Gone at 3-17

by David M. Brown

  An event in New London recognizing the first anniversary of the disaster focused on the future, not the past, wrote Robert M. Hayes of the Dallas Morning News in a March 1938 story. After a brief service, the community returned to its “never-ending struggle to blot out the terrifying picture of the world’s worst school tragedy.”1

  For decades, curious outsiders were unable to lift the veil of mourning that shrouded the town. “It was such a terrible, terrible thing that nobody could talk about it,” said survivor Priscilla Kerns Joffee, whose father was a member of the school board when the school exploded.

  A Houston Chronicle reporter ventured to New London in March 1956 for a story that appeared on the nineteenth anniversary. “They don’t talk about that day of doom in 1937 anymore,” wrote Pete Gilpin. “‘We’d prefer to forget,’ the townspeople agree and back it up with a marked reticence to any inquiry.”2

  John Davidson was a student at the high school in New London when the 1956 story appeared. He was born May 12, 1940. His parents lost their only child, Ardyth, in the explosion, and John was conceived to take her place. It was a tall order. Ardyth was fourteen when she died, a pretty girl with exuberant spirits, a good student, a softball standout, a budding dancer, and the radiant center of her parents’ universe. But John grew up knowing little about her.

  “I knew her name, but they were very reluctant to talk about her,” he recalled.

  Like many of his classmates, John Davidson walked past the cenotaph each day on the way into school, scarcely aware that the monument was anything more than an architectural adornment. That changed one afternoon when he made an unsettling discovery in a storeroom behind his home. The curious teenager pried the lid open on a dusty old wooden box and was startled to find the clothes Ardyth wore the day she was killed. Her diary was tucked between her coat and partially burned dress. The box had been nailed shut at the funeral home.

  “I knew what it was the moment I saw it,” John said. “I closed it up as soon as I saw the death clothes.”

  He was embarrassed to have meddled with a precious object his parents had chosen to leave undisturbed. But opening the container finally gave John Davidson a true link with a sister he would hold dear for the rest of his days.

  The New London story resurfaced abruptly in 1961, when a former student claimed he rigged a death trap that caused the explosion. After being arrested in Oklahoma City on a $38 robbery charge, William Estel Benson blurted a shocking “confession” to Oklahoma authorities. Benson wrote a statement saying that as a seventeen-year-old student, he had deliberately loosened pipe connections under the school, letting gas escape and accumulate in the basement. The act was revenge for punishment he had received for smoking in the schoolyard, he said.3

  “It is a cruel turn in a story that has been buried in silence these 24 years,” wrote Felix McKnight, who by then had become executive editor of the Dallas Times Herald.4

  “I stole two 18-inch wrenches to take loose the unions which connected the gas line under the school,” Benson said.5 “I broke both loose and waited for two weeks to see what would happen.”

  A guilty conscience made him confess, he told the United Press International.

  “I haven’t been able to live with myself until last night. Last night was the first time I have slept in 24 years,” Benson said. “Just check it out and you will find I am not lying.”6

  A lie detector test Benson took in Oklahoma City showed inconclusive results, but a second test administered in Dallas indicated his confession was a fake. Benson was transferred to a jail in Henderson, Texas, while Texas authorities investigated his claim. His mother, Helen Curlee, described her son as a “mental patient” obsessed for many years with the catastrophe that killed his fourteen-year-old sister, Betty Lou. William Benson had spent time in several mental health facilities for treatment of alcoholism.

  “His mind is bad and he doesn’t know anything else because he has thought about this explosion so long,” Helen Curlee told the Tyler Courier-Times.7

  Thirty-six hours after his arrest, Benson retracted the confession, saying he’d made it up to get attention, and he apologized for lies that reopened so great a wound. William Ferguson, the local district attorney, said the second lie detector test and a thick file of previous false confessions convinced him that Benson’s tale about sabotaging the school was fabricated. The only charges brought against him were for burglarizing two coin-operated laundries when he lived in Rusk County—part of Benson’s confession the lie detector test showed was true.8

  The furor prompted by the confession abated soon afterward, and memories of the worst school disaster in history drifted back into silence.

  A group of survivors, including some who had not seen each other in forty years, finally held a reunion in New London in March 1977. They exchanged hugs and handshakes, prayed together, shared stories of their experiences that day, listened to gospel singers, and paid homage to those who had perished in the explosion.

  H. G. White, then fifty-two, had last seen the teacher who helped him out of the rubble, Ann Wright, when he was a twelve-year-old fifth grader. “Do you remember falling into the hole where I was?” he asked her at the reunion.

  “I certainly do.”

  “I didn’t know what had happened. I was trapped. I remember somebody screaming real loud,” White said.

  “That was me,” she said.

  “I was such a kid I thought you were an old lady.”

  “I was twenty-two and in my first year as a teacher,” Wright recalled with a smile.

  Many survivors who had kept their painful memories bottled up for decades experienced catharsis by talking about what had happened to them. The gathering was such a success that the group decided to reunite every two years. At later reunions, especially those marking the fiftieth, sixtieth, and seventieth anniversaries, news reporters showed up in increasing numbers, looking for fresh angles in a story that had shocked the world when it happened but that had been largely forgotten in the years since the explosion. The former students and teachers swapped stories about how life had turned out for themselves and others involved in a disaster that had deeply affected their lives.

  L. A. “Tiger” Mathis and his brother, Donald, both joined the Marines in World War II. L. A., the rescue worker in the peach-basket brigade, and Donald, who was in the explosion but survived, landed at Normandy in the same wave of troops. Donald was shot dead. L. A. lived to be an old man.

  Ted Hudson was recognized as a folk hero for his ingenuity and quick thinking to establish a radio broadcast from the disaster site that helped direct emergency personnel and enabled the nation to listen in as the tragedy unfolded. When his story was featured in the national Kiwanis magazine, Hudson said he deserved no special recognition; he was merely doing what needed to be done.9 In November 1946 Ted Hudson, then forty-one, was killed in the crash of a small airplane he was piloting.

  Elbert Box received his high school diploma in the hospital, during his long recovery from a leg amputation and various other injuries. He adapted quickly to life with an artificial leg. Soon after being discharged from Mother Frances Hospital, Box married his nurse, Louise McAdam, whom he called “Tweetie Pie,” and went to work for the Texas Company, later Texaco, which paid for his college education. He retired from Texaco in 1976, after nearly forty years on the job, and died ten years later. His “Tweetie Pie” lived until 2006.10

  Lonnie Barber, the farmer and school bus driver who saw the school explode with his four children inside, continued to farm and work for the school district. Always a shy man, he received unsolicited publicity on the tenth anniversary of the explosion when Robert Hayes of the Dallas Morning News described Barber as “typical of the unsung heroes” of the disaster.

  At the wheel of a bus loaded with grade school children, Barber “felt that his first duty was to the frantic parents of the children in his charge,” Hayes wrote. “He saw that they were all safely home before returning to check on the sa
fety of his own. He found that three had escaped, but the youngest, Arden, had been killed.”11

  Lonnie Barber kept his thoughts to himself about it all. His father never talked much about the explosion, then or later, L. V. Barber said.

  James Kennedy, the boy who was so terrified after living through the explosion that he slept with his parents that night, overcame his fears, became a U.S. Marine, and later attended Stephen F. Austin University on the GI Bill. He spent his entire career as a teacher and school administrator, retiring in 1985 after seventeen years as principal of an elementary school in Kilgore, Texas.

  Jimmie Jordan, the little girl saved and protected by her older sister, Elsie, in the aftermath of the explosion, had Elsie watching over her for the next sixty-one years, until Elsie died in 1998. “She was always protective of her little sister,” Jimmie Jordan Robinson said in a 2010 interview for this book.

  Bobby Clayton, the boy who survived because he sat near the back of his classroom and a bank of lockers shielded him from being crushed, had another near-miss with death in 1970. On a road trip with his wife, Ar-lene, Bob was critically injured in a head-on collision. He typically spurned wearing a seat belt but had one on that day because of Arlene’s insistence. He recovered after a twenty-eight-day stint in the hospital. The physician told Clayton he survived only through the grace of God, his will to live, and the seat belt. In his eighties, while living near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he overheard a discussion on an early morning radio talk show of a book being written about the New London school explosion. He could hardly believe his ears. He later agreed to being interviewed on KDKA radio in Pittsburgh to share his memories of that tragic day.

  Bobbie Kate Myers, the sister of Perry Lee Cox, said her father’s “heart never mended” from whipping her brother and taking him to school that morning. “It so grieved my dad that in 1939 my parents separated and divorced,” she said in a 2002 interview with the Overton Press.12 Her mother remarried but her father didn’t.

  “They became the dearest and sweetest friends,” Myers said. “Their desire was to be put next to my brother at Pleasant Hill. So that’s what I did.”

  Marilla Davidson—Joe and Mary Davidson’s only surviving child—married John Dial, the boy who witnessed Lemmie Butler flip the switch that set off the explosion.

  Mary Davidson never recovered emotionally from losing her other children, according to those who knew her well. Joe Davidson reenlisted in the navy when World War II erupted. He retired from the navy as a lieutenant commander and returned to work in the oil fields.

  “Neither one of them got over their three children being killed,” said Charles Dial, Marilla Davidson’s brother-in-law. “I really don’t think any of the parents of children killed in the school explosion, including my dad and mother, ever got over it.” Charles Dial’s younger brother, Travis, died in the blast.

  Dial’s father had had blood in his eyes in the aftermath of the disaster, which he blamed on human error and poor judgment. “My dad was very, very upset, and he was going to hurt somebody,” Dial said. “Me and a couple of guys he worked with got together and talked him out of it, but he was very mad.”

  After Chesley Shaw was forced to resign as superintendent, he took a job teaching at the school in Minden where he’d previously been the headmaster for more than twenty years. Shaw needed to teach two more years to qualify for a state pension, and the Minden job, where his boss was one of his former students, enabled him to do that.13 Some of the bereaved parents filed lawsuits against the former superintendent and the school district, alleging school officials were to blame for the deaths of their children. A circuit court judge, however, ruled that Shaw and the school board were not at fault because lax laws regarding the use of natural gas allowed conditions that caused the explosion. Chesley Shaw slowly descended into dementia; he relived the disaster again and again for the rest of his life.

  Ronnie Gaudet, Shaw’s nephew, said time seemed to stand still for his uncle, fixed on March 18, 1937. Decades later, Chesley Shaw talked about the explosion—as though it had just happened—every time he sat down for coffee at a café in New London. One day in 1967, while Gaudet was a student at the high school in New London, he saw Shaw wandering through a hall.

  “I said, ‘Uncle Chesley, are you lost or something?’ and he said, ‘Nah, I’m just up here at the school.’ I said, ‘Well, doesn’t anybody know you are up here?’ and he said, ‘Nah.’ He was mumbling, a little bit incoherent,” Gaudet recalled. “I went down and told our superintendent the situation and he told me to go on to class and he would take care of it.”

  Chesley and Leila Shaw were buried at Pleasant Hill Cemetery near their son, Sambo, and more than a hundred others who died in the explosion.

  Fannie Rayford Shaw, Leila’s sister who had married Chesley’s brother, died a similar death to the child she lost in the explosion, Dorothy Oleta. On an early January day in 1942, nearly five years after the school disaster, Fannie accompanied her son Wylie and his wife to a house that the young couple was getting ready to occupy. After the trio entered, Wy-lie struck a match, and the house instantly exploded. Somehow, natural gas had accumulated inside while the house sat empty. Wylie and his wife were burned on their hands and faces; Fannie Shaw was burned over much of her body. An ambulance rushed her to Mother Francis Hospital, but her injuries were too serious for her to survive. She died on January 6, 1942. Reverend A. D. Sparkman, who preached at dozens of funerals after the school explosion, officiated at Fannie’s services in New London. She was buried beside her daughter at Pleasant Hill.

  Carroll and Mildred Evans retired after long careers as public school teachers and fulfilled many of the dreams they shared as lovesick newly-weds at the start of the Great Depression. Carroll continued to be fondly known as Boxhead to his many friends and former students until his death in 1991 at eighty-three. Mildred passed away when she was ninety-one in 2004.

  For nearly sixty years, Bill Thompson kept as his own secret the identity of the girl who traded seats with him. The burden of guilt he felt seemed unbearable at times because he believed in his heart he was responsible for his friend’s death. He lives on a New London side street, just around a corner from the memorial. “Every time I walked up to that monument and saw Ethel’s name there, I thought it should be mine.”

  Finally, after speaking with members of Ethel Dorsey’s family and receiving warm assurances that they in no way held him responsible, Thompson stood at the sixtieth anniversary reunion and talked about it, publicly stating Ethel’s name and breaking into tears. His misplaced guilt finally lifted.

  Walter Cronkite, late in life, still considered the New London explosion the most tragic peacetime story in his long and storied career as a journalist.

  After his stint with the AP, Felix McKnight became managing editor at the Dallas Morning News, executive editor and copublisher at the Dallas Times Herald, and president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Colleagues called him the “dean of Texas journalism.” McKnight returned to New London on several anniversaries of the disaster to write news columns based on his memories.

  “Fifty years ago today—the day the whole world cried—a tiny East Texas community lost a generation in a boiling flash of fire that lasted only a few seconds,” McKnight wrote in his Dallas Times Herald column for March 18, 1987. “The world’s richest independent school district suddenly and violently became the poorest with the pull of a switch in a basement manual training classroom.” He’d written nearly identical lines in one of his first dispatches from the disaster site.14

  “There have been few days in those 50 years that I have not thought of the children of New London,” McKnight said.

  Henry McLemore received the prestigious National Headliner Award for his coverage of the New London disaster. When he died in June 1968 at sixty-one, the once-famous sportswriter was remembered in his obituaries not only for his sports coverage, but for the heartrending stories he wrote in New London, Texas, ove
r four hectic days in March 1937.15

  Sarah McClendon established her own news bureau in Washington, D.C., and covered the White House during the administrations of eight presidents. “This was a story I will never forget,” she said in a March 1987 news interview about her coverage of the school explosion.

  “I think of it every year at this time. It was equal to war,” McClendon said.16

  At the 2005 reunion of survivors of the New London school explosion, Carolyn Jones Frei stood in a museum of artifacts from the disaster and read the same words she’d spoken to the Texas legislature in 1937, when she was a little girl who needed a chair to reach the podium. At the reen-actment, Carolyn stood next to an early model of the mechanism used to inject the foul smell into odorless natural gas—now a museum piece. The device, invented by a man who witnessed the explosion’s aftermath, represents one of the sweeping reforms that came about, in part, because of nine-year-old Carolyn Jones’s urgent plea for safer schools and as a direct result of the New London catastrophe.

  At the reunion in 2009, an elected representative spoke on the subject. “The explosion was no one’s fault,” he said. Afterward, while photos were being snapped, he asked Carolyn, “You do agree with me, don’t you?”

  “I was too shocked to answer,” she said later in an interview for this book. “Of course, no one meant for anyone to die. But they were carried away by their appetite for wealth, their pleasure in the oil money that was accumulating. That’s what happens when people lose sight of what is important,” she said. “And in retrospect, did anyone ever ask what happened to all that money?”