Gone at 3-17

by David M. Brown

  “What school? Where are you calling from?”

  “London school—the oil field. The children—”

  “Did you say children dead?” McKnight blurted.

  The next line was too garbled for McKnight to understand. He knew the man; he was a reliable stringer. “Are you sure there are people killed?” McKnight asked.

  “Yes. Many children are dead. Please send us help. Doctors. Ambulances. I’ve got to go now.”

  “No, don’t hang up,” McKnight urged. He managed to jot down the phone number before the man hung up.

  McKnight jumped from a table where he sat to a swivel chair in front of a teletype machine. He typed out a quick, short advisory: “An explosion at or near a school in the East Texas oil field has caused multiple injuries and possible fatalities, according to a usually reliable source.”1 He sent the advisory with a bell signal so that editors would know this was no ordinary story and more was coming.

  The AP bureau chief, Fred Dye, had overheard bits and pieces of the exchange, and he already had a Texas map spread on a table near where McKnight was working. “There’s no London in the oil field,” Dye said.

  “I believe it’s called New London. I saw the school when I was in East Texas the other day.”

  “There’s no London or New London on this map,” Dye said.

  Another phone rang and McKnight snatched the receiver off its cradle and cuffed it against his ear.

  “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.” He was scribbling notes as he listened. “You’re sure about all this? Okay. We need a number to call you back. Okay. And call us back when you have more.”

  McKnight slammed the receiver down. “That was an executive at Humble Oil. He confirmed it’s a school and says hundreds possibly are dead.”

  “Get something on the wire,” Dye said. “Then get down to the explosion—and take Bill Rives with you.”

  Twenty-six-year-old McKnight swiveled back to the teletype machine and started furiously pounding the keys. The first code he punched into the teletype tape was the multiple bell alarm for a newsflash. It was approximately 3:45 p.m. It would take more than two hours to drive to New London—not counting unexpected delays, McKnight knew from experience. Adrenaline surged to his fingertips.

  Commotion also filled the UP office, located in another downtown high-rise.

  Walter Cronkite, twenty, was on the desk filling in for a regular staffer who was on vacation. Normally Cronkite was based in the Kansas City bureau, but he had been called in to the Dallas office a couple of days earlier. He was getting ready to leave the office at the end of his shift when an advisory from the UP bureau in Houston rang bells in a teletype receiver.

  A major story is developing in East Texas, the advisory said. “Hold the afternoon wires open.”

  “The word came down the wire to Houston that they were going to need a lot of medical help up in New London, that there had been a serious explosion,” Cronkite recalled in an interview with KHOU-TV in Houston.2“I don’t think the first report said a school. We were holding the afternoon wire open for the late newspapers when word started developing that it was a school and it looked like there might be hundreds dead. It was hard for us to believe that it was that serious, but Bill Baldwin, the bureau manager of the UP in Dallas, and I hopped in a car and started right away for New London.”

  Editors at the Tyler Morning Telegraph and the Courier-Times quickly decided to send Sarah McClendon as the lead reporter to cover the disaster. She knew the region as well as anyone and knew the quickest routes to take over back roads to get to the school. Her editor assigned a photographer to drive, as McClendon herself didn’t yet drive, and told them to rush to the site of the explosion and immediately phone back with some facts about the true extent of damage and death. If the story was as bad as it sounded, they would put out an extra edition late that afternoon and send more staff to the scene, the editor said.

  News of the disaster spread rapidly from New London to all the surrounding communities and into Henderson by telephone and word of mouth. Neighbors raced next door to tell neighbors, motorists waved frantically and shouted what they knew to other motorists and to clusters of people gathering on street corners and along the roadsides.

  Rookie radioman Ted Hudson, driving a panel truck, joined a stream of traffic that included cars driven by Alvin Thompson and numerous other parents rushing to the school grounds to look for their children. Hudson’s own daughter attended school in Henderson and was safe at home. He wasn’t driving to New London as a radio newsman—he didn’t think of himself as any kind of reporter—but just because it seemed the right thing to do, as he would say later.3 He was going to offer to help in any capacity that might be needed.

  A procession of vehicles was leaving New London with lights flashing and horns honking. Injured children, some with blood smeared on their necks and faces, were visible in some of the cars. Children were also sprawled across the beds of pickup trucks. The cars and trucks were obviously heading toward the Henderson Hospital. The traffic at times became clogged in either direction. Somewhere in the procession, typing teacher Hazel Shaw was driving toward the school with Myrtle Meador, one of her students, in the passenger seat. Shaw and Meador had been at Henderson High School waiting for a typing and shorthand contest in which Myrtle was a finalist. When people at the high school noticed ambulances and emergency vehicles pulling into the nearby Henderson Hospital, Myrtle ran over to see what was going on. She came back, pale in the face, and told Miss Shaw what had happened. Now they were rushing back so Hazel Shaw could check on her father, the superintendent, and her brother Sambo and other relatives and many friends; Myrtle Meador was worried sick about what might have happened to her brother, Junior, and also knew that her parents would be searching for her as well as Junior.

  Although Hazel Shaw had no way of knowing it, an old friend of hers from her childhood in Minden, Texas, Avis Adams Griffin, was at that moment with her husband in one of the vehicles in the same flow of traffic toward New London. Avis, now a Henderson resident, was expecting New London teacher Mazel Hanna, one of her best friends, to spend the weekend as a guest in her home. Mazel, Avis, and Hazel were classmates at the Minden School when Chesley Shaw was headmaster there. Hearing about the explosion, Avis decided to hurry to New London to make sure Mazel Hanna and the Shaw family were all okay. Dr. C. C. McDonald was driving himself and a nurse to the site of the catastrophe to offer medical assistance. Harold Emerson, a traveling violin teacher from Dallas, was teaching lessons in Henderson when he heard about the explosion; he jumped in his car and headed toward the disaster to help in any capacity he might. Two cars filled with ten nuns who were staff nurses at the new Mother Frances Hospital moved along in the traffic, which hit a fast pace at times and then invariably crept to a halt amid a cacophony of blaring horns, sirens, and voices shouting between vehicles.

  This was a big mess, Ted Hudson and others in the jam concluded.

  Soon after reaching the disaster site, Hudson decided to rig a makeshift broadcast station. Somebody needed to send a plea for emergency medical supplies, doctors, and nurses. He started searching for a live telephone wire among the lines that had been blown away from the building.

  With any luck, he had enough equipment in his truck to patch together a mobile transmission center. Hudson rushed to finish the task before dark.

  Henry McLemore had zoomed to the top of his profession with such alacrity that it seemed appropriate he loved to write about racing horses, speeding cars, and spectacular runners. At just thirty, the United Press reporter was known the world over for his syndicated sports column—often brightened with comic asides about his own or other people’s foibles—and brilliant reporting from championship boxing events, grudge-match football games, and World Series showdowns. He was also surprisingly adept at covering sensational stories, hard news such as the devastating flooding in eleven states along the Ohio and Mississippi river basins in January 1937.

  McLemore was a dapper m
an with a puckish grin, a Georgia gentleman who had assimilated into New York City without losing his own brand of style and charm. Whether he liked to travel or not, travel was his motif as a writer. If the Kentucky Derby were taking place, McLemore was there. He staked out the hotels and bars in Indianapolis for days leading up to the Indy 500. This week his column might be datelined London, England; next, Nassau, Bahamas. His apartment was in New York, but his home was in airplanes, ocean liners, passenger trains, and automobiles. He once drove his car from New York to Columbus, Ohio, to cover a football game between Notre Dame and Ohio State. He returned by train, totally forgetting the car.4

  McLemore reported on cockfights and mob wars, high-stakes gambling, political conventions, the international tensions beneath the surface of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Germany. When German guards blocked him from entering an Olympic dressing room, McLemore pulled from his vest pocket an old speakeasy card with gold lettering and waved it in the guards’ faces. Bedazzled, they let him pass.5 In a column from Czechoslovakia, McLemore compared a taxi ride through Prague to taking a few laps around the Indy Speedway with racer Ernie Triplett.6 Writing from St. Augustine, McLemore explained he was in Florida looking for the fountain of youth. He hoped to bring home a glass of its fabled water for Babe Ruth to drink.7 The globetrotting scribe datelined one piece from somewhere in the Swiss Alps, admitting his ineptitude as a mountain climber. “When Mount Everest finally is scaled and a flag planted in its eternal snow, I promise I won’t be the man to do it,” McLemore wrote.8

  On the morn of a much-ballyhooed boxing match in June 1935, McLemore wrote, “James J. Braddock, just one year ago relief case No. 11732 on the rolls of the state of New Jersey, tonight fights Max Baer for the heavyweight championship of the world.” McLemore predicted an easy victory for Baer, adding that if Braddock won he, McLemore, would spend six months doing penance in Rangoon, Burma.9 McLemore’s next column began with the dateline: RANGOON, Burma.

  On March 18, 1937, McLemore was not off on one of his exotic treks but at his own desk in the New York office of United Press, mulling over a lightweight boxing match he was scheduled to cover on Friday at Madison Square Garden. The afternoon was dragging. If he was itching to leave the office and go exploring, the wire service boss walking toward him might have read his mind. “Swing by your apartment, get some travel duds—including extra shirts—and go straight to the airport,” the boss told him.10

  He was heading to a little hamlet in Texas called New London—posthaste.

  Lib McKnight had parked her car near the curb on a busy street in downtown Dallas. She was there to pick up her husband when he finished work. When Felix McKnight appeared on the sidewalk, he was carrying an armload of stuff from his office and was followed closely by his fellow reporter and friend, William T. Rives. They were in a rush. As soon as he reached the curb, Felix said, “Lib, I’ve got to have the car.” A big story was breaking, he explained hurriedly. The AP bureau chief would find her a ride home, he added.

  She jumped out of the car. Her husband gave her a quick kiss, and then he and Rives dove into the car and screeched away into the afternoon traffic.

  Before leaving the office, McKnight had called the Texas Highway Patrol to see whether any patrolmen were heading out to New London. His contact told him an officer was leaving in a few minutes. McKnight could trail the patrolman if he made it to a rendezvous point on the outskirts of Dallas in no more than, say, fifteen minutes, the contact said.

  “We’ll be there,” McKnight assured the highway patrol dispatcher. “Tell him to look for us.”

  Walter Cronkite and UP bureau manager Bill Baldwin were driving out of Dallas in the same rush-hour traffic. They stopped briefly at a roadside bootlegger’s venue to purchase supplies.11 Although liquor was legal again across the nation after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, much of Texas remained officially dry because of local option laws. Even so, booze was readily available, as always, at bootleggers, speakeasies, and some apothecaries that kept whiskey on hand for medicinal purposes, so to speak. And it wasn’t uncommon in those days for editors and reporters to keep a pint or two handy—either for their own use or sometimes to share with news sources to help loosen their tongues.

  Cronkite had yet to make a name for himself. He was just twenty years old, with little more than one year’s experience as a reporter, en route to his first major story—a huge one that was about to test the skills of some of the best journalists in America. But in certain ways, Cronkite had been preparing for this assignment since he was a boy, when he first decided he wanted to be a newsman.

  He was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, a Kansas City bedroom community, on November 4, 1916. His father, a dentist, moved the family to Houston, Texas, when Walter was ten. After graduating from Houston’s San Jacinto High School, where he wrote for the school newspaper, Cronkite enrolled at the University of Texas in Austin. In 1935, after two years at college, he decided to drop out and pursue his career in the trenches of a real newsroom. He accepted a job with the Houston Press, taking on the typical rookie assignments—obituaries, luncheon speeches, church news, dribbles of police beat work gleaning information on burglaries, drunk driving arrests, and traffic accidents for the newspaper’s police blotter and news briefs. The most critical lesson drilled into him by an old-school editor was the overriding importance of accuracy in everything he reported, Cronkite recalled. After a year, he left the Houston Press to become the one-man news and sports department of a Kansas City radio station. The job was short-lived. A few weeks after signing on with KCMO, Cronkite was fired because of a dispute with the station’s program manager over Cronkite’s unwillingness to air a phoned-in “news” item before checking out the facts himself. His newsman’s instincts and training were right—the story didn’t check out—but the program manager’s clout nevertheless put Cronkite on the street looking for a job. He landed one with United Press at the wire service’s national headquarters in Kansas City.

  “Banks of teletype machines clattered twenty-four hours a day, an insatiable maw demanding sixty words of copy every minute,” Cronkite recalled in his memoir, A Reporter’s Life.12 “Our competition across the street, the AP, was doing the same thing. Our job was to write better than they, and get our copy to the newspapers first. It was a blistering, relentless battle. It was said that somewhere in the United States or among our worldwide clients, there was a paper going to press every minute. It meant that we faced a deadline every minute.”

  The wire service was a great finishing school in the educational process of becoming a reporter, he concluded.

  “We couldn’t spend much time in contemplation,” Cronkite wrote. “We wrote fast, and because our client newspapers always compared our stories with the opposition’s, fact by fact, we had a powerful incentive to be right.”

  It also was a good place for a reporter in the right place at the right time, like Cronkite, to get a big break. Had he not been on a temporary assignment in Dallas, but at his regular desk in Kansas City, he wouldn’t have been sent to a school explosion in East Texas. He and Baldwin were on their way to New London to plant the UP flag and establish a foothold. The wire service already was preparing to send in the big guns—Delos Smith from New York, one of the fastest and best writers among UP editors, to head the staff at New London; Washington, D.C.–based Tom Reynolds, one of the best hard-news reporters in the nation; and Henry McLemore, the renowned sports columnist and news feature writer.

  Sarah McClendon would boast for decades that she “broke the story” about the New London school disaster, suggesting she was the first reporter to get the news out.13 Her claim was a stretch. Reporters from the Henderson Daily News were close enough to have heard the massive explosion and felt the walls of their newsroom vibrate from the shock wave. Many of the first victims pulled from the rubble were transported straight to Henderson, which had the closest hospital. Henderson Daily News reporters were on site quickly enough to gather data for the first comprehen
sive special edition about the explosion, published late Thursday afternoon.

  Even so, McClendon unquestionably was among the first at the site and her dispatches reached beyond local outlets, stunning the outside world with horrifying details of the catastrophe. She was there soon enough to be an eyewitness to horror, to hear mothers screaming, jumping from beams to boulders on tons of debris that lay atop their children. Tyler was only about twenty-five miles from New London, even closer along the back roads that locals such as McClendon often traveled. Unlike most of the reporters racing toward the disaster, she had a home in East Texas—it was a place where her roots were deep and she knew many people. She had an on-site reporter’s knowledge of the oil boom and historical grasp of the region and its residents.

  Her father, Sidney Smith McClendon, was a native of Monroe, Louisiana. He arrived in Tyler on a stagecoach and went into business selling books, stationery, and musical equipment, including Baldwin pianos. Her mother’s family had lived in East Texas for generations and had included a number of prosperous bankers and lawyers. McClendon’s maternal grandfather was a judge on the Texas Supreme Court. Sarah was the youngest of Sidney and Annie McClendon’s nine children.

  “It was like a vision from the end of the world,” McClendon wrote of arriving at New London with photographer Kenneth Gunn at her side. “Most of the school had, literally, vanished, leaving a rubble-littered cradle to show where it had been.”14

  McClendon gathered enough information to dictate a preliminary story over the phone to her office in Tyler and then to the International News Service in Dallas. This was within about an hour after the explosion, according to McClendon’s calculations.

  “After telephoning out my story, I simply pitched in,” she recalled.15

  On the open road, McKnight jammed his gas pedal to the floor to keep up with the state highway patrolman, who was speeding as fast as a hundred miles per hour on some of the straightaways. Here and there, people popped outside onto their porches as the officer’s sedan flashed by on U.S. Highway 80, screaming toward East Texas along with dozens of other sirens that seemed to be coming out of everywhere.