laid bodies at a clearing near the rubble. “We covered them as best we could, with clothing or paper or whatever. In other words, when they were covered, we knew they were dead.”
The rescue work was disorganized in the early phase. Men rushed about and lent a hand wherever it was needed—carrying a body, lifting a hunk of concrete, holding pressure on the wounds of children to keep them from bleeding to death.
Cries for help rang out from students and teachers trapped in the massive debris. At first, there seemed no way to reach some of them, Dees said.
“It just so happened that a truckload of baskets from a basket factory was passing by, and the driver stopped to help,” he said. “Somebody came up with the idea: Let’s just form a basket brigade and remove a lot of that debris that will fit in a bushel basket, like bricks and mortar, tile, whatever would fit. Somebody said, ‘Let’s form two lines from about the center of the site out to the perimeter.’ We formed two lines facing each other. They were loading the baskets up around the center, and they would pass the basket to two men, and they would pass it on to two men and so on out to the perimeter, and they would dump the basket. And then we would pass the empty baskets back up to the center.
“That’s how we got organized, so to speak. We got settled down to this basket brigade, and we moved a lot of debris.”
Superintendent Shaw wandered across the ruins trying as best he could to help somewhere. Dirt and blood smeared his face and neck. He had found his glasses, although the frame was warped and a crack shot across one of the lenses.
“There are children under here,” he said to each person he met. “There are children under here.”
His sense of responsibility as the person in charge of a demolished schoolhouse, the responsibility for hundreds of dead children, began to crush him. An overpowering hopelessness crept into his mind.
He sensed almost immediately that this disaster resulted from his decision, with the school board’s approval, to tinker around with the heating system and save some money. How blind, how pointless that seemed now. The first angry question the inquisitors would ask him, Shaw felt certain, was why the richest country school in the nation needed to save a few dollars on heating fuel.
The small man with round spectacles wandered as far into the ruins as he dared without getting in the way or making the situation worse by getting himself trapped in the unstable underpinnings. Roaming the debris, he eventually thought of a situation in which he and the school board would have been less culpable for what had happened. It was not unheard of across rich Texas oil fields for natural gas pockets to bubble up into caves or excavated holes beneath structures and cause explosions when some idle spark touched the gas. Something like that had happened recently in Texas or Oklahoma, Shaw recalled. It seemed at least feasible that it could have happened here.
Torn books with pages bulging from the bindings were scattered far and wide. Textbooks, library books, composition tablets, encyclopedias, anthologies of literature, arithmetic exercise pamphlets, geography books with maps—all the wisdom of the world pitched across a chaotic gulch. Lost somewhere in the heap, near where the superintendent’s office was demolished, had to be Shaw’s personal copy of the 1935 London year-book—the school’s first annual—a handsomely bound tribute to the accomplishments of the students, teachers, and the superintendent himself. The first Londona was dedicated to Shaw: “To one who has a clearer vision of our modern student life and its activities; one who is ever in sympathy with school interest; one who upholds the highest ideals before his pupils; and to one whom we love and admire.” The dedication summing up Chesley Shaw’s legacy was buried in the ruins.
The superintendent made his way as near as he could to where Sambo’s classroom would have been. Peaks and valleys of rubble stretched toward a partially standing wing of the school that seemed remote and surreal, unconnected to anything, with the football field in the distant background. Sambo is gone, his heart told him.
19
Newsflash
The two major newswire services in Dallas, the Associated Press and United Press, each were preparing for a shift from the regular dayside crew to the night operation. The change took place every day between 3:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m. Soon after 3:00—depending on the level of traffic on the newswire—the electrical nerve centers in the main offices were closed down, and all activities for the rest of the day, until about mi
dnight, were shifted to smaller auxiliary offices.
The UP and AP were fierce competitors. Each had hundreds of newspaper and radio clients counting on them to deliver any breaking news story faster than their competitors’ wire service—without sacrificing accuracy. Newspapers and radio news editors posted stories on tight deadlines, usually giving themselves an hour or more to edit a report, enough time to double-check the facts and fine-tune each element of the story. In the wire services, the motto was “a deadline every minute.” Rarely was there a spare moment even to grab a dictionary. This was the trench warfare of the news business. The wire services had offices in every major city in the United States; they were often located in downtown buildings not too far apart. Such was the case with the AP and UP bureaus in Dallas.
Veteran reporter Felix R. McKnight was about to close the AP day office after a long afternoon working at the rewrite desk. McKnight looked the part of a city reporter. His hair was combed neatly with a sharp, straight part on one side, and his tie was knotted up high against the collar of his white dress shirt. His sideburns were short. He wore a light sports coat. Most of the copy he put out that day was dull sounding in spite of his best efforts to enliven it. A couple of old newsroom slogans helped him on days like this. The first was “You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” The other was even more potent: “It is what it is.” No amount of embellishment could polish flimsy facts; great facts made a clean, lean story shine like a lamp in the dark.
One of the phones rang. McKnight grabbed the receiver, “AP, McKnight.”
The connection was bad. The man on the other end got out a couple of words through gulps of air. “Terrible, terrible explosion. Hundreds dead.”
“Slow down. Say again.”
The man paused and identified himself as a stringer from East Texas. McKnight knew the name. The stringer was crying as he tried to get his words out. “The school blew up,” he muttered.
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