Gone at 3-17

by David M. Brown

  “Go ahead. I dare you,” the woman said, putting her glare as close to the roughneck’s face as she could without bumping his nose. He backed off but continued to argue his points as the reporter followed him through the room, bickering from behind.2

  Using the distraction as a shield, Rives crept quietly among the bodies, lifting sheets and taking notes.

  Walter Cronkite felt like he was stuffed inside a press box at a major bowl game. The small Western Union building in Overton had been converted overnight into a makeshift newsroom to accommodate all the reporters from outside East Texas. Journalists and photographers had been arriving in a steady trickle since midnight, and now groups of reporters were showing up—all trying to get a spot in the Western Union office. The explosion was not just the hottest story in the nation; it was being followed around the globe. A front-page story in the London Times in England on Friday morning grabbed readers with a chilling headline:

  Explosion at U.S. School

  ____

  Hundreds Killed

  ____

  Walls and Roof Collapse

  ____

  Children Buried Under Ruins

  By noon on Friday, scores of reporters were buzzing in and out of the Western Union office, where coffee tables, end tables, and apple crates were being used to supplement the dozen regular desks in the room. The reporters were sharing typewriters. Just as soon as one ended his story, snatched up his copy, and took it to a teletype operator, a competing reporter plopped down at the vacant typewriter and began pecking out a story. About forty Western Union operators were on the job. The small office was as noisy as a big city newsroom on an election night. Nearly everybody in the room—reporters and telegraph operators—was smoking—cigarettes, cigars, pipes—and the office swirled with bluish-gray smoke. The only rule about it: do not under any circumstances ignite a fire because a room so clogged with cheap copy paper and strips of teletype tape will burst into flames immediately.

  Henry McLemore had written much of his copy out in longhand as he waited for a typewriter. When he finally got one, he quickly spun out the first few paragraphs of the story he was writing for the afternoon daily newspapers: “NEW LONDON, Texas, March 19—The radio voice told of Royal Mail’s victory in the Grand National, gave the winners of the exhibition baseball games, and price of crude oil, and then—without a change of feeling, said:

  “‘Will someone go to... street and sit with Mrs.... She has been unable to locate her two children, Timmy, aged 9, and Francine, aged 11. They went to school Thursday morning and have not returned.’”

  McLemore notes that he went to the address—“a little box house in the richest oil fields in the world, and the woman was almost too tired to answer my ring.” He explained that she was one of the first mothers who waded into the giant pile of rubble in search of her children, yanking absurdly at boulders and beams it would take heavy equipment to move. Then she hurried to the nearest temporary morgue—“a frame building with a ragged sheet hung over the door—and tiptoed from cot to cot afraid of what she might find.

  “But Tommy and Francine weren’t there,” McLemore wrote. “She made the tragic rounds in Overton, Tyler, Henderson, Kilgore, and all of the other neighboring towns to which bodies were carried in that frantic hour after the explosion. She was a member of the quiet shuffling crowds that sightseers saw standing in the front of the funeral homes and the hospitals.”

  The woman turned and faced McLemore, looking him in the eyes. “They must be somewhere, my babies. But I am so tired and there is nowhere else to look,” she told him.

  “She was right,” McLemore wrote. “There was no other place, and there was no other place for others like her; she was not alone. Scattered over the oil fields, in the little houses pitched in the forests of derricks were more than one family who could hope for no trace of the children they sent off to school that morning.”

  School officials already were suggesting that all the victims may not be found, as such, McLemore said.

  “With the blast went the school records, and 14 of the teachers. No one knows exactly who was in what classes, how many children were in the building at the time of the detonation. I saw steel filing cabinets and their contents, hundreds of yards from the site of the blast. I saw bits of clothing, books, and desks, scattered over far away tennis courts and play fields. Blackboards, with lessons chalked upon them, sailed blocks from the building. Gray steel lockers with clothing hanging from their sprained doors littered the campus.”

  Officials have good reason to be skeptical about finding all the victims, the reporter noted. “For some of the pupils were literally blown to bits when the gas in the basement, ignited and, striking upward and outward, shattered the building. No one knows the actual number of the dead,” McLemore wrote. “No one ever will.”3

  Even before he sent the copy onto Dallas, Kansas City, and New York, the puckish Georgian was pretty sure he had just crafted a report packed with emotional dynamite.

  “Dynamite!” somebody shouted across the Western Union office. “They’ve found dynamite in the ruins.”

  Every reporter in the room dropped what they were doing and scrambled to be the first out the door. This was a potentially sinister new angle—explosives that might have been planted and detonated to intentionally raze the school and kill as many children as possible. The few reporters who stayed behind typed out briefs about the discovery of several bundles of dynamite located under the stage in a part of the ruins where the auditorium had stood.4 The bulletins were coded to ring bells in teletype machines at every newsroom in the country and many across the world.

  By the time the mob of reporters reached the school grounds, though, the dynamite story had fizzled. It wasn’t quite a dud, but neither was it an incendiary blast of news that would shake the world.

  It was true: several sticks of dynamite were located in a storage cabinet beneath the stage. A custodian quickly came forward and explained why dynamite was there. When he and other janitors had been working on the football field the previous summer, they had used dynamite to blast boulders out of the playing field area, to make the field as smooth as possible. Somebody had clumsily stored the leftover sticks of dynamite in an inappropriate location. “A stupid location,” somebody said. So the information about the dynamite stored casually within the school, where it might have caused a disaster, but didn’t, just deepened skepticism among reporters, parents, and others about whether the school campus was being administered in ways to keep the children safe. Superintendent Chesley Shaw’s painstakingly constructed reputation began to unravel.

  Back in the makeshift newsroom, Cronkite found a vacant workstation and plopped down in a wooden swivel chair to start on his afternoon dispatch for late-breaking afternoon newspapers and the a.m. dailies. An old-flashioned Remington typewriter missing a keypad here and there sat on the desk. It was part of the discarded supplies and material that had been dug out of the attic and backroom of the Western Union office. Cronkite felt lucky to have any kind of typewriter at all. He lit his corncob pipe, took a couple of tentative puffs, and started pecking the typewriter’s keyboard.

  “NEW LONDON, Texas, March 19 (UP)—A few parents, still hopeful that they would find their children, even if only in death, clung to the ropes surrounding the New London school site Friday night,” Cronkite wrote.

  He had spent much of the day at the explosion site, taking notes as the recovery mission drew to a close. Parents still at the scene had spent what must have been the most miserable night of their lives, the reporter surmised. “By daybreak most of them had visited every morgue in the vicinity,” Cronkite wrote. “They returned to the scene of the holocaust, startled to find that workers nearly had completed the demolition.”

  In less than twenty-four hours, three thousand volunteers had removed so much rubble from the blast zone to several piles on the perimeter of the campus that now it looked as though the ground where the school had stood was only a shadow of its form
er self—swept clean by a giant broom. Countless tons of debris had been hauled out by the men of the peach-basket brigades. The accomplishment was an unparalleled engineering feat in modern times.

  The roar of trucks, generators, cranes, and other heavy equipment used in the night had gone silent by midmorning. “It seemed that the last hope had faded from the surviving onlookers when the last loose stones and girders were pulled from the site,” Cronkite wrote. “But within a few minutes workers returned to dig in four feet of silt that filled the subbasement to ground level.” No more bodies were found. “Morticians, ambulance drivers and nuns packed suitcases and left to return, in some cases, hundreds of miles to their homes.”

  “Despite efforts of workmen to clear away the gruesome debris,” Cronkite wrote, “Friday’s visitors found morbid souvenirs of the tragedy. Bits of musical instruments, blasted into tiny pieces; blood-stained books and assorted rags, once adornment on Rusk County school children’s backs, were acquired.”5

  In another corner of the makeshift newsroom, Felix McKnight pounded away on a typewriter with his third rewrite since daybreak of the day’s main news story. A group of fresh Associated Press reporters had arrived during the night; they were out working with Bill Rives on new material. The reporters eventually brought all their findings back to McKnight at the Western Union building, so he could weave their notes into the day’s main story or set it aside as material for a sidebar.

  The Alvin Gerdes story made a poignant sidebar. McKnight hammered out a quick two-paragraph brief that he could follow later with more details:

  “New London, Texas—The name Alvin Gerdes, no stranger to print, appeared again today but it drew no cheers—only bowed heads.”

  “Hero of the district champion London football team and considered a brilliant college prospect, he was one of the blast victims.”6

  Gerdes, a senior about to graduate and captain of the football team, was killed along with his younger brother Allen. Allen, sixteen, also played for the London Wildcats football team but had yet to make a name for himself as an athlete. He was a Boy Scout, a member of Jack Fentress’s New London Troop 217, and had been close friends with the scoutmaster’s son, Jack Jr., who also died in the explosion. One of the troop’s favorite events had occurred during May of a previous spring, at the Camp-O-Ral. Scoutmaster Fentress and Scoutmaster William Mote of London’s Troop 219 together escorted their boys over to Henderson for the weekend. There they joined eight troops—two hundred boys, all told—from Rusk and Panola Counties for two days and nights of scouting.

  The encampment rose on the grounds of the Henderson Junior High School. Scores of olive green pup tents sprouted quickly in regimented lines and divisions. Allen, Jack Jr., and other boys pitched their tents near where the flag for Troup 217 waved in the early summer air. They helped erect the troop kitchen, and after the evening meal, their patrol squad marched with the rest of their troop to the center of the camp, where all the uniformed scouts congregated for a ceremonial lighting of the bonfire and Indian benediction. As the fire licked a tall yellow-red fame against the dusky sky, the boys sang a soft vesper. A lone bugler played taps, and the Grand Council concluded with a prayer. The boys reorganized into patrols and troops and marched back to their campsites. Just outside the tents, crickets sang in the dark grass. The front tent flaps were open, allowing an evening breeze into the canvas enclosure, and stars sparkled brightly in the patch of sky visible from the tent’s doorway beyond stands of pine. The boys had talked for hours, of hunting and fishing and last year’s football season; of baseball, and the New York Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals; of the next day, which would include cooking contests and first-aid drills and signaling and starting fires with fint stones and constructing rope fences with elaborate knots, and they talked on into the night about school and their favorite teachers and most despised teachers and about what they planned to do when they were finally grown up and finished with school. And they spoke of girls, until finally, the talk dwindled and the boys drifted off to sleep, lulled by the harmony of the crickets and sheltered by the shimmering stars.7

  The wire services dispatched sidebars about the death of New London’s pretty music teacher, Mattie Queen Price. Queen had been one of those people that everyone, children and adults alike, just loved. She also was society editor for the Overton Press.

  As McKnight worked on his rewrite, a man who had been helpful with tips on a number of other stories rushed into the newsroom and approached the reporter. He asked in a whisper whether AP might be interested in a very unusual telegram offering condolences. At first McKnight was leery. A mishmash of information—telegrams from dignitaries, notes from officials announcing scholarship funds, and such—tended to clog up the main story, and often such correspondence was not meaty enough for a sidebar. At best they could be turned into briefs.

  “Tell me who?” McKnight said, offering his ear to his source.

  “Adolf Hitler,” the man whispered.

  “I’ll take it,” McKnight said quickly.

  This was fascinating, the reporter thought. The harsh little man with a postage-stamp mustache had seized dictatorial control of Germany and become a frightful character on the world stage by spring 1937. His regime was rearming Germany in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Talk of a new war, incited by Hitler, was sweeping Europe. Now, he was expressing sorrow about the deaths of American schoolchildren. Hitler’s propaganda man must be working overtime tonight, McKnight thought. He wrote a two-paragraph brief about the telegram, noting it was an “AP exclusive.”

  It was approaching noon when Marvin Dees finally made it home. The roughneck took his boots off outside on the porch and tried as best he could to brush some of the loose dirt from layers of filth on his shirt and pants. His wife, Floy, met him in the front room and hugged him for a long, long time without talking. Finally, she said she was going to make him a hot meal.

  “You probably haven’t eaten since yesterday,” Floy said.

  “I’m not hungry,” Marvin said.

  “You’ve got to be hungry,” she insisted.

  “No. Not now.”

  Marvin went to the bedroom, peeled off his clothes, and lay down across the foot of the bed. He was exhausted but not sleepy. His mind was whirling with scenes from the rescue mission, turning again and again like some kind of bizarre carousel in the haunted house at a carnival. He tried to think about other things. Each time his thoughts started in the direction he aimed them—such as the last time he’d been fishing, or the first time he rode a bicycle—the haunted house carousel would quickly swirl back into view, full of mangled bodies. “I knew right then it was going to be something you just lived with for the rest of your life,” Marvin Dees said in an interview for this book.

  Felix McKnight’s local tipster returned late Friday afternoon, this time with a solemn look on his face. “Big news,” he whispered in McKnight’s ear. “Superintendent Shaw has killed himself.”

  McKnight drew back. “Are you sure about this?”

  The man nodded and shrugged his shoulders at the same time.

  “Is that a yes or a no?”

  It comes from a normally reliable source, the man said.

  McKnight grabbed Bill Rives by the shoulder and whispered in his ear. “There’s a rumor Chesley Shaw has committed suicide. Leave the newsroom as casually as possible and go check it out.”

  In a moment, Rives pulled a sheet out of the typewriter he was using, laid it face down on the desk, and strolled out of the office. McKnight said good-bye to his source and turned back to his typewriter

  Not five minutes had passed when his phone rang. It was Fred Dye in Dallas, wanting to know, “What in the hell is going on down there?!”

  “Excuse me?” McKnight said.

  Dye told him there was a bulletin on a competing wire service saying Superintendent Shaw has committed suicide. “How’d we get beat on this?” Dye demanded.

  “It’s unconfirmed. I’ve got Rives over the
re right now checking it out.”

  “Well, since it’s out there, we’ve got to say something.”

  McKnight thought about it for a moment. “How about this: The superintendent of a school that exploded, killing hundreds of students, has committed suicide, according to an unconfirmed report.”

  “Not bad, but don’t use suicide.”

  “We are reporting on their report, right?”

  “It works for me. File it,” Dye said.

  McKnight filed the short bulletin about Shaw’s supposed death.

  It wouldn’t surprise me a bit, given what the man has been through, McKnight thought. Now rumors were spreading that some of the rougher elements in the community were trying to stir up a lynch mob—with Chesley Shaw as its primary target.

  About ten minutes later Rives appeared, smiling. “Not true,” he told McKnight.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I just spoke with the man. He’s at home, sitting in his living room.”

  McKnight killed the bulletin about Shaw.

  Sarah McClendon was walking out of the disaster site, her legs coated with mud up to the knees, when she saw a truck driver sitting in the cab of his truck, going nowhere. His arms were draped around the steering wheel, and his face was down against his arms. She tapped him on the shoulder. “What’s the matter?”

  The driver looked up, his face smeared with grime. “Nothing, lady. I’ve just been sick for the last two nights.”

  McClendon quickly found a ride to Tyler, went straight to the newsroom, and began an afternoon story for the Courier-Times. She noted that some officials suggested a mass burial might be needed to lower the risk of an epidemic from the large number of unburied bodies. Parents from all over crushed the idea immediately, saying they would have no part of a mass burial. They all wanted their children to receive the traditional ceremonies for the dead, even if the funerals were abbreviated and hurried. The children, they argued, should have at least a semblance of dignity before they went to eternal rest.