Gone at 3-17

by David M. Brown

  Laborers at a coffin factory in Dallas had been working around the clock since shortly after the explosion because in all of Texas there were too few child-size coffins to meet the need caused by the catastrophe. This was not a gross oversight on the part of the undertaking business. Funeral homes and casket makers generally based the number of coffins they kept ready for use on a historical pattern of demand. Each year adults typically died in larger numbers than children and teenagers. The New London school explosion threw the traditional supply-and-demand formula off kilter.

  Many of the caskets needed to bury children killed in the explosion were paid for by the oil companies the children’s fathers worked for. Private donors and the Red Cross also helped out. Some of the grieving parents, though, considered this sort of help a form of charity, and they refused to accept pricey caskets for no charge. Some would accept only the crude pine coffins that volunteers such as Graften Ferguson constructed in the explosion’s immediate aftermath.

  Dressed in his best clothes, Joe Davidson stood at the ticket window in the Overton railroad station and bought five tickets to Brazoria—two roundtrip and three one way.6 The roundtrip tickets were for Mary and him. The other three were for the coffins bearing the remains of Helen, Anna, and Wheeler.

  It’s not known why Joe and Mary decided to bury their children at a cemetery in Brazoria, down around Houston. Possibly, it was because the children were born there and had developed their first sense of home in that region near the Gulf of Mexico. Joe and Mary were taking them home. Or, it might have been because Brazoria County reminded Joe Davidson of his childhood home in southern Louisiana. He had spent a lot of time in boats on the Gulf and on the open seas and already was thinking of joining the merchant marines when his time in the oil fields played out. Or, perhaps Joe and Mary wanted to put some space between themselves and the horribly scarred earth where the New London school had stood. Catching a train was a sure way to do that.

  Before they left, Joe and Mary checked on Marilla, their only remaining child, at Mother Frances Hospital in Tyler. The doctors felt Marilla had survived the crisis period of her injuries and eventually would recover—though it would take months of hospital care and a lengthy rehabilitation even after she returned home. According to her prognosis, she would more than likely walk with a limp for the rest of her life.

  Comparing your own misfortune with something worse that happened to others was a phony consolation, Joe Davidson thought. Even so, it seemed a blessing that Marilla was alive at a moment when some New London parents had no children left and that she was expected to some day walk again, even with a slight limp, considering that Elbert Box, a New London student in a hospital room near Marilla’s, was going to have a leg amputated.

  Joe settled back and watched the Texas scenery roll by as the train headed south toward the coast. Mary didn’t seem to see any of it.

  27

  Reckoning

  Governor Allred declared martial law shortly after news of the explosion reached Austin. He ordered National Guard troops and aid workers to the site and instructed his commander, Maj. Gaston Howard, to form a military court of inquiry. Less than forty-eight hours after the blast, the court—six military officers, State Senator Joe Hill, and a pioneering chemical engineer, Dr. Eugene Paul Schoch—convened in a small, wood-paneled building a few steps from the ruined school, in a room full of the weary, the angry, and the reporters.

  Following is an excerpt of Capt. Zachariah Ellis Coombes’s examination of Daniel Kolb Morgan during the military court of inquiry in New London, Texas:

  Q: Mr. Morgan, when did you first come on this location after the accident occurred, the explosion?

  A: To the best of my knowledge it was around 5:30 in the evening.

  Q: You are one of the men who helped remove the debris and search the ruins?

  A: Yes, sir.

  Q: You are an employee of the Gulf Oil Company?

  A: Yes, sir.

  Q: You were present when the part of the building that was blown completely apart, when they were using some acetylene torches for cutting material?

  A: Yes, sir.

  Q: Will you tell the court what peculiar circumstances you noticed at that time?1

  Mangled claws of bent steel arched from the concrete and terra-cotta remains. Morgan picked his way toward the nearest crew carefully, on thick boots and shaky knees. The sun, an hour from slipping beyond the yawning sky, lit girders wrapped around great shards of cement. The men, some weeping, pulled with futile, bone-bending effort. Others, staring blindly down, scrabbled at the pile and left their skin on the rocks. The twisted steel hugged the mess to itself. Morgan pulled, and pulled, and stopped.

  “We need a torch.”

  “A torch! Get a torch up here!”

  A man gripping the long metal nozzle in one of his gloved hands arrived. Two tubes slung over his shoulder led back to tanks of oxygen and acetylene. Morgan and the others stood back as the scared man’s eyes passed over the jumble, looking for a safe place to cut. He moved sideways, straddling a row of exposed steel reinforcements, and planted each foot on an angled concrete slab. He spun one wheel on the nozzle and acetylene hissed through his fist. He spun another and oxygen breathed behind it. A squeeze of the igniter. A spark. A fame, wielded.

  The blue tip of the inner cone of fame, burning hotter than six thousand degrees Fahrenheit, touched the first steel rod. A fountain of orange sparks arced away from the torch man. White-hot oxygen and carbon curled around the steel, cutting a metal valley and falling into the crevice below in a stream of slag. The men caught their breath and listened for a scream. One by one, the supports parted for the fire until the concrete slab tilted, scraped, shifted, and tumbled away from the crew. The torch man pulled back, and Morgan descended into the gap.

  Below were leaves of paper spread around a thin spine of cracked earth, six or seven feet long. Morgan saw blue flames leaping out of it, setting fire to the fluttering paper. He began kicking dirt over the vein of fuel the torch had ignited in the ground. Morgan knew at once what filed the vein. No one had shut off the gas.

  The court convened on the morning of March 20, 1937. Dr. Eugene Schoch, sixty-two, tall, with a swimmer’s lean build, sat beside Major Howard at a plain wooden table. He held the first civil engineering degree ever granted by the University of Texas and founded the school’s Bureau of Industrial Chemistry.2

  Rumors had circulated that the explosion had been caused by dynamite, which had been stored in the school’s basement and used to clear rocks from the athletic fields. Schoch knew before the hearing began—knew just by walking past the wreckage—that the rumors were wrong. No school would have this much dynamite.

  J. L. Downing had drafted the plans for this ruined marvel, and he was the court’s first witness. The young Downing’s architectural firm was based in Henderson, ten miles away. Downing dated his plan for the main building July 1, 1932, and wrote on them “London Independent School District of Rusk County, Texas.” The main building would rest on a foundation of poured concrete and would look from above like an E with the points facing east. To the west was Main Street. The wings looked as though they were one-story tall from the road, but a gentle downward slope beginning close behind the longest wall added another story below and out of sight from the street.

  Downing designed the building to have a central boiler. A radiator salesman named A. J. Belew convinced the school board to alter Downing’s plan and install Gasteam radiators in every classroom. He told the board the building would need no costly redesigns; his radiators, he said, did not need vents to the outside.

  Belew took the stand, and Schoch watched him slip through questions from the court’s lead inquisitor, Captain Coombes. After twenty minutes of evasions and half answers, the only thing made clear to the court was that Belew had a slightly better grasp of gas composition and English than Coombes. Schoch could abide no more. Belew could dance around these other men, but not him. Whatever Belew might
have read about the powder kegs he sold, Schoch or one of his students likely had something to do with crafting the text. Science is lucid and binary—yes or no, on or off, right or wrong. Nature’s ambiguity is a human construct. The pull of science’s certainty drew Schoch from his family’s farm in Floresville, southeast of San Antonio, forty years before. His guiding premise was that an answer existed, regardless of its visibility. Science needs no salesmen. Belew’s pitch was over.

  Schoch leveled his head and glared through the black, circular rims of his glasses at the polished man. “Mr. Belew,” he said. Generations of students would have shrunk at his tone. “I take it that you are what we would term a gas engineer, are you not?”

  “I don’t know that I would qualify.”

  “Don’t know that you would qualify on that?”

  “No.”

  “Let’s be definite about this now.” Schoch straightened and leaned toward the table. “What is the extent of your training? Will you tell us what your training is?”

  “Well, like I said, some fourteen years selling experience.”

  Belew said he had no college degree but had studied on his own.

  “You can calculate drafts,” Schoch said. “And you understand the necessity for drafts. And you can analyze gases—”

  “No,” Belew cut in. “I haven’t said I could analyze gases.”

  He’d said twice he wasn’t an engineer, but this was not enough to quell Schoch’s welling anger—not enough to quell the anger of anyone who’d seen the bodies just beyond the door. Schoch wanted to embarrass the salesman, to strip his credibility, to wound him. To witness the ruin was to be bound to this tragedy and its people, to their grief and exhaustion. Adrenaline had spent itself days before. Something darker had been seeping upward to take its place: a lust for the blood of someone who wasn’t innocent.

  The people of New London would not get it. The court found that Belew had done nothing wrong, and Schoch offered something of an apology the next day. It found no grounds for criminal charges against anyone—not the salesman who convinced the school board to change its design, the board that acquiesced, the state that required no inspectors and no oversight of any plans, despite what this building would house. According to the court’s findings, the man-made tragedy had taken one of every four children from the town of New London, but no law had been broken.

  The proceedings would claim a victim, however.

  William Chesley Shaw testified during the court’s second and final day of hearings. He had lost a son and a career in the explosion. Many parents blamed him for the catastrophe. Talk of a lynching continued. Captain Coombes spoke, instead, of a pipeline.

  “Mr. Shaw, were you the man that gave the orders for the connection with the Parade Oil Company, or the Parade Gasoline Company pipeline?” Coombes asked.

  “I was partly responsible, yes, sir.”

  “Were you the one who directed the janitor to make that connection?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The Parade Gasoline Company operated a refining plant in Rusk County. Oil from the rigs flowed into the plant for processing and was shipped to customers throughout the country. The refining process created waste gas that the company sent back to the rigs through a network of pipes segmenting Rusk County. With a lower methane content and higher concentration of butane, ethane, and heavy hydrocarbons, the gas could not be sold, and so the company included wording in the lease agreements that put the burden of disposal on the rig owners. Neither the company nor the roughnecks had any use for the gas. Most owners released it into the air through tall pipes, then set fire to it as it escaped, creating burning pillars that lit the East Texas night. The practice of tapping into waste gas lines was something of an open secret in the oil patch. Homeowners would weld valves onto the disposal lines and connect them to their gas-fired heaters through pipe they laid themselves. Municipal gas companies regulated the pressure of the gas they piped through town, keeping it to around two pounds per square inch. Waste gas, pouring from the refinery in bursts, could rush through pipes with twenty times as much pressure. Those who tapped into the lines had to attach their own regulators to their homes or risk having the heavier gas burst through the small nozzles inside their heaters, sink to the floor, collect, and wait for a spark. The gas had no odor and so gave no warning. With no one monitoring it, it came with no bill.

  Somewhere in a Parade Gasoline Company office, tucked inside a desk drawer or filing cabinet, was the company’s policy paper stating its opposition to unauthorized taps into its waste gas lines. Responsibility for enforcing the policy fell to the plant’s superintendent, Earl Clover, who also oversaw the immensely complex and profitable operations for which the company existed—the acquisition and refining of crude in the busiest oil field in the world.

  Four members of the school’s seven-member board of directors—A. D. Blackwell, Judson Wyche, J. R. Kerns, and the board’s president, E. W. Reagan—gave Shaw approval to tap into the Parade line in early 1937. The safety of burning waste gas did not come up. The men did not tell anyone and did not discuss it again but for a conversation between Shaw and Clover.

  “You didn’t want to get out and advertise the fact, and so you didn’t mention it in your minutes?” Coombes asked Shaw, who shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

  “No, sir,” he said, wishing to God the photographers would stop taking his picture.

  “It was one of those affairs then, I take it, that this gas was just going into the air, the officials of the Parade company had indicated that [Clover]—so far as he was concerned—he didn’t care?”

  “Far as them using the gas, they didn’t care.”

  “But he didn’t want the company compromised by giving you permission to use it. He had instructions, perhaps, not to give it away?”

  “I should think, from the way he talked. That was my interpretation.”

  “Do you know whether Mr. Clover has returned from the funeral of his child?”

  The crew had gone out in early January—a janitor, two bus drivers, and a welder the school had contracted to tap into the waste gas line about two hundred feet from the school. They dug a trench, welded a two-inch iron pipe to Parade’s four-inch main, and buried the pipe. A. J. Belew came out to inspect the connection to the school. He told the men that the two regulators they’d installed between the Parade line and the school wouldn’t be enough to hold back the pressure. He told them to add one more, and they did. Not long after, teachers and students began complaining of headaches.

  No one returned to the Parade line tap until shortly after Daniel Morgan found blue flames flickering from the seven-foot crack in the earth beneath the rubble of the school. Thousands of people were crawling over the wreckage, lit by a setting sun. A man Morgan spoke to alerted United Gas Company, New London’s natural gas utility. The company told the man they hadn’t provided gas to the school since January. Word eventually reached the Parade refinery, and field foreman Delbert Leon Clark, that the company’s waste gas was flowing beneath the ruin.

  Clark had to act alone; his boss, Earl Clover, was among the swarm, looking for his two children and finding one. Clark sent out a line maintenance man to find the tap. After an hour or so, the man returned with nothing. Clark went out himself. Walking along his company’s main line where it passed in front of the school, he saw a patch of overturned earth that, in the winter chill, had not grown over. Though he dug frantically through the hard dirt, long minutes passed before he could find the shutoff valve. They had attached it two feet from the main, welded it sideways rather than upright, then buried it.

  The school used Parade’s waste gas for one month before the explosion. The school district saved $250.84.

  A flashbulb snapped. The questions seemed to come faster; Shaw’s responses more haltingly. The tap. The regulators. The headaches. He sweated and twitched. Another flashbulb snapped.

  “I don’t know what they want to keep taking these pictures here for.”

>   “Cut out the flashes until we get through with Mr. Shaw,” ordered Gaston Howard.

  But it was over. Coombes saw Shaw teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Coombes looked to Howard, and Howard said, “Mr. Shaw, if you are not feeling all right, we can recess for a short while until you feel better.” Two men helped him from his chair. He did not return.

  “The superintendent appeared to have aged a dozen years since the worst American school disaster,” wrote Tom Reynolds of United Press. “He was a man shattered, his legs wobbled and his hands trembled violently.”3

  Felix McKnight watched Shaw leave the room. The superintendent walked slowly with the assistance of a friend. “His face was the living definition of grief,” McKnight recalled in an interview for this book.

  Two long days of testimony—wrenching accounts by rescuers of shattered children, tempers flaring over company men protecting themselves, quiet answers from children with dried blood on their scalps—drew to a close. Few witnesses remained before Dr. Schoch rendered his judgment, that gas filled the basement and an electrical spark ignited it.

  Steven Hawley, the chief engineer of the Texas Fire Insurance Department, took his seat before the court, and the first whisper of redemption came to New London. As the previous day’s testimony cast light on the common practice of tapping into waste gas lines, Hawley had left the crowded makeshift courtroom and found a phone. He ordered his engineers to go to every oil-field schoolhouse in East Texas to test the air inside. Now he looked at the uniformed men, the senator, and his state’s preeminent chemical engineer, and told them an inspector named Newsome, two hours ago and six miles away, found in the basement of the Carlyle School 720 cubic feet of natural gas. He told them of his search of state records and of how many schools used similar heating systems. He told them something must be done.