Gone at 3-17

by David M. Brown

  McClendon reported that coffin factories were working overtime to meet the needs of the East Texas catastrophe. Embalmer supplies were running low, and some bodies already were beginning to decay, she wrote.

  “David Frame, general superintendent of the Humble [Oil] Company at Houston, directed relief efforts from that camp,” McClendon reported. “Three men at the Humble Headquarters office sat with one grief-stricken family of company employees after another dealing out company money to defray funeral expenses.”

  McClendon said most undertaking establishments reported funeral arrangements still pending.8

  The Tyler Courier-Times carried a short piece that afternoon stating that Superintendent Chesley Shaw speculated it was “quite possible” natural gas from the oil field on which the school was built had somehow seeped into the basement and caused the explosion.

  The architect who designed the school, T. Roy Ainsworth of Houston, told the Associated Press that no ordinary blast could have destroyed the school that his firm designed in 1931. The structure—254 feet long and 146 feet wide—was framed with steel, using hollow tile for walls within the building and a brick exterior with stone trim. Roof trusses were steel, covered with concrete slab and then roofing tile.

  “The entire structure was fireproof,” Ainsworth said.

  It was designed to be steam-heated from a properly ventilated central boiler that burned oil, he added.9

  Houston Post reporter John Mortimer finagled a typewriter in the Overton Western Union office and sat down to write his piece for Saturday.

  “The aftermath of the New London catastrophe came Friday—an aftermath of stark pathetic silence when the hour came to count the score,” Mortimer wrote. The reporter had detected “something in the faces of those men which was not good to see.

  “Cold staring eyes—something had gone out of them,” he wrote. “There was an absence of tears. But not of suffering.”

  As he went about trying to interview those who had worked in the rescue and recovery operation, including some who had lost children, Mortimer confronted “a belligerent, repelling silence. They did not want to talk about it. The early frenzy had passed. They had begun to realize the extent of the tragedy, and they wanted to share their grief alone.”

  He asked about a relief program set up to help with hospital and funeral expenses. “We don’t want money. We just want to be left alone,” a rescue worker told him.10

  Bill Rives wandered over to the Overton city hall, which had become a clearing house for information about the victims. He overheard a woman speaking to a clerk. “Bobby was wearing a brown shirt, corduroy pants, and brown shoes,” she said. “He was such a little boy. Weighed about a hundred ten pounds.”

  People were using every phone in the building. Rives didn’t intrude, but he got close enough to hear bits of their conversations, and he jotted notes as he listened.

  “We have found Mary, mother,” a woman said. “No, I don’t think she suffered much. Her face had a sort of smile on it.”

  Near her, on another phone, a man said, “Can you come tomorrow, Tom? They haven’t found the boy yet.”

  Rives headed back to the Western Union office to feed McKnight some of the material to use in the wire service’s next dispatch.

  McKnight, picking up on every poignant detail he could locate, even those close at hand, added this line to the story he was about to send: “Kin and friends of the dead packed the telegram office to send messages as scores of newsmen beat a steady clatter on a battery of typewriters.”11

  Henry McLemore was on a roll. He’d crafted another brilliant opening and solid story that could run Saturday or Sunday. Or the editors could switch his earlier story to a Sunday piece, since it was so pent up with emotion, and run this story for tomorrow. McLemore didn’t care when they ran them; he just wanted to keep writing as quickly as the material presented itself. He had started his latest piece with one of the most powerful lines of any of the thousands of stories that were filed during a week of intense news coverage.

  “London, Rusk Co. Texas, March 19—The richest little school district in the world became the poorest.”

  The opening was a balled fist, packed with bitter irony, designed to smack a reader on the chin. As the reader sits back and decides he’s got to know what this means, McLemore explains, “This tiny place sprawls over almost the exact center of what men have called the richest strip of earth in all the world. Beneath it, bubbling and gurgling, crawls a river of black gold that is oil.

  “Twenty-five thousand derricks, each a marker for a well, lift their gaunt ends in and about it. Twenty-five thousand sand flares, each a guarantee that the well over which it sheds a crimson light is flowing, burn day and night.

  “But Friday night the derricks stood out as symbols of fabulous wealth” converted to “markers for the dead,” and the flares “were funeral torches for the hundreds of children who died in the schoolhouse catastrophe which has no equal in the United States.

  “Oil town folk are hard folk. Literary realists have portrayed them many and many a time as the hardest of folk. They’re big and tough, and they live the same way. Oil towns are notorious for their hell-for-leather, rip-roaring times; for their anything-goes-anytime spirit.

  “And Friday night is always a gala night in an oil town. Because Friday night is payday and tomorrow is Saturday, when all the joints are open—wide open.

  “You should have been in this oil town Friday night. The only places where there were crowds were the telegraph companies (‘Try and be there by twelve stop Bobby will be buried in early afternoon’), the funeral homes (‘No, it ain’t her. My God!’), and the hospitals (‘Be as quiet as you can, please’).

  “The crowds that stand dumbly around these places in London have duplicates in thirteen other East Texas towns.”

  McLemore spoke with every survivor he could locate. “There was Evelyn Hudkins, 16, pretty. She crawled through a twisted tangle of girders and dragged behind her the torn body” of a boy.

  “He was my sweetheart,” she said. “I’ve gone around with him ever since I can remember, and I couldn’t leave him there... though I knew he was dead.”

  McLemore met a man who identified himself as an Englishman. “I went through four years of the war, and this is the first time I ever saw anything that was worse,” the Englishman told the reporter.

  “For one-quarter of a block there was nothing but ruin. It was as if a tremendous cathedral had been struck dead by a bomb,” McLemore wrote.

  “Four tractors fastened their cables to the entire side of a wall that had fallen in, sealing a classroom. The ten-ton slab was yanked aside, and three little bodies removed. A blackboard, miraculously intact, still had arithmetic inscriptions chalked on the board.

  “Mothers and fathers superintended the crow-barring of the children’s lockers. It was almost more than one could bear as they were handed sweaters, baseball gloves, tennis racquets, and books. Some of the lockers were half a block away from the building—half buried in the muddy red clay.

  “I talked to a mother and father whose little girl, having forgotten her coat when she left school early, returned and was halfway up to the wall leading to the main entrance when the building went straight up in the air. Somehow, nothing struck her.

  “I talked to the school plumber who, two minutes before the blast, missed a needed tool and walked outside to his truck to fetch it.

  “I talked to parents who, earlier in the day, had whipped their children for playing hooky. They cried with joy as they told me of the punishment they had meted out.

  “But there were more than 400 I didn’t talk to. And that’s why the richest school district in the world is the poorest.”12

  Carolyn Jones went with her mother and stepfather to the funeral home in Henderson to make arrangements for Helen’s and Paul’s bodies to be shipped to Oklahoma. “I was told to wait in the car,” Carolyn recalled.

  By that time, night had fallen.

/>   “The day before a carnival set up its rides on a vacant lot near the Court House square in Henderson, and I could hear the tinny music of the merry-go-round calliope,” Carolyn said. “Growing tired of waiting, I climbed out and walked to the door of a nearby sheet iron shed or garage. Standing in the open door, I saw on makeshift tables row upon row of bundles wrapped in bloody sheets. I hurried back to the car.”

  As she waited, the calliope music danced up over the dark trees and evaporated into the black sky.13

  Part III. Aftermath, March 20–29

  26

  Coffin Train

  Ted Hudson was still on the radio, more than thirty-six hours after he first took the mic and started talking. He asked for volunteers to go to the railroad depot in Overton to help unload coffins arriving from Dallas.

  Even if Hudson had an opportunity to sleep, he would have had a hard time shutting his eyes and letting himself sink toward unconsciousness. Too many images were swirling in his head. Like many of those who worked for long hours in the rescue and recovery mission, he didn’t feel as though he ever wanted to sleep or eat again.

  Felix McKnight had now gone more than forty-eight hours without sleep. He had barely moved from his typewriter all night, listening intently to all the chitchat buzzing across the Western Union office, just in case he caught something he’d missed. He hadn’t missed much.

  But he and the other reporters had reported a couple of things wrong. The early death toll estimates were too high. That happens in disasters. Numbers are high at first, when everybody is in a panic and people are having a hard time locating their loved ones. The actual death toll was somewhere between 300 and, perhaps, 350. The goof about Shaw’s alleged suicide was bad—terrible, considering everything the man had been through yesterday. Wire service reporters had put up a brief that a grieving mother died of a heart attack after locating the body of her daughter in a morgue. The story was lifted from a local newspaper and regurgitated without anyone double-checking the facts. It was wrong. Mother and daughter were alive and doing okay. McKnight put a correction on the wire to kill the earlier brief.1

  McKnight called home and spoke briefly with his wife. Baby Joan was doing fine, Lib said. She asked him to please take care of himself and try to get some rest.

  “Rest, sure,” McKnight promised, but in his mind it seemed as though time had entered some new demarcation when the school exploded—before and after the school disaster. He doubted that he would ever look at life the same way again.

  Bill Thompson was so restless he could scream. All night and all day people had stopped at his bed, asking him questions about the explosion. “Did you sleep well last night?” a nurse asked.

  “I wasn’t here last night,” Bill said—meaning the night before last, since he hadn’t really slept any in the past twenty-four hours. The past two days seemed as though they made one day.

  A reporter listening in on the nurse and her patient wrote a story for the next day that indicated Bill was not even aware he was in the hospital. That was wrong. He knew where he was; he’d just lost track of time. Events surrounding the explosion were beginning to seem fuzzy, almost unreal.

  A nurse drifted into the room to check his bandages and take his temperature. His brother, Laverne, was sitting in a nearby chair, asleep.

  The bed in which Arliss Middleton had died now contained another badly hurt child.

  Henry McLemore obtained a copy of a list somebody had made of all the funerals taking place that day. It was fascinating to read—though heartbreaking at the same time—so many services in so few churches, all happening Saturday afternoon. Many more were being scheduled for Sunday. Some of the children were being buried in the new clothes their parents had bought for them to wear to church on Easter—the following Sunday. McLemore underlined some details he wanted to include in his next piece.

  The railroad depot was a center of action Saturday morning because many of the transient oil-field families were shipping bodies home for burial. Also, a shipment of new coffins was expected to arrive by freight train. McLemore was beginning to realize that he could use a railroad motif or theme in his article—that might work.

  He made some notes—funerals taking place on back-to-back schedules sounds like a train schedule of arrivals and departures. He jotted down a line on notebook paper:

  “When the hearses and trucks moved slowly away the crowd outside the church didn’t disperse. Children of other friends were to have funerals this afternoon. Like train schedules, the services were scheduled for 2 p.m., 3 p.m., 4:30 p.m., and 7 p.m.”

  That paragraph works exquisitely, McLemore decided. Now he needed an opening line that would be unlike the many others written today; most reporters were blobbing the whole story, or at least half of it, into the opening paragraph, choking the readers with words. McLemore wanted something simple, sharp, and aimed straight for the heart of every person who picked up the newspaper and scanned the stories. He thought about it deeply for a moment, with his eyes closed. And then he wrote a line on a scrap of notepaper:

  “This grief-torn community today began the sad job of burying its dead.”2

  That’s it. It says just enough, punches the story home whether you read the second paragraph or not. He was about ready to write but decided to go out and stroll around Overton for a while. He was an artist of sorts and hoped to spy a new color in the spectrum.

  At an intersection along Commerce Street in Tyler, a traffic cop saw an ancient pickup truck with a crude, hand-lettered sign on the hood that read, “Funereal.” A rough pine box, tied with rope, protruded from the bed. A man and a woman, both looking weary, sat inside. The policeman turned his car in behind the sooty black truck and drew alongside the driver’s door.

  “Where to?” the cop asked the driver, whose face was creased with wrinkles, the stub of a cigarette hanging from his lips.

  “West Texas,” the roughneck said.

  “Was it... the explosion?”

  “Yep.”

  “And...”

  “I’m taking her home.”

  The cop tipped his hat.3

  The Smoot family was planning a double funeral for Helen and Anna. Their four older brothers, all roughnecks, had worked in the rescue operation from immediately after the explosion on Thursday until the last shovel of debris was cleared Friday afternoon. The two oldest—Greg and Wayne—went from morgue to morgue until they had identified the bodies of both their sisters.

  Scores of the girls’ friends, including many of the students who had made Helen and Anna the presidents of their respective classes, streamed up the steps to the Smoot home’s front door all day Saturday and knocked, quietly, respectfully, for permission to come inside and visit with the family.

  Mr. Smoot had ordered an oblong granite headstone that was being inscribed with the girls’ names and a poignant epitaph: “Side by side in the sunshine, side by side in the rain.”4

  Carolyn Jones journeyed with her mother and stepfather to Ardmore, Oklahoma, to attend the funeral and burial of her sister Helen and her Uncle Paul. When her father, Walter Jones, arrived, he confronted his former wife, angrily blaming Eula for Helen’s death because Eula had wanted to get the divorce and take the children with her. Eula, stunned, said he was being absurd to make such a wrongheaded and hurtful accusation.

  “Helen was there because you decided to put her in that school,” he said, bitterly.

  “We would all have starved to death if it had been up to you,” she fired back.

  The Old London Baptist Church was packed with mourners—well more than the two hundred people the sanctuary was designed to seat. The room was stuffy and a little too warm, even though the windows were open and five-bladed fans droned above the funeral congregation. Henry McLemore stood near the back, behind all the rows of pews that led to the altar, and had just made a note that the five coffins at this funeral were each no more than five feet long.

  “The caskets rest on cane back chairs, in front of the
brightly varnished pulpit,” he wrote. “Probably fifth-graders.”

  Sunlight streamed through the windows, brightening the flowers amassed atop the caskets. As McLemore heard mention of the families whose children were being eulogized, he noted the family names—Has-brook, Willis, Lambert, Ragsdale, and Stearns. Between eulogies, the sanctuary rang with bedrock Protestant hymns, including “Rock of Ages.” Those who knew the song by heart let their voices lift it to the rafters. Others hummed the melody behind the words:

  Rock of Ages, cleft for me,

  Let me hid myself in Thee;

  Let the water and the blood,

  From Thy wounded side which flowed,

  Be of sin the double cure,

  Save from wrath and make me pure.

  Five ministers spoke during the hour-long service. An American Legion commander then took the podium, requesting that only immediate family members accompany the deceased to graveside services at the Pleasant Hill Cemetery, about four miles away.

  “The roads are choked with funerals today,” he said. “The highway patrol has asked that friends do not attend. So, please, the families only.”

  McLemore watched as most of the crowd receded against the walls while men and boys carried the coffins, one by one, out the church door, down the steps, and out to the curb. Two were placed in a pair of hearses. The other three were put on mattresses in the backs of delivery trucks that had been washed and polished for the occasion. “Each truck carried a bouquet on the partition behind the drivers’ seats,” the reporter noted. “There were not enough hearses to serve this town today.”

  The crowd outside the church didn’t disperse after the hearses and trucks departed for the graveyard. Another round of funerals was slated to begin shortly at this church and other nearby churches across New London. Many more were scheduled for the next day.5