Gone at 3-17

by David M. Brown

  Carolyn Jones was picked for an immensely important task. In the wake of the disaster, the Texas legislature met to debate school safety issues, and East Texas lawmakers wanted a New London student who survived the explosion to speak before the House of Representatives. Nine-year-old Carolyn was chosen. Her father and his sister, Gladys Uhl, drove Carolyn to the state capitol in Austin. Carolyn and her Aunt Gladys wrote the speech after they arrived.

  “Mr. President, members of the House of Representatives, and friends of schoolchildren, I’m here today as a representative of the London school and as a survivor of the school explosion that took the lives of nearly five hundred pupils, teachers, and parents,” the speech began.

  At the time, the death count being reported was still too high. School officials had concluded the actual number was probably closer to three hundred.

  “Last Thursday afternoon, while my colleague and I were studying spelling for the interscholastic meet in which we were going to represent our school the next day,” Carolyn continued, “our teacher Mrs. Sory saw some pictures fall from the wall and several vases crash from the desk.

  “In an instant she had jerked open two nearby windows and said, ‘Get out of here.’ We were clinging to her when we heard the first awful rumble that in a few seconds caused the room to collapse.”13

  The passage of time would never erase that terrifying moment from Carolyn’s mind.

  Elbert Box lost a leg when the school came crashing down. It was still attached to his body, but it was useless now. The doctors had already said that if the infection didn’t clear up soon, they would have to amputate.

  First they cut off part of it, but that didn’t help. So they told Elbert and his parents the rest of it had to go. Otherwise, the boy was going to die.

  Getting your leg chopped off at eighteen is a rotten way to start your manhood, Elbert thought. The nurse patted his hand. It will be okay, her eyes told him. Elbert wasn’t the kind of person to mope or complain, so he gave her a brave smile. Seeing her face each day, this lovely young woman in her nurse’s cap and cape, gave him a sense of hope that offset the pain in his body and the emotional turmoil roiling in his mind because the school had exploded, nearly costing him his life and exacting one leg as the price for his survival.

  Elbert soon felt he was falling in love with Louise McAdam. She was one of five professional nurses assigned to the daily medical care of seriously injured New London students who would be long-term patients at Mother Frances Hospital. Louise, as it turned out, was also falling in love with Elbert. An assistant nurse, one of the nuns at the hospital, noticed the giddy smiles and soft touches Elbert and Louise exchanged. The astute sister played cupid.

  It’s not known whether Elbert Box proposed marriage to Louise Mc-Adam before or after his leg was amputated. What is known is her answer: yes. The explosion cost him dearly, but he gained a loving companion for the rest of his life.14

  Carolyn Jones had to stand on a chair to speak from the podium in the House of Representatives. The little girl thanked the Texas lawmakers and Governor Allred for the relief the government provided upon learning of the disaster. She asked the legislature to consider setting March 18 aside each year as a day for remembering those who died in the catastrophe.

  “Let me urge you, our lawmaking body,” Carolyn said, “to make laws of safety so it will not be possible for another explosion of this type to occur in the history of Texas schools.

  “Our daddies and mothers, as well as the teachers, want to know that when we leave our homes in the morning and go to school, that we will come out safely when our lessons are over.”

  Wearing a cotton dress with a blue print and puffed sleeves, the child spoke with composure, only occasionally glancing at her notes, newspapers reported.15

  “Out of this explosion,” Carolyn said, “we have learned of a new hazard that hovers about some of our school buildings. If this hazard can be forever blotted out of existence, then we will not have completely lost our loved ones in vain. All of us who were spared will try to show our appreciation by striving to become the finest of citizens to carry on the work of this wonderful land of yours and mine.

  “This is our plea. Thank you.”16

  The chamber thundered with applause.

  Within a short time of Carolyn’s remarks, Texas lawmakers passed the toughest law in the nation governing safety standards in schools and other public buildings. They also passed a law requiring an odor to be added to odorless natural gas used in homes and buildings so that dangerous leaks could be detected quickly. Soon similar laws were enacted in all states in the nation and in nations around the world.

  The rotten egg smell added to natural gas today—an odor that has saved countless lives over seven decades—is a direct result of the Texas school explosion on March 18, 1937, and the deaths of more than three hundred students, teachers, and others.

  As Carolyn Jones traveled with her father back to East Texas on a sunny day just one week after the explosion, the catastrophe was still too fresh in everyone’s mind to think that any good could come of it. Many of the survivors, including those who escaped serious injury, bore deep psychological wounds. In those days, there were no grief counselors to meet with students, teachers, parents, and rescue workers struggling to come to terms, emotionally, with the shock of living through such an experience. Post-traumatic stress disorder was not yet a condition recognized by mental-health experts, although the condition was tentatively recognized during World War I under the broad category of shell shock. Ministers and fellow church members did their best to console and counsel those in grief and despair.

  Some of the mothers who were at the PTA meeting the afternoon of the explosion noticed, within days, that their hair was turning prematurely gray, wrote Lorine Zylks Bright. “I know that many mothers suffered nervous breakdowns, and some fathers, too,” she added. Bright told of one woman who, after losing her only child in the disaster, became reclusive and essentially starved herself to death.17

  On the third day following the explosion, F. M. Herron and his wife sat next to the hospital bed where their daughter Inez lay bandaged and unconscious. Inez, twelve, had been transported to Mother Frances Hospital by ambulance soon after she was found alive in the ruins. Surgeons immediately operated to remove a piece of her skull that was cracked in such a way they felt it endangered the child’s survival. Then they could only wait to see whether the girl would come back from the unconscious state she’d been in since her classroom disintegrated around her.

  Although hundreds of parents and others streamed in and out of Inez’s room to take a glimpse of her, nobody could identify the girl on Friday and most of Saturday. Mr. Herron had located the body of his oldest child, Juanita, fourteen, soon after the explosion, and he found his son, F. M. Herron Jr., ten, unharmed. But the whereabouts of Inez remained unknown for agonizing hours and days. On an erroneous tip, the father first visited a hospital and funeral homes in Shreveport. Then he followed another rumor that she was in either Longview or Marshall, but she was in neither place.

  On Saturday, F. M. Jr. caught a ride to Tyler and found his sister at Mother Frances Hospital. Now her parents and brother waited beside her, praying that she would wake and be okay. Sunday dragged into Monday. Early Monday morning, Inez’s eyes opened.

  “Inez, don’t you know me?” her mother said.

  The girl nodded and then turned her heavy-lidded eyes toward her father.

  “Daddy,” she whispered.18

  30

  Survivors Assembly, March 29

  A cluster of children stood near the narrow country road, waiting for a bus that would take them to school for the first time since the explosion. Several wore bandages on their heads, and all were bundled in sweaters and coats. The sunny spring weather that had blessed East Texas recently had given way to raw winter again—it was a blustery, cold, and damp Monday morning beneath a gray overcast. Lower clouds scudded against the sky like streaks of chalk.

>   The students were instructed to report to the wooden gym behind the empty patch where the high school used to stand and find their homeroom teachers. If their teachers were deceased, they gathered with surviving classmates from their homerooms and sat as a group. The first day back was scheduled to last just an hour or two—time enough for the principal to call roll and determine who would be returning to school and who would not, and to help authorities firm up the death toll. Classes were supposed to resume Tuesday in the gym, the home economics cottage, and a building formerly used for band practice. During the rescue and recovery operation, the band room had served as a makeshift first-aid station and, later, a temporary morgue. Several small buildings were being moved to the campus to function as classrooms until school was over in May. Plans already were in the works to construct a new high school in time for the start of the fall semester. It would be even bigger and more modern than the structure that exploded; the district would spare no expense to make it one of the safest schools ever built. The school board had approved the project just six days after the disaster. It was designed with a similar look—beige bricks for the outer walls and red tile on the roof, with a large auditorium in the center—and would occupy the same site as the previous school.

  Senior High School Principal Troy Duran gazed across the gym and estimated the attendance. Fewer than half the students enrolled in the combined junior-senior high school had showed up, Duran calculated. Missing were the dead, the wounded, the children of families who’d fled New London, and those whose parents simply would not allow them to return to this broken place. When Duran started calling the roll alphabetically, some students answered “here” or “present.” For others, teachers and classmates answered. Names of children killed in the blast quickly popped up: Boyd Abercrombie, fifteen; Evelyn Bonnie Adams, twelve; Almita Allman, twelve; Allene Anderson, twelve; and her sister, Lillian Anderson, fourteen.

  “Betty Ruth Apple,” Duran said.

  “She was killed,” somebody answered.

  “Wayne Scott Arnold.”

  “He is dead,” a tense, quiet voice said.1

  “Arden Barber.”

  Dead.

  “Ollie Barber.”

  Dead.

  Bus driver Lonnie Barber, Arden’s father and Ollie’s uncle, stood in the back of the gym listening intently to the roll call. He knew many of the children, and his heart sank each time he recognized one of the dead. This was a never-ending tragedy—fresh tears glistened in Barber’s eyes and on faces throughout the crowd—eleven days after the explosion.

  “Murvin Barton.”

  Dead.

  Barton, seventeen, was a starting guard for the London Wildcats and described as quick and tough by his football teammates. The football and basketball teams, the track and field squad, the high school band—all were decimated. The 120-piece band had been scheduled to leave for a concert in Jacksonville when classes ended on the day of the explosion.2 Some band members were spared because they already had gone to the band room behind the high school. Shortly before the explosion, Charles Dial realized he’d forgotten to bring his band uniform to school, so he got permission to leave class and run home to retrieve it. The band was also preparing for a big thirty-band festival at Kilgore the weekend of March 27–28. Instead, the festival was dedicated to the London Wildcats marching band.3

  Football players who were killed included the Gerdes brothers, Alvin and Allen; Forrest Coker; Joe Gordon; Paul Greer; and Arliss Middleton. Starting end Elmer Rainwater survived but lost three siblings—Aubra, fifteen; Evelyn, thirteen; and Helen, eleven. Evelyn Rainwater was the girl who survived the explosion but died after jumping from a second-floor window and crashing into a lower window. Ray Smoot, a tackler on the football team in a previous season, was not in the explosion, but he lost two sisters—Helen and Anna, presidents of their respective classes.

  Ardyth Davidson, a member of the girls’ champion softball team, was killed. One of her teammates, Marilla Davidson (no relation) survived, although she was seriously injured and lost three siblings—Joe Wheeler, Helen, and Anna. Marilla and at least two dozen other students were still recovering in hospitals. On April 18, the one-month anniversary of the explosion, twenty-one students remained hospitalized.4 Marilla Davidson wouldn’t be released from Mother Frances until June.

  Nearly everybody involved with the school lost somebody—a brother, sister, teacher, homeroom classmate, teammate, boyfriend, girlfriend, son, or daughter. The children of school board members died. The janitors who helped make the school sparkle and kept its machinery operating smoothly lost sons and daughters.

  Boys’ basketball lost its star power: Sambo Shaw, Alvin Gerdes, and Forrest Coker. Girls’ basketball lost Helen Smoot and Melba Lee Hughes, girls who controlled the ball with snappy passes back and forth until the other team grew frustrated and fouled one of them. Helen and Melba tossed their free throws through the basket with a sassy switch.

  The drama club lost Irma Hodges, Philo Stephens, Annie Marie Mil-stead, and Miss Katie Mae Watson, the club’s sponsor and one of fourteen teachers who died. Philo had become a good stage manager, and Irma Hodges was quite talented as a makeup artist.

  When Duran reached last names starting with “D,” Ledell Dorsey listened carefully for her name to be called. She didn’t want to miss it and have anyone think that she had been killed. Ledell was at school that morning only so she could tell her friends and classmates that she’d survived. Returning to the site of the explosion filled her with dark dread. After the assembly was over, she planned to beg her father not to force her to return to the school ever again.5 Being in the place where all those others, including two of her sisters, had perished was just too hard.

  “Alice Dorsey,” Duran said.

  “She was killed.”

  “Ethel Dorsey.”

  “She is dead.”

  Bill Thompson, sitting with several of his homeroom classmates, looked up when he heard someone say Ethel had been killed. Bill was stunned. He didn’t know Ethel was among the dead. The boy suddenly felt in his heart that he had caused her death because Ethel had switched seats with him and she was in Bill’s place when she was killed. He imagined everybody in the gym must be looking at him, blaming him, although, in reality, no one but Bill knew this secret. This fear, this shame, would not leave him until he became a limping, creased man, sixty years later.

  Others at school that day and throughout the community were sorting out emotions associated with the disaster that would affect the rest of their lives. Some, like Bill Thompson, felt guilty because they had survived while others perished. Geneva Elrod, recovering at Mother Frances from multiple bone fractures and internal injuries, was also suffering from the heartbreak of losing two siblings she cherished—a brother, Edwin, and sister, Juanita. Edwin, the youngest, had wanted to play hooky the day of the explosion, but Juanita and Geneva ordered him to school. Geneva felt guilty about that for a long time.6

  Sixth-grader James Kennedy gazed around the gym and suddenly realized how hard the blast had hit the sixth-grade class. Four classrooms of sixth-grade students had dwindled to just one because eighty-seven sixth graders had been killed, thirty-three boys and fifty-four girls.7 The fifth grade, which lost sixty-seven students, was the second hardest hit.

  The first night after he survived an explosion that instantly killed classmates all around him, Kennedy was so upset that he slept with his mom and dad, even though he was thirteen. “You have dreams about it,” he said.8

  Other students in the gym that morning were experiencing nightmares of their own when they tried to sleep. Seventh-grader William Follis, thirteen, had witnessed unthinkable sights. As he struggled to free himself from the debris, the boy saw a girl who was nearly cut in half, still conscious, and aware that her clothes had been stripped from her body. She was desperately trying to cover her breasts. He tried to save another girl who was choking on dirt the blast had forced into her mouth and throat. Their eyes made contact
before she died.

  “It still haunts me to this day,” Follis said more than seventy years later in an interview for this book.

  The assembly ended after about an hour, and the students filed outside and onto waiting buses. Snow began to fall, silently covering the giant scar left on the earth where the high school once stood.

  Part IV. Epilogue

  31

  Reunion

  A cluster of white-haired men and women, several on walkers and in wheelchairs, gaze at a monument with twin fluted columns towering thirty-four feet above Memorial Drive in New London, Texas. They are surviving members of a student body and schoolhouse at the center of a massive explosion on March 18, 1937.

  A dwindling number of survivors gather for reunions every two years at the site of the disaster that killed more than three hundred students, teachers, and others. Most spend some time in front of the monument, quietly scrolling through names inscribed across pink granite along the base of the cenotaph. Each survivor has a distinct and harrowing recollection of that day, but their collective memory conveys an overlapping constancy of sorrow. They are bound by a grief that never quite healed, many will tell you.

  “You just couldn’t believe your eyes,” says one old man, leaning on his cane. “I climbed out from under the bricks and boards, and ran around here—to a spot right yonder—and the school was just gone.”

  Most are willing to spill their souls about it, even to a stranger, though with pain still in their voices and tears in their eyes after nearly seventy-five years. In the weeks, months, and years following the tragedy, however, parents, teachers, and students—the entire community—were silent about what had happened. The nation moved on, its attention attracted by the Hindenburg’s explosion in Lakehurst, New Jersey, less than two months after the New London disaster; a continuing depression; and a growing threat of war in Europe. Because talking about the tragedy was taboo among New Londoners the memory slipped from American consciousness, and the affected families sought relief through their silence. Shunning any reminders of the catastrophe, some parents refused to have their children’s names inscribed on the monument.