Gone at 3-17

by David M. Brown

  Bill Rives was bracing himself at times between the floorboard and front passenger seat of McKnight’s car. With no seat belts to secure him, Rives was left to cling to the passenger door armrest with his right hand and press his left palm against the dashboard, lest one of the frequent stretches of ruts in the road toss him into McKnight’s lap or against the windshield. The patrolman finally slowed as the automobiles approached the city limits of Terrell, the first town of any size east of Dallas. Seeing the main route had been cleared for emergency vehicles, the highway patrolman accelerated again and barreled through downtown intersections at speeds McKnight clocked on his speedometer at fifty miles per hour. Both reporters’ heads thumped into the roof as the car bounded across dips in the streets.

  McKnight and Rives, twenty-five, had so much in common they were like brothers. Native Texans, they hailed from white-collar, middle-class families and were nurtured as city boys. McKnight was born in Dallas and grew up in San Antonio. Rives was from nearby Victoria. A shared passion for sports and sportswriting had lured the young men into the news business. They became close friends in the early 1930s working as fellow reporters for the San Antonio Light. The bustling South Texas city gave the boys a quick education in hard news—the police beat, city government, and the courts.

  Neither man had covered a catastrophe. The closest McKnight had come was the Gulf of Mexico, where he had been dispatched to meet a hurricane churning toward the coast. The skies stayed dark for several days, and the warm waters of the gulf were whipped into an angry frenzy of whitecaps, but the hurricane fizzled.

  McKnight knew he was racing toward a big story. The challenge pumped adrenaline into his system like gasoline into a carburetor. His mind flitted past his car, and the patrolmen racing ahead of him. It reached for the scene, groping in the darkness of the unknown. He thought his experience provided him at least a basic understanding of what lay ahead. He was wrong.

  With Bill Rives riding shotgun, McKnight’s confidence swelled. The bureau chief at AP decided to send two reporters in case this was a real disaster. Even one child injured or killed in the hallowed safe haven of a school would be grist for an important story, the sort of viscera that gathers communities a little closer together and convinces a few more people to pay for the news. If the initial reports of catastrophic damage and dozens of casualties were true, McKnight would need the backup.

  They worked well together. McKnight was fast and exceptionally well organized under pressure. He had a rare instinct for reading people quickly and cultivating their trust. Rives had a keen eye for nuances of a story. His training as a sportswriter had instilled him with poise for reporting fast-breaking news on tight deadlines. And it had given his prose, like McKnight’s, a sparkle.

  McKnight wished he’d received more time to prepare himself before rushing away from Dallas. He and Rives had about ten minutes to prep before leaving the office. McKnight would have liked more time to explain the situation to Lib, but after three years of marriage, she understood the job’s demands. A stampede of other news writers, including United Press reporters—the AP’s chief rival—was hurtling toward East Texas. Careers in this business rose or fell on timing.

  Lib and their nine-month-old daughter, Joan, would be fine without him for a night or two, McKnight knew. He planned to call and check on them during his first break after filing the story from New London.

  Rives repeatedly spun the tuning dial on the car’s radio, but so far no special news reports about a school disaster had interrupted the ho-hum afternoon lineup of gospel singers, swing music, farm reports, and routine network programming.

  “Mac, something nutty about this thing,” Rives said.16 “We might find twenty-five dead. But hundreds? It’s impossible.”

  It seemed so. Still, McKnight felt better knowing Jackson Krueger, another former San Antonio Light colleague, was on the AP rewrite desk in Dallas that night. Jack rounded out the team. Regardless of what challenges McKnight and Rives might face in East Texas, a pro like Krueger would solidify the effort. He could take a slab of rough copy and carve it into tight prose.

  Jack Krueger was another longtime friend. He and McKnight had been pals as children and remained close as young men. They even had some of the same blood. During McKnight’s junior year at Texas A&M, a serious stomach ailment landed him in the hospital, and he had to endure an emergency ten-hour surgery. Krueger provided blood for a transfusion. After McKnight went to work for the Associated Press in 1933, he recruited his buddies from the San Antonio Light, Rives in 1935 and Krueger in 1936, to join him at the bureau in Dallas. Now their mutual trust, talent, experience, and news instincts were about to combine on one of the major stories of the twentieth century.

  McKnight was an offspring of the new century. He was born August 2, 1910, to Nancy and Luther McKnight. The family moved to San Antonio when Felix was eight years old. His father was a salesman for the Diamond Match Co.

  Felix graduated from Main Avenue High School, where he was sports editor at the student newspaper. In 1928 he went to work as a sportswriter for the San Antonio Light, saved enough money to start at Texas A&M, and continued working for the Light in the summers. While attending A&M, he earned $2.50 a game covering Southwest Conference sports for the Light, Dallas Morning News, Houston Chronicle, and Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

  Texas A&M at the time offered almost nothing for an aspiring journalist, McKnight recalled in an interview for this book. “They’d never heard of a journalism school. The closest thing to it was a rural sociology course I took,” McKnight said. “In that class they taught you how to gather swine and poultry reports together for the weekly newspaper.”

  The stomach surgery caused McKnight to miss several months of college in his junior year. With the Great Depression raging and money in short supply, he left A&M in 1931 to take a full-time reporting job with the San Antonio Light. And there his real schooling began.

  The afternoon was nearly spent. Rives moved the radio dial from station to station but still picked up only music and entertainment. They were almost in Tyler, the city nearest to the school explosion.

  McKnight calculated that he had driven 110 miles in 100 minutes. He veered off the main east-west highway and headed south on a back road toward Tyler. The bureau chief in Dallas, knowing the direct routes would be blocked by police and clogged with traffic, had called an editor at the Tyler Courier-Times/Morning Telegraph, an AP member newspaper, to arrange an escort who knew back roads into the New London area. McKnight and Rives met him at the paper.

  From Tyler, they followed a Courier-Times/Morning Telegraph delivery truck over narrow, oil-topped roads toward the school. About ten miles outside New London, a car sped toward them; the driver was frantically waving traffic aside.

  “I saw the back of the car,” Rives recalled.17 “It was piled with bodies.” The reality that the first report of hundreds killed in an explosion was no exaggeration washed over him.

  When they were about two miles from the school, a barricade across the road blocked further access to vehicles. McKnight and Rives set out running. It was twilight when they reached the top of a hill overlooking the New London campus.

  “We looked and saw a million-dollar schoolhouse scattered over a block-long area,” McKnight recalled. “We saw a thousand men crawling over the ruins, silent, sweating, clawing at brick with raw, bleeding hands. Oil company trucks formed a semi-circle in front of the ruins. Motors hoisted cranes in and out of the gnarled steelwork. Floodlights poured daylight shafts on the scene.”18

  The reporters raced down the hillside.

  20

  A Blue Patch of Sky

  Bill Thompson heard faint voices above him and the sound of work boots tromping through the mess. As the sounds grew closer, he called out, hoping his words would carry all the way to the surface. He had not been able to move for nearly an hour, and his body felt numb. His head had stopped bleeding. He still couldn’t see anything.

  Metal clanked som
ewhere, and a motor growled. The boy now heard men stomping all around just above him. A vague fear crossed his mind that the movement might cause the debris to collapse more tightly around him, cutting off his air, and then he saw a wedge of sunshine cut into the darkness. “Here I am,” the boy said. “I’m down here.”

  A man on the surface called to other rescue workers, “Here’s one alive! Get some help over here! Fast!”

  The boy could see hands and arms as the men pulled away broken sheets of plaster and shattered boards. A triangle of blue sky appeared above him. The man looking down in the hole smiled at him. The roughneck’s face glistened with sweat. Dirt was smudged across his cheeks. He had the mug of an amateur prizefighter who’d been on the losing end of too many bouts.

  “How you holding up?” the man said.

  “I think I’m okay.”

  So many hands grabbed him and lifted him up from the hole it seemed he was riding on air. The men set him down, and he immediately stood up and started to walk.

  “Hey, whoa there,” a man said. “You need to see a doctor.”

  The boy felt woozy but generally okay. The cut on his head was sore, and he ached from bruises. No limbs seemed broken. His eyesight was clear. “I need to go home,” he told the man.

  “No, you need to go to a hospital. You sit down right over there until I get back with some help.”

  When children in Japan participated in earthquake drills at school, they crouched beneath their desks. Tenth-grader Max Holleyman didn’t remember where he learned that—whether it was in a civics class or something he might have seen on a newsreel at the movies—but it was the first thought that popped into his mind when he heard a roar and a rumble sweeping toward his classroom. He shot straight up at first, and then dove under his desk as the classroom darkened.

  “It went black,” he recalled. “Everything went black—pitch dark.”

  After a few minutes, Max could perceive enough light to follow it to a window. He climbed out and immediately went to search for his sister, Betty Kathryn, eleven, whose sixth-grade classroom was on the backside of the school, facing the gym. Max saw scores of women running out of the gym. He studied the wreckage to determine where Betty Kathryn might be. She was on the first floor, but all that area was smothered beneath other parts of the school, which had fallen on top of it, including the big red-tile roof, which was scattered in pieces. Finally, he saw a standing stairwell that led into the wreckage, and he climbed down the stairs. Dust was so thick he could hardly see, but he stopped short of stepping on a boy on the stairs because the child was shuddering and panting. Max bent down to get a better look. The boy was dying, and there was nothing Max could do for him. He headed farther down the stairs until he came to a massive ball of debris that blocked him from continuing. He saw a classroom door, off through the wreckage, where a child was crushed beneath a cascade from above. Max retreated back up the steps and out into the afternoon sunshine. A cluster of women stood wringing their hands at the entry to the stairwell.

  “Can you get in through there?” one of the mothers asked.

  “Don’t go in there. It’s bad. It’s a bad thing,” Max said. The debris was too large to remove by hand, he told them.

  He hurried back toward the section of the building that was partly standing. Max passed the band director, C. R. Sory, who had backed his car onto the campus and was lifting a badly hurt girl into the backseat. The girl was Mrs. Sory’s niece; she lived with her uncle and aunt so she could attend school at New London. Mr. Sory got blood on his arms and face when he loaded her into the car. She was too far gone to help. Max saw a large group of students standing below the hull of a two-story section, still intact, although it looked as if a giant with a huge saw had hacked off the wing from the body of the school. The second-floor hall opened into thin air.

  “The second floor was a library and there was a student that had jumped from the second floor and gone through the glass [of the lower window] and almost cut her leg off. There were students very bravely getting that child off that window,” Max said.

  “Is anybody in here?” a voice said from within the broken hull of the building. “Is anybody alive in here?”

  Ledell Dorsey struggled to her feet but stayed close to the corner of the classroom where she had remained, paralyzed with shock and fear, for nearly an hour after the building shook violently and broke apart all around her. The fifth grader suddenly saw a person appear, moving slowly through a cracked wall where a dusty shaft of sunlight pooled along an empty hallway. “I’m over here,” Ledell said.

  The tall teenager, a senior high student she’d seen before, came toward her.

  “Come with me,” he said. “I’ll get you down from here.”

  She was afraid to move.

  The boy took one of her hands. “Now come with me. You’ve got to follow me. This building could fall.”

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  “It’s okay.”

  He tugged her hand, and Ledell followed him. The boy led her to a window that was not so high from the ground as the windows in her classroom had been, and the boy convinced her she wouldn’t be hurt in the short jump. The teenager turned and walked away, back into the shadows, looking for others who might have survived.

  People tried to warn Carroll Evans that a section of building where he was searching for survivors seemed to be teetering on the verge of collapse. It’s dangerous, they told him. Of course it’s dangerous, he wanted to shout back at them—it’s a disaster. He struggled forward with the beam of his flashlight searching the crevices. He spotted a child, a girl pinned against a desk by a block of concrete. The girl was unconscious.

  “Somebody bring me a jack!” Evans hollered.

  A young man showed up quickly with the sort of industrial jack house movers used to lift buildings off their foundations. Boxhead and the boy situated the jack so that the base rested on a concrete slab and the lift arm wedged against the desk under which the student was trapped. Evans pumped the jack handle back and forth until pressure from the lift began to crack seams in the wooden desk. With a few more pumps, the desk burst apart, shifting under the weight of the concrete above. The sudden movement set the girl free but sliced off part of her arm. Evans tore a piece of fabric from his shirt tail and fashioned a tourniquet.

  “I carried her out there to the gym and her mother came out there and took her out of my arms,” Evans recalled. “Then I went back around there and I looked around and the whole building was down.”1

  The girl he rescued died from her injuries.

  Evans found another opening and plunged back into the wreckage. He first came across a boy pinned beneath a slab of concrete. The slab was too massive to move with jacks, so nothing more could be done for the boy until a crane could be used to hoist it. That would be too late, Evans knew. The teacher put a piece of board beneath the boy’s head, to elevate it slightly. “Rest quietly until help comes,” Evans said.2

  F. M. Herron learned that his son, F. M. Junior, had gotten out of the building without a nick. The ten-year-old took off running for home and didn’t stop until he was hugging his mother on the front porch.

  Juanita was dead, and Herron was determined not to lose hope of finding his daughter Inez among the students who had survived. Even so, he went back around and looked over bodies that had been carried out since he last surveyed the dead. Men and women in pickup trucks and cars were hauling them away to morgues soon after they were identified as being deceased. Inez, his oldest daughter, was not among the bodies left behind.

  Herron hadn’t found out anything about Inez in the nearly three hours since the explosion. He asked about her every time he saw a surviving student or a teacher or anybody who might have information. Finally, he received a hint—hearsay, really—that Inez was injured and transported to one of the hospitals or clinics somewhere in East Texas, or perhaps to Shreveport. Yes, a second person said, a girl who might have been Inez was taken away in an ambulance headed
for Shreveport because the closest medical facilities were beginning to fill up.

  Herron left the ruins, swung by his house to pick up his wife and son, and they headed east toward Louisiana.3

  His wife looked pale. His son remained silent. Herron ran one of his hands through his mussed gray hair, smoothing it as best he could, and caught a glimpse of himself in the car mirror. His face was the color of schoolroom chalk. He pushed down on the accelerator, hoping to make Shreveport before dark.

  Rescue worker Marvin Dees had worn his gloves bare handling material passed from man to man in the basket brigade. Some men in the line had no gloves, and their hands were bleeding. Dees didn’t realize it at the time, but he would discover later that the leather soles on his new work boots were being shredded by sharp objects underfoot.

  After a while, a murmur passed down the lines that Salvation Army workers had set up stations where volunteers could get gloves, coffee, sandwiches, and cigarettes. The men took turns visiting the Salvation Army stations for a short break and a smoke. Some munched on sandwiches. Before returning to the basket brigade, they each received a new pair of gloves.

  “Everything you touched was sharp,” Dees recalled. “Sharp edges on the tile, broken brick, and concrete—all those jagged edges were pretty sharp.”

  A sickening feeling settled into the pits of their stomachs as they worked their way deeper into the ruins, he said. “You just kind of got nauseous, and as time went on, you got more nauseous. We knew that death was all around us—that had just happened. You were in an area that, an hour before, these people were living, and you knew that now some were dead and some were still trapped and you didn’t know how many.”