Gone at 3-17

by David M. Brown

  Otis Jones, a hired man who lived and worked in Overton, was in the middle of digging another post hole for the new fence. He had earlier taken off his light jacket, but the afternoon was so warm he was sweating heavily as he took a cedar post and stood it upright in the hole. Judging from the base of the post, the hole needed to be a little deeper. He was about three miles from the school.

  A rolling rumble and sharp thunderclap cracked right at his ears. Otis took an unsteady step forward, then backward. At first he thought lightning had struck something right at his back because the thunderbolt was so loud. He looked up and all around. There wasn’t even a wisp of a cloud in sight.

  Several miles down the road, Mrs. Ezzie Poole was bent over her wash-tub scrubbing clothes for her husband and children. She raised her head and stared at the sky. What on earth?

  Three of her children were at school. The clap of thunder came from that direction. She instinctively started to take count of her brood. Classes were nearly over, so the three might be on the way home. Her youngest two, not school age yet, were visiting a nearby house where an elderly woman sometimes tended to them.

  The old woman watching the children had felt something jar the house. Her hearing was not good, but she still had her wits about her. She tottered into another room where she found Mrs. Poole’s little ones, standing still and looking surprised in a way children sometimes look when they’ve been up to mischief.

  “Now you kids know better than to be jumping off the furniture,” the old woman scolded.

  The kids looked at each other quizzically. They hadn’t jumped from anything.

  Glasses on a shelf above the milkshake machine in Thomas Smoot’s café rattled, and a force surged against the windows, making the panes waver in their frames. The café was on one corner of a crossroads in Old London, only a couple of miles from the school where Thomas’s daughters, Helen and Anna, were in classes. Helen, seventeen, was the older, and Anna, fifteen, the leaner. Little jibes about her weight didn’t seem to bother Helen. She was plump but hardly unattractive. She carried the extra weight well, used it to her advantage with quick wit, absorbed it into her personality, and seemed lovelier because of it. Her smile was a beam of sunshine, and if eyes could be said to twinkle, Helen’s did.

  A legion of friends at school made her president of the senior class. She reported for the London Times and worked on the staff of the school’s yearbook, the Londona. Occasionally a blurb in the Times poked fun at Helen’s size. A quip in a recent edition said, “Helen Smoot used to touch the floor without bending her knees but now she can bend the floor without touching her knees.”2 As likely as not, it was Helen herself who planted the remarks. Classmates elected her Senior Girl with the Best Personality. She was mentioned in the Henderson Daily News in a London School Notes column, appraising the Perfect Senior Girl:

  She should be as popular as Ruby Lee Hooten,

  Have the clothes of Geneva Blackwell,

  Be as studious as Evelyn Hudkins,

  Be the size of Yvonne McGary,

  Have the eyes of Geneva Dorsey,

  Have the complexion of Eva Ruth Jordon,

  Have the eyelashes of Helen Stroud,

  Have the graceful walk of Bernice Norris,

  Be as neat as Geneva Gary,

  Have the personality of Helen Smoot,

  Be as pretty as Florence Lee.3

  Beneath Helen Smoot’s outgoing charm lay a sensitivity and creative vision that few of her classmates noticed. At heart, she was a poet. The delicacy of flowers, the nuance of butterflies, the purpose of raindrops, and the snowflake’s transient offering captured her imagination. These were the gilt, glitter, and gold interwoven into this child’s tapestry of the universe. Sunrise was God’s transcendent painting. Sunset, a mysterious negative—the fiery omega.

  Anna Smoot didn’t have her sister’s cute face, but like Helen, she possessed intelligence and a leader’s gregariousness. Her peers made Anna the class president as well. Being a pair of presidents from the same family—and both girls—drew them close. They shared secrets, cracked jokes, and giggled. Sometimes they talked about romantic scenes in recent movies, such as Rose-Marie, starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy as young lovers, or new books, such as that panorama of ruin and love and the Old South at war, Gone with the Wind.

  Thomas Smoot and several of his customers strolled to the front windows of the café and peered outside. Somebody suggested they might have felt an early tremor of an earthquake. No, Smoot realized. That came from around the school.

  Smoot, who had worked near oil fields for much of his life, guessed the explosion was a steam boiler on one of the drilling sites dotting the school’s campus. Smoot’s four sons worked in the fields as roughnecks, but his immediate worries were for Helen and Anna.

  “I’m closing up,” Smoot told the customers. “Let’s go see what happened.”

  Marshall Cox and his customers at the country grocery store felt the building sway and heard jars and cans vibrating on the store shelves. Within minutes, a car screeched to a stop on the gravel parking lot outside Cox’s store and the driver shouted to people standing out front. One man walked back inside, looking bewildered. “May be an explosion at London School,” he said.

  Marshall Cox told his customers he was closing up so he could go check on Bobbie Kate and Perry Lee. His face had lost all color.

  Several miles in an opposite direction, beside the Sabine River outside of Kilgore, young Paul Howard was helping his father chop a load of wood. As the explosion swept over their heads, the trees on the riverbank seemed to sway. Mr. Howard was a veteran old-field hand who had moved to the Black Giant out of the Smackover field in Arkansas.

  “That was a boiler going up,” he told Paul. “And I mean a big one.”

  Paul’s twin brother, Silas Howard, was in the cafeteria of the Kilgore High School, where he had a part-time job helping clean up at the end of the school day. Silas was mopping the floor, and he had just poured sudsy water out over the center section, when the building shook for a moment. He felt the movement pass right beneath his feet. Looking back at the floor, he saw a fresh crack running the entire length of the cafeteria. The soapy water from his mop bucket was seeping slowly into the fissure.

  Across town inside a two-story Kilgore office building, insurance salesman J. B. Downs was writing at his desk when the earthquake-like tremor made the walls and floor tremble for a few seconds. The windowpanes pinged like crystal glasses being tapped with a fork.

  In a neighborhood on the other side of Kilgore, Mrs. Bud Sanders was standing with her hand on the front door knob, about to enter her mother-in-law’s house, when the home’s front windows rattled. She heard a distant rumble to the south, followed by a boom. An eerie sensation tingled against her skin. “Looking back, I can’t help but wonder if the trumpet of the Lord might not produce these same feelings of apprehension and wonderment,” she said.4

  Mary Jones was stopped at a red light atop a hill, not far from New London, when she saw a spectacle that defied belief. The New London High School rose into the air, split into many pieces and crashed to the ground. She saw tiny dots—children actually, but tiny because of the distance—start shooting from the rubble like ants pouring from an anthill kicked by somebody’s boot heel.5

  All across the countryside, farmers pulled up on their mules and said, “Whoa.” One of them, Sam Wooley, more than ten miles from the New London school, thought he heard a crack of thunder, although the afternoon was too pleasant for a storm. In nearly the same instant, Sam felt the fresh-turned earth at his feet seem to tremble, vibrating into the wooden plow handles. The impatient mule stamped at the ground.

  Other farmers, those closer to the explosion, stood still behind their mules and watched the near horizon, where just then a plume of rust-colored smoke, splotched with white puffs and gray streamers, began to rise.

  Roughnecks in the surrounding oil fields stopped what they were doing and looked around trying
to determine what had just happened. Of all the people in the vicinity, they knew best what that sound meant—explosions were the roughnecks’ worst occupational hazard.

  One by one at first, then by the score, and within moments by the hundreds, men such as Joe Davidson and Floyd Meador set down their tools, scaled to the bottom of their derricks, shut off welding machines and blowtorches, and proceeded at a trot in the direction of the hellacious blast. When one of the men yelled back to the others, “It’s the school!” and that word passed from man to man, the pace of the procession accelerated to a gallop and soon became a wild dash of thousands of men with hearts pounding in their throats.

  A. H. Huggins, a telegraph operator in the Western Union office at Overton, about four miles west of New London, looked up from his machine and saw a man in tattered clothes with blood smeared on his face, arms, and hands. The man, New London’s band director C. R. Sory, murmured, “There’s been a terrible explosion. Hundreds killed. It’s unbelievable, but true.”6

  Huggins later described Sory as “half-crazed,” and for the moment he doubted what the man was saying. Then he glanced out to the street. People wandered past, their clothes shredded, faces ashen with dust, arms and legs blood-spattered. An ambulance passed in one direction, siren wailing, and a fire truck rushed by, alarms clanging.

  The operator gathered enough information for a quick dispatch to Western Union regional headquarters in Houston and tapped it out in Morse code:

  * * *

  THERE HAS BEEN AN EXPLOSION AT THE NEW LONDON SCHOOL HERE, REPORTED SEVERAL HUNDRED KILLED AND INJURED, FLASH THE NEWS TO OUR OFFICES IN THE VICINITY ASKING THAT THEY SEND DOCTORS, NURSES AND AMBULANCES AT ONCE.7

  * * *

  15

  Newshounds

  In the cities of East Texas, the only hot news so far that day appeared to be the weather. Forecasters expected unseasonably warm temperatures that afternoon and possible showers or a thunderstorm in the evening.

  Associated Press (AP) reporter Felix R. McKnight arrived early for his shift at the AP’s office in Dallas, where he was slated to spend the entire day at a desk doing mostly rewrite work. In a nearby office building, United Press (UP) reporter Walter Cronkite, on loan to the Dallas office, assessed his workload that day as no more interesting than the rewriting he typically performed on a slow news day at his regular office in Kansas City. McKnight and Cronkite were both in their twenties and itching for stories with more oomph than routine reports on oil-field activities and running tallies of traffic fatalities.

  Another wire service reporter in Tennessee, in fact, found little more exciting to write about than a farmer who showed up at a bank wanting to deposit a hundred dollars, all in pennies.1 The gist of the short feature concerned the grumpy bank teller who had to count the coins one penny at a time.

  In the nation’s capital, the ongoing power struggle between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the U.S. Supreme Court had reached a lull. The Roosevelts stumped for the president’s education agenda, Franklin in Georgia and Eleanor in Oklahoma.

  It was a slow day for news even in New York. A flurry of interest developed when a distraught woman leaped in front of a subway train.2 But for the Big Apple, a showy suicide was hardly more extraordinary than the bank teller counting pennies in Tennessee. A short piece about the woman would be buried deep inside the next day’s editions.

  One glimmer on the news front: Female aviator Amelia Earhart took off on one of her daring flights. Elsewhere in the world, Arabs rioted against British colonialism and Jewish immigration into Palestine. Ernest Hemingway filed dispatches on the Spanish Civil War. The pope prepared to deliver a radio broadcast deploring the evils of Communism.

  In New York City, United Press’s most-prized columnist, Henry Mc-Lemore, a flamboyant globetrotter recently returned from covering devastating floods along the Mississippi River, prepared to don his sportswriter hat and report on a professional boxing match set to take place the next day at Madison Square Garden.3 Destiny had other plans. By midnight, he would be in a cramped makeshift newsroom in remote East Texas, fifteen hundred miles from his desk in New York, covering the most riveting story of his storied career.

  Back in Austin, Texas, reporters hunted for fresh angles on the birth of Governor James V. Allred’s third son, Sam Houston Allred. The catchy tidbits were filed in early briefs: Sam Houston Allred was born on March 17 in Sam Houston’s bed in the Sam Houston Room of the Texas governor’s mansion. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt planned to drop in on Governor Allred and his wife, Joe Betsy, to take a peak at baby Sam. Bits of hard news emulsified into pabulum.

  Labor organizers in the oil field around New London had been fanning rumors of a potential strike in 1937 that would shut down production in a pocket of the nation where the economy was growing strong again. Most people felt it was idle talk. Roughnecks were such rugged individualists that it was difficult to believe they would ever walk off the job, especially when so many other men with hungry families were drooling for employment in the oil fields.

  Even so, the AP in Dallas sent Felix McKnight to East Texas to check out the rumors. McKnight spent several days in late February and early March 1937 talking with oil-field workers and their families as well as the owners and managers of the oil companies and gasoline refineries driving the boom.

  The young South Texas native was impressed with the beauty of East Texas, the rolling little hills with thick pine forests, hardwood river bottoms, the growing towns, Henderson so tidy and neat and spiked with church steeples, Kilgore earning its rowdy reputation nightly, the neighboring villages of Old London and New London with the farm community social order mixing with oil-field culture.

  McKnight took names and developed a rapport with enough local contacts, in the towns, oil fields, and company headquarters, to be able to keep an eye on the situation in East Texas if anything developed.

  Sarah McClendon considered herself a crusading journalist early in her career. It was true on several levels. As a woman ambitious to carve a lasting place for herself in a profession dominated and controlled by men, she developed a brash, outspoken, and tenacious approach to even basic newspaper reporting, an approach she would one day take to White House press conferences.

  Soon after graduating from the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism in 1931, McClendon snagged a job reporting for a pair of newspapers in her hometown of Tyler, Texas, a small city at the edge of the East Texas oil boom. At the time she was hired, the co-owned Tyler Courier-Times and Tyler Morning Telegraph were launching a campaign with the Chamber of Commerce to push support for a modern new hospital in the city. The oil boom spurred so much growth across the region—accompanied by frequent job-related injuries and increased traffic accidents—that Tyler’s cramped hospital facility, with fewer than twenty beds, became woefully inadequate.

  “My job was to find out what it would take to build the hospital, to find out who opposed the project, to find out how to get around that opposition,” McClendon recalled in a memoir.4 “I saw myself as a fearless, crusading reporter. The pay was ten dollars a week.”

  McClendon’s chief responsibility, though, was to cover “society news” for the newspapers’ “women” sections. It galled her.

  By March 18, 1937, the modern hospital was one day away from becoming a reality. A grand opening ceremony for Mother Frances Hospital was scheduled for Friday, March 19. McClendon had devoted much time during recent weeks to working on a special section about the glistening new facility, which the Tyler newspapers had published the previous Sunday.

  Other than the anticipated hospital opening, it was a sluggish news day in Tyler. McClendon spent the morning on routine projects for the Courier-Times, the afternoon newspaper. Typically, if she could grab an additional byline by covering hard news for the Morning Telegraph, she’d work on through the afternoon and evening. This day, the twenty-six-year-old reporter felt caught up enough to schedule a midafternoon appointment at a beauty parlor.
<
br />   When McClendon emerged from the beauty parlor and set out down the sidewalk toward her office, something about the afternoon struck her as odd. The pace of shoppers, businessmen, lawyers, and others on the sidewalks and street corners seemed to have slowed down a notch from the normal midday bustle. Many had even stopped in their tracks. “When I returned to the office, it was clear that something was terribly wrong,” she recalled. “Everyone was just standing there, stunned.”5

  16

  Holy Sisters

  Dr. C. C. McDonald took his seat at the head table during an afternoon meeting of the Tyler Rotary Club. McDonald, president of the Smith County Medical Society, was there to speak about the Mother Frances Hospital opening the next day after a formal dedication ceremony. Among the most prominent doctors in the region, he’d led the drive to build the gleaming facility. He’d supplied local reporters, including Sarah McClendon, much of the background the Tyler newspapers had used for a special hospital section published the previous Sunday.

  Russell Rhodes, the former manager of Tyler’s Chamber of Commerce, introduced McDonald. “Certainly he deserves, more than anyone, the credit for the hospital which we are about to dedicate,” Rhodes said. “The doctors gave him authority to go ahead as their representative or we would not have a hospital today.”1

  An artful and entertaining speaker, McDonald typically opened with an anecdote. The physician kept a selection in his repertoire, drawn from personal experience and stories he’d heard working closely with other doctors in Tyler. He spoke frankly and with a sense of self-deprecation, tossing in splashes of local color and an occasional bawdy wrinkle. McDonald referred to the time of his birth in 1906 as a “pioneer” era in Texas medical practices.

  “Mother hung a white cloth in the window when it was time for father to go for the doctor,” he said in a memoir of his medical career. The doctor who brought McDonald into the world “was a well-educated physician who had been reputed as being a ‘good doctor if you could catch him sober.’”2