Gone at 3-17

by David M. Brown

  McDonald obtained a permit from the sheriff’s office and started carrying a.38-caliber Colt handgun in an arm holster during the early years of the oil boom. This was after sometimes rowdy oil-field roughnecks started showing up in his office bloodied and ill-tempered from accidents at work or brawls in a tavern. He never had to use the pistol, but its presence was “comforting” when it came time to ask some of the rougher roughnecks for cash on the spot in payment for his services.

  Among friends, McDonald might use a favorite story about a urologist named Livingston: “Dr. Livingston had a unique way of handling patients successfully. This is illustrated by the traveling salesman who came into his office for examination of his prostate. After completing, he told the patient the bill was $2.00.

  “The salesman, scowling indignantly, sputtered, ‘That much for just thirty seconds of work?’

  “Livingston handed the man a rubber glove, and offered: ‘Put it on, and stick your finger up my a—and we will call it even.’

  “This settled the matter,” McDonald deadpanned.

  When it came to Tyler’s new hospital—the first modern medical facility in East Texas—there was no joking around. C. C. McDonald could take much personal credit for the project’s success, although bragging was not his style. Besides, everybody in the room knew how much toil and sweat McDonald put into it and applauded his leadership. The nineteen doctors who joined McDonald in the effort had taken to calling him “Chief.”

  Opposition to the idea from those who suspected taxpayers would be saddled with enormous debt was unrelenting—despite wide awareness that a hospital was needed.

  McDonald recalled once working at a local hospital that experienced recurring power outages during an ice storm. He improvised by using a car headlamp and storage battery to light the operating room during an appendectomy. The makeshift system failed by the time the surgeon was ready to close his incision. In the emergency, an assistant shined a flashlight on the patient’s belly. It was not until the next day that an X-ray revealed a clamping device had been sewn up inside her abdominal cavity. The surgeon had to reopen the woman to remove the tool.

  Opponents of the new hospital were not bad people, McDonald said. The “gentlemen were honest, sincere businessmen who had grown up under very conservative circumstances in a small agrarian community of limited resources. They had been trained to a lifestyle that required ‘Squeezing the dollar until the eagle defecates.’”

  Some of the opponents worried what would become of the local economy when the oil boom inevitably played out. A few demeaned the plan to build a new hospital as a scheme by the doctors to enrich themselves. That was hogwash, McDonald knew. These docs in Tyler didn’t have much to gain personally from supporting the push for a hospital, but twenty of them, including McDonald, had put up their own money to get the ball rolling so the city could apply for a grant from Roosevelt’s Public Works Administration.

  In the end, supporters were able to have Mother Frances Hospital built and equipped at no cost to the taxpayers after brokering a deal with the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth to invest in the facility and manage hospital operations.

  McDonald assured everybody at the Rotary luncheon that the hospital was fully ready to open for business following tomorrow’s ribbon-cutting ceremony. More than a dozen Sisters of the Holy Family—hospital-trained nurses—were on the job already. The twenty doctors who backed the plan were set to become part of the staff.

  McDonald was scheduled to be a guest of honor that evening at a formal banquet celebrating the launch of the facility.

  All morning and afternoon Mother Mary Ambrose kept the nuns in her charge jumping from one project to the next. Bishop Joseph P. Lynch, head of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Dallas, was scheduled to arrive in Tyler by early evening. Mother Mary Regina, the provincial superior of the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth, had arrived already. Her order had signed a contract with the city to operate the hospital. It was a coup for the Catholics, outnumbered by Protestants in this region ten-to-one. Tyler had just one Catholic church and no parish school. A Baptist group—the largest Protestant sect in East Texas—made a pitch for the contract, and the city’s decision raised concern about a possible backlash from anti-Catholic factions. The Sisters of the Holy Family won the contract because of the order’s experience at operating hospitals, an outstanding reputation, and the offer of a sweeter deal for the city than others put on the table.

  Twelve sisters, all practical nurses, formed the staff. But this afternoon, as no patients would be admitted until after the dedication tomorrow, the nuns busied themselves with housekeeping chores and last-minute touches to make Mother Frances Hospital shine. It was said that even the heads of screws were gleaming when the sisters finished polishing the hospital that day.3 Mother Ambrose was a taskmaster of the old school, a strict spiritual leader who equated orderliness and cleanliness with godliness.

  The hospital was named for the order’s founder, Frances Siedliska, born in 1842 in Poland to wealthy, landowning parents. She received a noblewoman’s education, including voice, music, poetry, and other arts instruction, from tutors in her home. Her parents placed minor significance on religious practices, but Frances developed into a devout, practicing Catholic in her teens. She felt drawn to the life of a nun and a need to spurn affluence and contemplate matters of the spirit. Her father objected to the very idea of his beautiful and cultured daughter becoming cloistered in a dungeon-like convent. Frances had something different in mind. In 1875 she started the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth, based in Rome with convents in Paris and London. Ten years later, she and eleven sisters arrived in the United States at the request of a priest in Chicago to serve a community of poor immigrants from Poland. When Mother Frances Siedliska died in Rome on November 21, 1902, she had led the order for nearly three decades and nurtured it well. By 1937 Sisters of the Holy Family were maintaining more than a hundred schools, eight hospitals, and two orphanages in the United States alone.

  The doctor’s group at the newest hospital, a five-story beacon of progress in a growing city, invited all of Tyler and East Texas to drop in and take a look. Three hundred out-of-town doctors received personal invitations to inspect the hospital and attend a Friday luncheon in the larger of the hospital’s two dining rooms. An adjacent kitchen provided a fully equipped food service unit, complete with a conveyor belt and elevator lift to transport food trays to the various floors, where nurses could distribute them to patients’ rooms while the food was still warm.4

  The Tyler municipal band was to play a fifteen-minute concert to kick off the grand opening at 4:00 p.m. on Friday. Guests from West Texas to Washington, D.C., were en route for the event.

  “On the eve before the opening all was ready: beds covered with colorful spreads, furniture arranged,” according to archival documents referenced in a Sisters of the Holy Family newsletter. “Interior decorators chosen by the hospital committee were busy preparing assortments of flowers for the wards and the rooms; the atmosphere was very pleasant. Nobody there was idle; each came with the sole purpose of helping to make the dedication a success.

  “All that was in the hospital was very modern, perfectly planned, and furnished beautifully. There were large operating rooms, offices, and a library—all with the finest equipment.”5

  The sisters thoroughly scoured the kitchen area, even though it had never been used. They washed hundreds of dishes, glasses, and eating utensils as the items were removed from manufacturers’ packing crates. It’s not known whether the meticulous nuns used the kitchen’s chief novelty, an electric dishwasher, or washed them, as they were accustomed, by hand. They did use the hospital’s automatic laundry to wash scores of new linens and towels for all the beds and patients’ rooms.

  The hospital contained an isolation ward for patients with contagious diseases; a unit for broken bones and skeletal deformities; a radiation department for treating cancer; an X-ray room and diagnostic lab; an eye, ea
r, nose, and throat facility with special equipment for removing obstructions from breathing and food passages; a nursery with a glass partition so fathers, grandparents, and friends could look in on newborns without contaminating the sterile atmosphere around the babies; and a pharmacy.

  A room on the main floor was converted into “a small but beautiful chapel.” The custom-made altar wasn’t yet installed, but a small organ was in place.

  “Since some of the Sisters had a designated ward on the first floor as their living quarters, that room became a temporary ‘warehouse’ for whatever could not be arranged in place at that time,” the newsletter said. “Imagine, if you will, stacks of sheets in one corner; in another, a huge pile of blankets; in another section, pillows; in still another, towels galore. In addition, there were under each bed suitcases, shoes, bedroom slippers.... Any thing that seemed superfluous on the higher floors was deposited in the ‘common’ room.

  “The upper floors shone with order and cleanliness. The patients’ rooms were like well-furnished parlors. The third floor maternity section was none worse, and the children’s bassinets were fit for children of a king. All was in such readiness so that if any person questioned what still had to be done, the only suitable reply would be: ‘Straighten out the sisters’ quarters.’”6

  Their living quarters would not be open to the public anyway, so the sisters postponed that job for the first thing Friday morning, when they expected, finally, to have a little time to themselves to meditate, pray, and tidy up their rooms.

  Mother Mary Regina was busy with innumerable tasks she’d assigned herself around four o’clock Thursday afternoon, when a sister approached her and said the Mother Superior needed to take an emergency phone call. When Regina put the phone receiver to her ear and listened for a moment, her face changed from the pleasant expression she always tried to wear to a look of grave alarm.

  “Yes, we’ll send help immediately,” she said, with urgency in her voice. “And we will open the hospital this afternoon.”

  17

  Radio Man

  Ted Hudson awoke on that Thursday with a feeling that his dream was about to come true. This was his first day at the helm of a new radio station in Henderson, Texas. It was the town’s first station, the fruit of Hudson’s planning and promotion of the idea for years.1

  Hudson, a native of Shreveport, Louisiana, had moved to Henderson in 1931, soon after the oil boom began. The region offered fertile ground for entrepreneurs. Hudson saw no reason why Henderson shouldn’t be able to sustain a radio operation tailored to the community and supported by East Texas advertising dollars. It seemed incredible to him that a town of more than ten thousand residents in a county with a population of seventy thousand didn’t already have a radio station by 1937.

  Nothing surpassed radio as a diversion from the hard times of the Depression. Americans bought approximately four million radios between 1930 and 1932. By the end of the decade, an estimated 28 million homes had at least one, and nearly 90 percent of the population spent more than four hours a day listening to everything from news and weather to music and forerunners of the situation comedies and melodramas that would become equally popular on TV in another couple of decades.2

  “Before they can go happily to bed on Sunday nights, millions of people wait up to hear Walter Winchell chatter about the news,” said a story in the first issue of Life magazine, published November 23, 1936. The story detailed how Gypsy Rose Lee, the famous stripper, was a recent guest on Rudy Vallee’s hour-long variety show. Vallee earned more than $100,000 to host the show—$1.6 million in 2010 dollars.3

  Jack Benny attracted the biggest following, with an estimated 18 million weekly listeners. Political columnist Dorothy Thompson commented on the serious news of the day on NBC’s America’s Town Meeting of the Air. Less adventurous listeners tuned in to CBS radio’s Just Plain Bill, the “barber of Hartville,” a vehicle for “the real-life story of people just like people we all know.” For those who couldn’t quite handle the stimulation of Bill’s rollicking adventures in normality, Oxydol offered Ma Perkins, “America’s mother of the air. Brought to you by Procter and Gamble, makers of Oxydol.”4

  Maxwell House Coffee sponsored The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, and Wheatena, a hot breakfast cereal, sponsored another favorite, “All hands on deck, here’s Popeye.... Wheatena is his diet, he asks you to try it, with Popeye the Sailor Man!”5

  Music made up more than half of radio programming and was mixed with adventure serials such as The Lone Ranger, variety shows, soap operas, and a few educational programs such as Invitation to Learning and Science on the March.

  By 1937 radio had become the nation’s nervous system, transmitting signals coast to coast.

  Soon after moving to Henderson, Ted Hudson immersed himself in civic and business activities and began talking up the radio idea with anyone who would listen. His father, a railroad train engineer, imparted to Ted a yearning for adventure. Ted, now thirty-two, discovered in himself a born entrepreneur’s relentless drive, optimism, and instincts. He’d already secured the money to open a radio, washing machine, and appliance store in Henderson, but radio remained his true love. As a little boy tinkering with a ham radio in the attic, Ted had picked up snippets of the Russian Revolution—an excited mob shouting revolutionary slogans in a foreign tongue. With his flabbergasted parents standing behind him that night, he learned the power of radio—its immediacy and its ability to carry one solitary voice around the globe. Ted resolved to be the announcer on a coast-to-coast newscast.

  The new radio station occupied the top floor of the Randolph Hotel, in downtown Henderson, where Hudson rented an unused penthouse to house the station’s studio and control room. He’d made practice runs on the system for two weeks. The station hit the airwaves at 7:00 a.m., broadcasting network programming interspersed with Hudson’s announcements of news and events.6 Hudson had some experience calling high school football and baseball games, but this was his debut as a regular radio announcer. He apparently had the talent to pull it off. “His keen sense of humor and his knowledge of the games he announced made him one of the best sports commentators this section has ever known,” according to an article in the Henderson Daily News.7

  Hudson piggybacked his Henderson broadcast on the signal of KOCA in Kilgore, about twenty miles north. After the 7:30 Eyeopener Program furnished by a network, Hudson had a few minutes at 7:55 to make local announcements. The late afternoon edition of the Henderson Daily News from the day before, Wednesday, March 17, offered him a template and included the New London PTA meeting, scheduled for 3:00 p.m. in the high school auditorium. All parents, the announcement said, were urged to attend.

  Hudson must have felt a surge of confidence after surviving his first live segment on the air without a glitch. At 8:00 a.m., his station went to a thirty-minute Pentecostal Church program. At 8:30 a.m., a variety show started. The rookie radio man had some time to contemplate his next news and announcements segment at 8:55 a.m.8 So far, so good.

  If Hudson had any jitters about going on the air, they quickly dispersed. Besides, who was listening? The station was brand-spanking new; Hudson doubted more than a few hundred people, among them his closest friends and neighbors, knew to tune their radio dials to listen to him this morning. He was talking to family. His seven-year-old daughter, Mary Lou, had promised to tune in for a few minutes before she left for school. Hudson gave Mary Lou the honorary title of “engineer” at the new station, and she immediately set about trying to correct her father’s grammar.

  The 3:00 p.m. network show Rhythm Time had concluded, and the next show, King Richard’s Orchestra, which started at 3:30 p.m., was well under way. Hudson was nearly through the afternoon of his first full day as a professional radio announcer when he noticed commotion outside his studio in a hallway of the Randolph Hotel. He heard snippets of a conversation, voices loud enough to sound excited, alarmed, or distressed. After sticking his head outside the studio, he overheard sev
eral people discussing an explosion that supposedly happened at New London High School, ten miles northwest of Henderson.

  Hudson immediately called a friend and arranged to borrow an airplane. A few minutes later, he was flying over the disaster site. It looked far worse than anything Hudson had imagined. Debris was scattered in a wide, twisting swath, and hundreds of people were scrambling about the ruins. As far as he could tell from the air, the school was just gone—smashed into a heap of rubble that resembled scenes of bombed towns in news photos from Europe. He turned the airplane back to the south.

  After landing at the Henderson airstrip, Hudson wasted no time getting to his panel truck, loading it with radio transmission gear, and heading toward the stricken community.

  18

  Into the Ruins

  Bill Thompson’s heart slowed as he sank into a state of shock. The previous instant, a flicker in time, lodged in his brain as a flash of some moment in his future: déjà vu waiting to occur, again and again.

  It was strange—whirling through space as though his desk had become a wild carnival ride. The boy twirled over and over in a realm between life and death until compacted inside a tangled mass of debris, he was sucked back down by the forces of gravity at war with the physics of exploding gas.

  Bill saw nothing. Only one of his arms was free to move up and down. The rest of his body felt locked as if in a mousetrap. He pinched himself. This was no dream.

  Blood trickled down his face and neck. It was sticky and warm. A ringing in his ears gradually gave way to other sounds, a distant commotion. Voices. He was not alone.

  E. D. Powell was working in his garden about a quarter of a mile from the school. He heard a loud boom and felt the ground shake. Powell, an oil-field worker, figured a storage tank had blown up. A moment later he saw a great cloud of dust or smoke billowing skyward from the direction of the school.