Gone at 3-17

by David M. Brown

  “Every once in a while, you’d hear somebody yell, ‘Dragline. We need a dragline,’” Dees said. “There were some [victims] that were trapped underneath and that’s when the draglines came in handy. And someone would pull a winch line over to a big piece of concrete or a steel beam or whatever and drag it out of the way, and then the basket brigade would get in there and get the small stuff.”

  Fifth-grader Walter Freeman woke briefly when something cold touched his forehead. A volunteer at a makeshift hospital in an Overton church tenderly brushed his face with a damp cloth. Walter opened his eyes and saw a black woman standing over him. Seeing that he was conscious, she beamed.

  “You be still now, child,” she said.

  Walter didn’t feel like moving anyway and could have moved very little even had he wanted to. It was soothing to feel the woman bathing his wounds with the cool rag. Other students, some of them groaning, lay on cots all around him. The woman asked him his name.

  “Walter,” he whispered.

  She was writing on a note pad. “And your last name?”

  “Freeman.”

  She asked for his parents’ names, and Walter told her, although it took some effort. He didn’t want to talk anymore. He felt awful, groggy and nauseous.

  A doctor and several nurses moved among the children. Against one wall, the volunteers were lining up the bodies of children who died en route to the triage or at the medical station. The men were covering them with tablecloths, quilts, or sheets of paper they found in the church’s closets and pantry.

  Sisters Jimmie and Elsie Jordan were stretched out on side-by-side cots, both with their heads swathed in gauze. Elsie held her little sister’s hand, comforted by her warmth, though Jimmie had not opened her eyes or said a word since Elsie found her in the debris. Elsie knew that Jimmie was badly hurt by something that had knocked a hole in her head, and that she might even die. But she wasn’t going to let go of Jimmie’s hand even for a minute because she was afraid the grown-ups might mistakenly think Jimmie was dead and put her against the wall.

  Bobby Clayton lay on a nearby cot with his head bandaged. His mother had found him soon after the explosion and sat with him. A nurse came by and told Bobby she needed to give him a tetanus shot. He rolled his eyes toward a girl on the next cot over and said, “Give her the shot first. She’s hurt worse than me and may need it sooner.” Bobby’s mother smiled down at her boy. She would repeat the story many times in the weeks to come. Later, Bobby disowned the hero mantel. With a sheepish smile, the ten-year-old admitted he directed the nurse’s attention to the girl on the next cot as a ploy to keep the dreaded needle away from his own arm a few moments more.

  At the disaster scene, Bud Price carried an armload of trash to dump at the debris collection pile a short distance from the ruins, and to get there he took a shortcut across the parking lot. On his way he spotted a car he hadn’t seen in his initial survey of the parking lot.4

  Debris and dust covered the car. Price put his face to a window and peered inside. A pair of wooden shoes sat on the backseat. He’d found Queen’s car, and now his heart raced as he developed a plan to go look for his sister. He’d first check the nearest medical stations and hospitals, and then the funeral homes in Overton and Henderson. And then, if necessary, he’d spread the search, circling through the countryside to hit Kilgore, Longview, Nacogdoches, Jacksonville, Tyler, and other outlying communities. He didn’t find her at the Baptist church in Overton. He drove a couple of blocks to the American Legion Hall, which was being used as a temporary morgue and information clearing house for the victims. When Price walked in, passing under a sign that read “Gentlemen Please Remove Your Hats”—for patrons of the skating rink inside the hall—he was instantly struck by the overpowering fumes of formaldehyde. He covered his nose with a handkerchief and resumed his search, going from body to body.

  Suddenly, he noticed a pair of his friends standing over by a wall. Price waved and said hello. They lowered their heads and didn’t speak, and he knew.

  When he found her body, only a small cut marred her lovely face. But the back of her head had been flattened by a blow; one leg was nearly severed.

  “I found out she had been in her room with eight pupils. Only one survived. That little girl’s last memory before she blacked out was going forward to hug Queen,” Price said.5

  A pair of rescue workers later told of finding Queen, clinging to life, in the ruins. She was conscious and spoke to them, they said. When they picked up the piano teacher, one of her feet fell off. She reached and picked up the foot before they carried her out of the wreckage.6

  The big news that Mattie Queen Price had planned to tell Bud that afternoon remained a mystery he puzzled about, from time to time, for the rest of his life.

  Cars crowded along the street outside the American Legion Hall as parents pulled up, parked, went inside long enough to survey the bodies, and then left for another hospital or morgue. Floyd Meador’s 1936 DeSoto was at the curb. Five-year-old Ben Meador was alone in the car, sitting in the backseat, occasionally raising his head to peek outside.

  Oil-field worker Floyd Meador and his wife, Mattie, were inside, scanning the bodies. They were looking for Myrtle Fay, seventeen, and William Floyd Meador Jr., thirteen. Myrtle was supposed to be away from the school that afternoon at a typing contest in Henderson, but when her parents were helping remove the dead and injured from the ruins, a classmate of Myrtle’s told Mattie that Myrtle didn’t make the trip to Henderson.

  “She stayed back there in the typing lab,” the girl said with tears in her eyes.

  But Floyd and Mattie found no sign of either of their children in the American Legion Hall. They walked back to the DeSoto.

  Just then, a flatbed truck loaded with more bodies pulled to a stop at the door of the hall. Rescue and recovery workers had covered them, as best possible, with linens and sheets of newspaper. The truck normally carried watermelons.

  Floyd Meador walked to the truck and quickly spotted a body that was covered with a blanket except for the legs.

  “I know those feet,” he said. “That’s my boy.”

  Wilson and Corine Jordan found their girls at a medical station in Overton. Elsie’s face had a serious cut from her hairline to the top of an eye. The eleven-year-old child was conscious and alert but extremely upset about Jimmie’s condition. The third grader had been unconscious since Elsie dug her from debris after the explosion. A doctor looked at the hole in Jimmie’s head and told her parents there was nothing he could do for the child.

  “A brain surgeon from Dallas is in Tyler,” the doctor said. “Get her in an ambulance and over to Tyler as soon as you can.”

  Wilson Jordan, a thirty-two-year-old oil-field worker, left to locate an ambulance. Corine, twenty-seven, stayed with her daughters. The Jordans lived on the other side of a hill from the New London school campus. Corine had heard the explosion and quickly climbed to the top of the hill to see what had happened. When she saw the destruction below, she had fainted. Now that she had found her girls alive, she never wanted to let them out of her sight again. Wilson returned and said there was an ambulance outside with room for Jimmie. They could get Elsie on the next emergency vehicle bound for Tyler, he told Corine.

  Wilson Jordan carried eight-year-old Jimmie out to the ambulance. She was totally limp and light in her father’s arms. She was a tiny girl with dark brown hair, incalculably precious to the roughneck placing her in the ambulance and immeasurably loved by the stunned housewife holding back tears so as not to alarm their older daughter.

  Similar emergency medical stations and temporary morgues were being set up all around New London—in churches, hotels, and grocery stores. Perry Lee Cox, the fifth grader who tried to cut school that morning, was taken to a doctor’s office over a grocery store in Arp. The bread truck driver who saw Perry drop out of the sky onto the road in front of the school, had loaded the boy into his truck and rushed him to the only doctor’s office in the vicinity h
e knew about. The doctor examined Perry and realized the boy was too hurt, inside and out, to have any chance of recovery. A brick had slammed into his head above his right eye, an arm and leg were broken, and his insides were scrambled, damaging all his organs; amazingly, his heart continued to beat. The doctor decided it was best not to move him; he just kept the unconscious boy as comfortable as possible while a search was made for his parents. The doctor found a small pocketknife in one of the boy’s pockets; the knife’s handle was painted with fingernail polish. “Get a description of his clothes and this pocketknife on the radio,” the doctor told one of his helpers.7

  The boy’s father, Marshall Cox, was at the disaster site searching for Perry.

  Alvin Thompson quickly found out that his daughter, Lanelle, a third grader, was safe and sound. She was in the grammar school rhythm band and had performed during the PTA dance program. Lanelle and some of her friends were walking back to their school, passing the high school, when it exploded. A concrete boulder and shower of bricks landed all around Lanelle, but the child escaped without a scratch. She was on a school bus headed for home. Now Alvin was hunting for Bill. He was walking the corpse line on the school grounds, carefully studying all those in trousers for any indication one of them might his boy. His heart sank a couple of times when he saw bodies about Bill’s size and stature. He went back to one body three times before definitely ruling it out. Although he was deeply sickened by the sight of mangled children and the rancorous stench wafting through the ruins, Thompson made his way toward a line of men who were passing out debris from hand to hand.

  Roughneck Joe Davidson was at the head of one of the lines, digging and sorting through rubble, finding other men’s children but so far no sign of any of his own four. Nearby, a barber and beautician had teamed up to help with minor injuries, mainly sewing up cuts.

  Fifth-grader H. G. White was taken by car to a rural doctor’s office. Dr. J. T. McClain, a veteran of trench warfare during World War I, sorted out the four bloody children sprawled across the passenger seat. Most of the blood appeared to be from one badly injured boy. H. G. White looked to be the next most seriously hurt. McClain told H. G. to keep hand pressure on his head wound and wait on the front porch. The doctor lifted the bleeding boy out of the car and carried him inside to the office.

  After a few minutes, McClain hurried out onto the porch and examined H. G.’s cut. The physician stitched the gash in his scalp and told him to go tell his parents that he was okay. H. G. leaped off the porch and started running for home. A woman he knew offered him a ride, so he jumped in to make the trip faster.

  When they pulled up in front of the house, it looked deserted. “It was an old tin-roof, four-room house, just a square block. We had gas lights. Gas mantels in each room. It had a big porch on it but didn’t have a bathroom,” White recalled.

  He knew his mom and dad must be at the school looking for him, so he asked to be taken back to that terrible place. The woman, a Mrs. Miller, drove fast.

  “It was two miles to the school. We went up and down two or three hills, still on an old country oil road, and another half a mile, we met my mother and dad. They were coming home,” White said. “When we met them, both cars stopped right in the middle of that road and my mother grabbed me and she was shouting, ‘Praise the Lord!’

  “A lot of people don’t know what shouting is, but I told them it was kind of a hallelujah jubilee. My dad was standing there crying. He hugged me.”

  21

  Valley of Death at Sundown

  Bus driver Lonnie Barber drove his rig to the bus barn, parked as best he could in a hurry, jumped out, and marched straight off toward the school wreckage a hundred yards or so across the way.

  Running the route had taken longer than normal because he had a mix of students from different parts of the district and found himself doubling back from time to time, to drop one off here and another there. The grammar school children were mostly hushed, although some sniffled and cried. At nearly every stop, adults were waiting for their children to bound off the bus trailer and into their arms. Barber tried to make sure all the students were left in the charge of some adult. He didn’t return to the campus until late afternoon.

  He found his oldest child, L. V., the eighteen-year-old senior, working in the rescue mission. They stared intently at each other for a moment. Lonnie didn’t have to ask.

  “Burton is hurt, but he’ll be okay,” L. V. said. “I haven’t found Pearl and Arden.”

  “Take the car, go straight home, and tell your mother what’s going on,” Lonnie said. “Then come on back here and help me look some more.”

  “Yes, sir,” L. V. said.

  L. V. watched his father join those digging through the rubble. On his way to the car, he learned from a friend that Pearl had been taken to a hospital in Tyler. She was not gravely injured. Now he could take his mother good news about all her children, save one. But he knew that would make it no less devastating for her to hear that Arden was still missing, and feared dead.

  Carolyn Jones sat on the front steps of her house in the deserted neighborhood; her eyes were locked on the dirt road leading through trees, and she waited in silence. The afternoon light was fading to dusk. A puffy cloud drifting in from the south reflected a crimson sunset.

  “I watched the car drive slowly up the lane. Mother and Ervin got out, carrying baby Ann [Carolyn’s half sister]. Helen and Paul were not with them. I ran to meet them. They were mute, stunned. Only the baby gurgled in their arms,” she remembered.

  Carolyn’s parents told her the clocks in the school had stopped at about 3:20 p.m., ten minutes before the school day was supposed to end. It wasn’t necessary for anyone to comment on the bitter circumstances of the explosion happening just minutes before school was to be out. It would be one of those “what if?” questions that always go begging for an answer in the aftermath of a disaster. They fell silent. Carolyn could tell that her mother and stepfather had scant hope of finding Helen or Paul alive.

  “Repair garages, roller rinks, gyms, church basements, dance and lodge halls—all vacant buildings were used as makeshift morgues. When the local hospitals were overcome with patients, ambulances carried the injured to more distance places,” Carolyn recalled.

  Every one of those morgues and hospitals had to be searched for Helen and Paul.

  Ted Hudson now had the local radio station broadcasting from New London. His voice on the car radio “pled incessantly for volunteer doctors and nurses, ambulances and supplies,” Carolyn said.

  Hudson announced that the new Mother Frances Hospital in Tyler was opening a day earlier than scheduled to receive patients immediately.

  “Lists of those who had been identified were read over and over on the radio,” Carolyn recalled. “We recognized the names of our friends, the children of Ervin’s coworkers, those who sat in class beside me, sang and prayed in the Baptist church.”1

  Bill Thompson decided he wouldn’t wait for a stranger to whisk him away to a hospital. He needed to go home to let his folks know he survived. He realized his mother and father would be frantic by now. They didn’t have a phone, so there was no way to find out quickly what they were doing or if they had heard that he had been saved.

  Before he had a chance to set out for home, the men returned and put Bill into an ambulance. “You wait here, and we’ll be right back,” one said.

  After they were out of sight, the boy climbed out of the ambulance and began walking away. The men caught him, put him back into the ambulance, and admonished him to stay put until they rounded up other injured children to send to the hospital with him.

  “I don’t know how many they were going to put in there. I guess stack them up,” Thompson said.

  He left again and made his way to a bus that a few students had already climbed aboard. After a moment, he thought better of that plan. On this day, a bus might take an extra hour or more to reach his house. He left the bus and found a car loaded with several of his
friends. They agreed to take him home right away.

  As soon as Bill reached his front door he felt a tremendous release of all the emotion he’d been holding inside since the explosion had pinned him in the dark. He felt a need to cry but didn’t want his dad and mom to see him crying and think he’d been hurt worse than he had. Bill cleared his eyes with the cuff of his shirt. It didn’t occur to him that his entire body was caked with plaster dust, his face was streaked with dried blood, and his hair was matted in a knot where the gash had clotted. He strode inside and greeted his mother in the kitchen. She didn’t recognize him.

  “It’s Bill,” he said. “The school blew up.”

  Bonnie Thompson was shocked. She had been busy with chores and hadn’t heard about the explosion.

  She snapped orders at Bill and his older brother Laverne, who was back home from a stint as a cavalryman in the army. Bill was told to sit down immediately, so she could take a look at his injuries and clean him up. Laverne needed to hurry out to the barn and reattach the family car’s tires so he could take Bill to the hospital in Henderson. Ever since Alvin Thompson had received a dealer car to drive, the Thompson’s automobile had been in the barn sitting up on jack stands, with its four wheels hanging from spikes on the wall. Laverne ran to the barn. Bill sank into a kitchen chair. Bonnie grabbed a damp rag and dabbed at the blood streaks on the boy’s nose and cheeks.

  At the schoolyard, Alvin Thompson surveyed bodies being loaded into a delivery truck. None resembled Bill. He decided to check the hospitals and morgues.

  He hurried to his car, cranked it, and was about to drive away when a neighbor’s child leaned on the driver’s side window.

  “They found Bill,” the girl said. “He’s at home.”

  Thompson gave an audible sigh of relief, thanked her, and then raced off toward his farm. Sitting with his back pushed hard into the seat cushion and his fists knotted on the steering wheel, he could see the rosy hues of sundown pooled in his rearview mirror. One glance into his own eyes grounded him, and tears flooded his cheeks.