Gone at 3-17

by David M. Brown

  Hudson asked survivors of the explosion to take the microphone and identify themselves, so that loved ones who might be listening would know that they were okay.

  Carroll “Boxhead” Evans, who had been planning to visit his parents in Belton, took Hudson’s offer. “This is Carroll Evans. I was not in the school when it exploded and I’m not hurt,” he said, somewhat awkwardly, into the radio mic. Evans was always at ease talking with people, even garrulous most of the time, but talking on the radio was an oddity; he swallowed and adjusted the tone of his voice. “My wife, Mildred, and our son, Duane, are safe and sound. I hope my mom and dad in Belton are listening.”

  Evans wouldn’t find out until later, but his parents already had started toward New London in their car, fearing the worst. Their son’s voice coming over the car radio was the sweetest sound they had ever heard.

  Mr. and Mrs. Marshall Cox were driving toward Arp as Carroll Evans was talking on the radio. There was just one doctor in the tiny hamlet, so the office was not hard to find. Marshall Cox swerved into the doctor’s driveway and skidded to a stop in the gravel. He and his wife ran from the car and up the wooden steps to the doctor’s second-floor office. When the doctor saw them, he nodded gravely toward Perry Lee, who was on a hospital bed next to a back wall. When the parents looked to the doctor for some sign of hope, the doc just shook his head no.

  Perry’s face was gray. Mr. and Mrs. Cox sat with their boy, each holding a hand, until he died about 10 p.m.16

  Wilson Jordan sat at Jimmie’s side in the Bryant Clinic in Tyler. Corine Jordan sat at Elsie’s side in the nearby Mother Frances Hospital. Elsie kept asking her mother whether Jimmie was still alive. Each time Corine said yes, Elsie made her promise she was telling the truth.

  “She’s at another hospital,” Corine told Elsie.

  “Why is she there, and I’m here?”

  “The ambulance just brought you here.”

  Elsie’s head was wrapped in a gauze bandage that was swathed at an angle across her face, covering her right eye. Glass had sliced her eyelid, which had to be stitched, but by a miracle it hadn’t cut her eyeball. She grew silent. “Promise?” she said.

  Her mother patted her hand. “Promise.”

  At Bryant Clinic, Wilson Jordan was greatly relieved when a man came into Jimmie’s room and identified himself as Dr. Albert D’Errico, the brain surgeon from Dallas. D’Errico gingerly removed a bandage from Jimmie’s head, bent close to her, and shined his headlamp down to illuminate the hole in her skull. He used tweezers to remove splinters of bone and bits of debris from her wound. After he had cleaned it out to his satisfaction, D’Errico closed the hole with stitches. He told Mr. Jordan it didn’t appear the object that punctured her skull went so deep that it caused brain damage. He carefully bandaged her head, finally wrapping gauze at an angle across her face, covering her right eye.

  “If she survives twenty-four hours, I think she’ll get through it,” the doctor said.

  Lonnie Barber and his son, L. V., learned that two of the Barber children were at the Bryant Clinic in Tyler. Pearl and Burton had been admitted to the small hospital with injuries that weren’t life threatening. All the clinic’s beds were filled with victims of the explosion. But Arden Barber was not there or at the new Mother Frances Hospital or at the Henderson Hospital or any of the other hospitals Lonnie and L. V. had checked.

  Finally, a friend of the family who had made a round of the morgues and funeral homes went to where Lonnie Barber and his son were working in a peach-basket line and pulled them aside. The man told them Arden was among the dead. Lonnie Barber thanked him and then went back to work pulling debris from the ruins. L. V. stayed at his father’s side. Lonnie Barber didn’t typically express his emotions, L. V. said years later in an interview. But the quiet, gentle farmer and longtime school bus driver was deeply hurt on the inside—grieving for Arden and all the other children he had come to know and love who perished that day, L. V. said.

  “Arden was just a little ole slender, happy-go-lucky boy. He always made good grades,” L. V. said. “He was twelve years old.”

  Dr. D’Errico left the Bryant Clinic and went straight to Mother Frances Hospital, where he joined Dr. C. C. McDonald and other local surgeons in the hospital’s state-of-the-art operating room. Considering the number of seriously injured patients already admitted, with most needing some type of operation, the doctors were braced for a long night of almost nonstop procedures. Mother Mary Ambrose had admitted more than twenty children by mid-evening and before midnight the number would reach twenty-five—most with life-threatening injuries. At the hospital’s front door, Mother Mary Regina welcomed parents, relatives, and friends who were searching for loved ones. If a child’s name was on her list, she sent family members to the patient’s room or to the waiting area outside the operating room.

  The hospital had one unidentified girl, about eleven or twelve, who was unconscious. Mother Regina allowed friends and family who were looking for a girl about that age to go to the room and peek in to see if they recognized the child. So far, nobody had offered a clue as to who she might be.

  Mother Regina’s list of patients included Eddie Gauthreaux, the third grader who had returned to Mattie Queen Price’s music room to get his jacket. Eddie’s skull was partly crushed. A notation beside the child’s name said, “No hope held for recovery.” The list described Marilla Davidson’s injuries as a broken leg, severe head bruises, and multiple lacerations. Twelve-year-old Connie Downs was listed in “very serious condition” with a broken right leg, broken right arm, and suspected internal injuries. Chester Couser, sixteen, was in critical condition because of a fractured skull. A crushed backbone made Maxine Maddry’s hope of survival almost nil. Ida Ray Smith was listed as having bruises about her face and head. A boy named Elton Dees was in critical condition with a fractured skull and severe leg injury. The full extent of injuries suffered by Elbert Box was still being assessed, though a leg injury had been bad enough to put him on the critical list. One of Morris Luxemburg’s legs was broken and seriously lacerated.17

  Teachers and school administrators also streamed through the hospital to help sort out the whereabouts of as many students as possible. Junior High Principal Felton Waggoner went from room to room, speaking to each child who was awake enough to realize a visitor was in the room.

  “I’m so happy you made it out and are okay,” he said to one young girl. “How did you get out of the school?”

  “Don’t you remember, Mr. Waggoner?” she said. “You carried me out.”

  More students and teachers were killed and injured in the junior high portion of the building than anywhere else. Waggoner had carried so many out that he lost track of all their names.

  “I’m just so happy we got you out,” he told the child.

  By the time Will Anderson reached Tyler in his old Whippet, the car’s engine was sputtering and popping. He’d driven the Whippet for many miles around East Texas, stopping at hospitals and funeral homes in Henderson, Jacksonville, Kilgore, and Longview. He was searching for his daughters, Allene and Lillian. Anderson had accepted the possibility that they might both be dead, but he held hope in his heart that one or both of them could be alive. His wife, Lola, had given him two scraps of cloth to help in the search if worse came to worst. The cuttings were from the material Lola had used to make each of the girls’ dresses they’d worn to school that day.

  But there was reason for hope. Some of Lillian’s classmates had told Mr. and Mrs. Anderson that she was outside playing softball when the school blew up. Even so, she was missing. At the last stop Will Anderson had made, a friend had told him somebody else thought a girl who looked like Allene was at the new hospital in Tyler. He jumped back into the Whippet and drove to Tyler as fast as the old car would go. About the time he arrived at the hospital, the Whippet’s motor backfired one last time, shuddered, and slung a piston through the engine wall. He trekked toward Mother Frances on foot, beneath street lamps.
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  Allene wasn’t at the hospital. Will Anderson found a ride to the Bryant Clinic. Neither of his daughters was among the patients at that small hospital.

  Anderson hitchhiked back toward New London and got out in Overton. At a morgue in Overton, where clothing articles were placed atop sheets covering the dead, he found matches for both scraps of cloth he’d carried in his pocket all over East Texas.

  23

  Midnight of the Soul

  Felix McKnight picked his way over and across the sprawling ruins, looking for a fresh angle for his next dispatch. The AP reporter paused to take notes at a spot where a rescue worker clutched an acetylene torch near a massive steel beam protruding from slabs of broken concrete. The roughneck gripped the torch in a gnarled fist, skillfully gliding the sharp blue flame at the tip of the torch across the beam. His arms glistened with sweat. Grime was caked on his brow and cheeks. The flame popped and crackled as it contacted cold metal. The torch hissed at first, then made a low roar as the worker squeezed pure oxygen into the nozzle. The acetylene burned fiercely, slicing through the beam like a carving knife through a flat ham. The steel gradually sagged and broke into separate pieces, loosening another knot in the heavily packed debris field.

  Soon afterward McKnight’s impressions of the scene were rolling out in words and sentences on clattering teletype machines in newsrooms throughout the nation and the world: “Acetylene torches by the score were brought into play, and bit through the twisted steel of the girders which had supported the building and which were torn asunder in the terrific blast,” McKnight wrote. “The building was of brick with a tile roof. The explosion mushroomed the roof, blew the brick walls outward and then the roof settled on those inside the building who had not been blown out by the force of the blast. So powerful was the explosion that employees of a Humble Oil Company plant two and a half miles away said it made the ground shake.”1

  It began to rain. United Press reporter Tom Reynolds wandered upon the weary boss of a gang of volunteers leaning against the shard of a school wall. Water trickled off the brim of his hat.

  “How many more in there?” Reynolds asked.

  “God only knows,” the man said. “We won’t know until we get down to the clay. I mean, there is a possibility of finding more bodies until we reach the clay dirt of the foundation.”2

  The Salvation Army took charge of rounding up food for a ragtag brigade of about six hundred grave diggers, volunteers who had rushed to the school to help save some of the children and who now would be burying most of those pulled from the wreckage.3

  The country doctor who had attended to H. G. White’s head cut, J. T. Mc-Clain, later had jumped into his roadster and sped the about three miles to the disaster site. He wanted to see if he could be of more immediate help at the scene. Meandering through the rain, which suddenly began to fall harder, he saw men pulling bodies and pieces of bodies from holes in the ground no deeper than foxholes. McClain helped where he could, splashing through the mud each time some excitement arose where men thought they had located a living child. It was the grimmest sight his eyes had taken in since the battlefields of Europe.

  The first newspaper coverage hit the streets in an extra edition of the Henderson Daily News early Thursday evening. A bold headline proclaimed, “Hundreds Perish in School Blast.” The Tyler Courier-Times also produced an extra edition on Thursday. “W.C. Shaw, superintendent of the New London school... telephoned here this afternoon that he believed between 300 and 400 school children died in an explosion at the school,” the report said.

  The biweekly Kilgore News, normally scheduled for Thursday publication anyway, was delivered to homes in East Texas late that afternoon with an even higher estimated death count. The newspaper’s headlines captured a feeling of hysteria that seized the region as the day wore on: “Explosion Kills 500 Children, Wrecked Building, Burying Mutilated Bodies”; “New London School Tragedy One of Largest in History; Students Meet Death under Tons of Heavy Debris.”

  There were a few bright moments, like nuggets of gold or diamonds turning up in a washtub of muddy water. Under some of the heavy debris that was clawed away, two children, a boy and a girl, sat huddled together, clinging tightly to each other. With grime-smeared, frightened faces, they gazed up into the glare of floodlights. As the children were helped into an ambulance, many in the crowd raised their arms, hugged, and cheered.4

  But the jubilation was not frequent. More often than not, noted AP reporter Bill Rives, the rescue teams recovered corpses. There seemed to be no end to the bodies being piled upon the schoolyard.

  Rives recalled arriving near the disaster site by car just before dark. Reporters walking in saw the football field lights blazing in the distance, casting an odd twilight glow against the commotion in the distance. An undercurrent of disturbing sounds caused reporters to step up their pace. When Rives approached, the scene looked like a quarry with debris piled fifteen feet high in places.

  “Blood smeared an upturned brick,” Rives wrote later that night.5“With a shout, the workers gathered available shovels and lights and stretchers were called. An arm, a head appeared—terribly crushed. In a few minutes it was on the stretcher, carried to a waiting ambulance and speeded to the nearest temporary morgue.

  “The scene was repeated over and over.”

  Several thousand oil-field workers, many of them wearing khaki clothes with dark stains after working a full day’s shift in the fields, dug frantically through the ruins. Many of them, like Joe Wheeler Davidson, were searching for their own children.

  “Under the hot glare of arc lamps, amid the thunder of trucks, the blaring of loud speakers, the even pacing of military sentries, the occasional shriek of an ambulance, hundreds of men dug. The known death toll stood momentarily at 500. It was expected to reach 600,” reported the Henderson Daily News in an extra edition. Various news organizations reported what they believed to be factual information about the death count.

  A film crew shooting a motion picture for a newsreel recorded buckets containing body parts at a makeshift morgue near the school, reported the Tyler Courier-Telegram. “A bucketful of ribs, leg and skull bones, looking as if they had been boiled for weeks and as clean of flesh as a whistle were being exhibited.... These bones were actually picked up in this manner from the debris... showing that the sand cut the flesh from the bone. A piece of skull bone was cut away as neatly as if a surgeon’s knife had performed a trepanning operation.”6

  “Two sorrowful parents moved as if in a trance, bearing the clothes of a young boy. He died in their arms and his body was gently taken from them. But they were afraid in the confusion they might not see him again, so they wanted his death suit,” Rives reported.7

  The AP reporter met a woman searching for her child, who “frantically snatched at a hand with two rings on it found” a hundred yards from the building. “A cry, and she turns away.” The “scene of desolation and despair... made my heart sink,” Rives wrote.

  L. A. Mathis had been in the peach-basket line for hours, long after he learned that his brother, Donald, escaped from the ruins without serious injury. L. A. was weary, his arms and back ached, and his head pounded with an awful headache. Each time he grabbed one of the baskets, it seemed heavier than the last basket he handled, but he drew upon all his strength, took hold of it, and passed it on to other hands. No sooner had he passed off one basket, another came swinging toward him, bulging with bricks and broken boards. The last time he took a short break to relieve himself, Mathis discovered he had forgotten his gloves somewhere, probably when he was getting a cup of coffee at the Salvation Army disaster station.

  The men were passing a thick rafter through the lines, a long wooden beam so heavy that many hands were needed to hold and pass its weight. Mathis grabbed the beam when it reached him and his hand slipped, so he had to shift his feet quickly and catch the rafter with his other hand at another spot. As it passed in front of him, he saw that his hand had slipped because brain matter was
smeared across the beam. His stomach seemed to turn inside out. He puked. A moment later, he collapsed. A couple of guys stopped to help him. “You okay?” one said. Mathis came to. He felt too ill to stand back up, but he let the other men pull him to his feet.

  “I’m okay,” he said. “I need some gloves.”

  Somebody handed Mathis a new pair of Salvation Army gloves. He stepped back into his spot in the peach-basket line and resumed his former pace of passing the debris along to the next man without breaking the rhythm. Mathis and others who worked in the peach-basket brigade would remember that night for the rest of their lives, recalling vivid details of the ordeal decades later.

  “I can’t remember every little detail, but I can remember some details,” Marvin Dees said in an interview more than seventy years later. “The overall picture is with me forever—the chaos, the noise, a lot of engines running, and people yelling orders, conversation here and there, and a lot of screaming going on. Especially at first. Especially in the first few hours, there was a lot of weeping. You’d see a scene here and there that was heartbreaking.”

  Graften Ferguson, a young apprentice carpenter, had shown up at the disaster site that afternoon. He and his brother were fishing on the Angelina River when they heard the explosion. The people in charge at first put him to work building pine coffins. Now his duties had shifted to digging graves. He became one of hundreds of men working with shovels and picks at Pleasant Hill Cemetery, the closest graveyard with a lot of available space.

  By late evening, thousands of volunteers were working in teams to remove the debris at a pace that seemed almost surreal. Witnesses who fixed a long gaze on the operation were amazed to see the rubble field literally shrinking, inch by inch, as they watched.