Gone at 3-17

by David M. Brown

  Arriving at the scene, he saw bodies of children, some blown onto the campus and some hanging from shattered windows. He began digging in the debris, pulling bodies from it and keeping an eye out for his own children. He first found Edna, twelve, and then Eloise, fourteen.

  “My heart was gone,” Powell said later.1 “They were our babies.” Ralph Carr stood on the porch of a building near the school and watched in disbelief as the structure rose into the air, hung suspended for a split second, and crashed back to earth with a roar. He dashed toward the wreckage, praying that his sixteen-year-old daughter, Chloe Ann, was somewhere safe from harm. He was one of the first people to enter the ruins, climbing over mounds of debris and working his way through the wreckage until he became hopelessly blocked from going any farther.2

  He could see through the debris into part of a classroom where students were sitting at their desks, covered in gray dust—dead. Chloe Ann was among them. Carr could get no closer to his child. He wept.

  H. G. White had just gotten back to his seat after talking with math teacher Lena Hunt when the boy felt an object slap against his head, a quick hard blow that momentarily stunned him. Something broad and heavy pressed into his back, pinning him to his desk.

  A woman screamed from somewhere above the dark cocoon of broken wall and ceiling plaster that encapsulated him. Dust in his nose and throat made breathing difficult. He was hurt and bleeding, and the woman’s scream seemed to be moving somewhere out of sight.

  He heard a crash and then a shaft of light shot down into the hole where H. G. was pinned. Suddenly the screaming woman was down there with him. She stopped screaming when she saw the boy.

  Miss Ann Wright, a first-year teacher, had been in a nearby classroom that was demolished. Several of her students had been killed instantly in the explosion, which had trapped Bill Thompson beneath the rubble. Wright had stumbled across the ruins, screaming hysterically, until she crashed through a sheet of plaster atop what had been Lena Hunt’s classroom. Mrs. Hunt was dead, buried somewhere in the debris.

  Miss Wright broke away some of the plaster wall that pinned H. G. to his desk, and she threw out broken pieces as fast as she could. Within a minute or so, she had tossed out enough for H. G. to wriggle his body as Wright tugged him from beneath his armpits. The rubble gave him up, dislodged him into the arms of the teacher. H. G. and Miss Wright climbed up out of the hole. He felt an amazing sense of freedom and litheness, in spite of a pounding headache. Blood matted his hair, and grayish powder covered his body and those around him. Everyone looked like ghosts.

  H. G. glanced back into the hole where he had been trapped and saw another boy, a classmate, who appeared to be dead. Blood had gushed out of the boy’s mouth and nose.

  H. G. walked toward an outside water fountain that two women were using to splash water on students. One held the fountain’s valve open while the other caught water in her cupped hands and poured it over the children’s wounds and dust-covered faces. H. G. bled from a hole in his head over his left eye. The woman washed his face, then looked up and asked him to move aside. A high school student staggered around the north side of the gym toward the women at the fountain. As they began washing his face, he collapsed and did not move again. Pieces of notebook paper had scattered across the campus, and people were using them to cover the faces of the dead. One of the women picked up a sheet and placed it over the young man’s motionless features.

  Third-grader Jimmie Jordan had disappeared from her sister’s side. Elsie staggered through the mess looking for her, but the dust and debris prevented her from seeing far ahead. People fleeing the building jostled her, everybody lost and confused, going one direction then the next. Children all around her cried, and every now and then, somebody screamed.

  Elsie saw Jimmie’s hands sticking out of a pile of rubbish beside some windows. She climbed over the heap and began tearing it apart. She slipped and fell against a cracked window, and it shattered. A sharp dagger of glass sliced Elsie’s face, cutting her eyebrow and eyelid in half. With blood blinding one eye, she kept digging, throwing out pieces of plasterboard and shards of tile. When she finally pulled Jimmie free, Elsie saw a dime-size hole above her eye. Blood poured out of it. Elsie tried to find a pulse and couldn’t, but thought she might not have done it right. She stopped the bleeding by holding her hand on Jimmie’s wound.

  Elsie carried Jimmie in her arms until she reached a place in the ruins where she could get out. A woman saw them and noticed the bad cut over Elsie’s eye. “Let me take the child. You’re hurt yourself. We need to get you both to a doctor.”

  Elsie didn’t want to let go of Jimmie. The woman gave her no choice.

  “We’re taking her to get help,” the woman said. They put Jimmie on the open bed of a truck filled with other children, most of whom looked dead. Elsie climbed on too and wrapped her arms around her unconscious sister.

  Helen Beard awoke on the ground between cars in the parking lot. Cement dust completely covered her body. Blood was streaming from the back of her head. One of the first people she saw amid a crowd of people was her mother. Helen pushed through the crowd until she was able to throw her arms around Mrs. Beard’s waist. “Mother,” Helen said, before becoming too woozy to speak.

  The right fender on the Beards’ car was crushed into the wheel, so Mrs. Beard asked a friend to take her and Helen to a hospital.

  Mr. Beard and his son, Alton, who survived the explosion unscathed, stayed behind to search for Marie.3

  Felton Waggoner waded into the scrambled wreckage and began separating children from the ruins. He picked up the living and the dead, carried them out, and laid them atop a gentle slope, on the grass beside a sidewalk.

  Time and again, he struggled into the demolished building and emerged holding a child in his arms. Waggoner was a tall man—six feet, five inches—and looked like a giant to the younger students. Many recalled seeing him striding back and forth, carrying a precious bundle each time, thrusting a measure of discipline into the chaos and hysteria surrounding them all.

  Bobby Clayton, pinned in a narrow gap beneath a row of steel lockers, saw Mr. Waggoner maneuvering through a cross section of collapsed walls and over a ragged hump of shattered joists and fallen beams. Bobby’s father worked in the oil field for a natural gas company, and the boy had begun attending New London just three weeks before, having transferred there from a little country school in Arkansas. Bobby called out to the junior high principal, but his voice was so choked with dust his words barely formed on his lips. Waggoner couldn’t hear the faint plea for help. The tall man moved off in another direction.

  Bobby, ten, settled back and tried in vain to relax. The sturdy lockers had stood against a wall at the back of the room, just behind Bobby’s desk. When the room blew apart, the lockers fell over against him and knocked him to the floor under the desk. A gash in his scalp bled. He hurt all over. As far as he could tell, the others in Mrs. J. D. Nelson’s classroom were buried under a heap of rubble, dying or dead.

  Teachers Carroll and Mildred Evans held each other with their bodies clinched around their toddler, Duane, their terrified hug lasting until the air cleared enough to see the high school—what had been the high school—in a scrambled heap of bricks, boards, tile, pipes, wires, twisted steel beams, and jagged concrete boulders.

  Carroll gave Mildred and Duane a gentle push back inside their home, and he headed straight into the ruins. Evans tried to find the science room where he taught his last class and where his colleague, Willie Tate, was teaching a large group of students about the moon’s orbit and phases. The mound of rubble that had replaced that part of the building proved impassable. Evans picked his way down to the basement level and into what was left of the industrial arts shop where his friend and next-door neighbor Lemmie Butler taught.

  When he saw the scorched body of a man splayed across a desk, Evans knew it had to be Lemmie. He patted around the corpse until he felt Butler’s pocket watch. Evans stuck it in his own p
ocket to take to Butler’s wife.

  F. M. Herron jumped into his car and joined a caravan of vehicles that headed from Overton toward the school. When he arrived at the edge of the disaster, he assumed the worst. Herron hardly uttered a sound before he struggled into the debris pile and began carrying out the bodies of children. He had no idea of the whereabouts of his own—Juanita, fourteen; Inez, twelve; and F. M. Junior, ten. These bodies were so torn he didn’t know how any parent would recognize a son or daughter.4

  Herron lifted a dead girl and carried her to the line of bodies on an embankment. Women were laying sheets of notebook paper over their faces. Herron gently placed the girl among the dead and turned to go back into the ruins. But before he took two steps, he stopped, and then spun around to look at the girl again. She still had on one shoe, which Herron recognized.

  Juanita.

  L. V. Barber realized he could do nothing for the girl who jumped from the second-story window of the study hall library. She’d sliced an artery in her leg going through the glass of the first-floor window. A small group of students huddled around Evelyn Rainwater, a girl known for her beautiful gray eyes, as blood drained from her into the schoolyard dirt.

  L. V. jogged around the corner of the only wing that still stood and looked out at the wreckage of the rest. He couldn’t imagine anybody had survived the collapse but set out anyway, searching for his brothers—Burton, sixteen, and Arden, twelve—and his fourteen-year-old sister, Pearl. He found Burton, milling among a crowd of survivors, within about fifteen minutes. Someone had showered him off, exposing extensive burns. Burton had been in the shop, where the explosion originated. The blast had blown apart the column he had been standing behind, tearing his face, shoulder, and leg.

  Nobody L. V. talked to said they had seen either Pearl or Arden. He went to a part of the school where he suspected Pearl might have been in class and saw rows of bodies mangled and twisted beyond recognition. He turned his search to Arden, the family’s baby, a fifth-grader whose classroom sat in the middle of the explosion’s most destructive swath. It would take a miracle, L. V. Barber admitted to himself.

  Walter Freeman, twelve, was sitting at his desk in the back of Lena Hunt’s math class, in the opposite corner from H. G. White’s desk, when the explosion brought the school down around them. Walter woke up on the floor under a desk, feeling numb through part of his body, stinging and hurting in other places. He saw some light seeping in from the direction of a stairwell in the hall that led up to the outside. With excruciating effort, Walter pulled himself forward into the hallway. It seemed like he was inside a bad dream. He remembered seeing Mrs. Hunt at her desk, with the blackboard behind her, when something crashed down on the teacher. He also remembered seeing a quick flash almost at the same moment, as he careened from his desk into a vortex of debris. Now he couldn’t stand up, but he managed to crawl another few inches using his shoulders, chest, and one arm. A stick protruded from his other arm. Walter tried to pull it out but it wouldn’t budge, and that’s when he realized it was bone.

  His back was broken, several ribs were cracked, the sight in one eye was blurred, and a piece of steel was embedded in his head; he had a concussion. Walter didn’t then know the extent of his injuries or how perilously close to death he was. He just focused on the shaft of light ahead of him and pulled himself toward it. He heard someone near the stairwell say, “There’s one. Let’s get him out.”

  Two women hurried down the steps and saw the boy with a blood-smeared face and his overalls nearly ripped off his body. His eyes were open, blinking away drops of blood. They carried him out into the sunshine.

  Walter saw the big oak tree behind the school with some of its branches stripped off as if a storm had hit it, and the mangled body of a child hanging from one that remained. He passed out.

  George L. Hardy of Arp heard the explosion, and soon afterward, he saw emergency vehicles streaming east in front of his house. “The London school!” somebody shouted from a car. Hardy grabbed his hat and coat, jumped into his car, and started for the school. By the time he reached the outskirts of New London, he was sweating profusely. Hardy, sixty-three, loosened his collar and took off his coat. After he’d gotten as close to the school as possible, he parked the car in the weeds on the side of the road. Then he set out in a trot. He was too old and out of shape to make a full run.

  When Hardy saw chalky white men coming out of the collapsed building carrying dead children drenched in blood, he clutched his chest and collapsed next to a fallen piece of wall. George Hardy died later that evening, felled, a doctor said, by a heart attack induced by shock.5

  Preston Crim had been sitting near the windows in Ann Wright’s fifth-grade English class, next to Claude Joseph “Joe Bo” Kerce, a couple of rows over from Bill Thompson.

  Preston, eleven, held a green-striped fountain pen and copied down a homework assignment Miss Wright had put on the blackboard. Kids were talking in soft voices because the teacher said they could visit quietly in the last few minutes before the bell. Bill Thompson, Preston noticed, was making eyes at Billie Sue Hall. Joe Bo, also eleven, was gazing out the window. He was the class cutup and got paddled often, but everybody, including the teachers, liked him and couldn’t hold back the laughs when Joe Bo’s comedic charm hit high gear. His nickname was a droll coupling of his middle name—Joe for Joseph—and the name of a faithful companion, his little dog Bo. Joe Bo seemed a natural fit.

  Preston Crim had no indication anything was wrong until a strange force slapped against him. “All of a sudden it felt like there was a strong wind—something blowing against you real hard—and everything was going around and around and you couldn’t stand against it,” he recalled. “It was just turmoil, and then, almost as soon as it happened, it was over. And then it was just complete destruction. You couldn’t see anything.”

  A piercing scream sliced through heavy dust. It was Ann Wright, yelling her lungs out. Joe Bo Kerce took command and pushed the teacher toward an opening where the windows had been and through it. Preston followed them.

  “When we got outside you couldn’t see your hand in front of you because of the dust,” Crim said. “We started running and the first thing you do is run into some parked car out there and bounce back, torn up. We made our way to the front of the building where the buses always waited.”

  The only certainty at that moment was something crazy had happened, turning school out earlier than expected. “That’s all us young kids could think about. We didn’t realize how serious it was,” he said. “We got up there and saw the school—just leveled out.”

  Joe Bo glanced at Preston and saw blood running down his shoulder and a coating of plaster dust stuck to his green corduroy outfit. Preston looked at Joe Bo, whose scalp and neck bled in spots from bits of concrete blasted everywhere by the explosion.

  “Well, Preston,” Joe Bo said, “this ought to get us out a couple of weeks.”

  When the dust cloud parted, the boys discovered a terror far worse than the scenes of any horror movie they’d ever watched. This was not fiction flickering on a movie screen; it was as real as the taste of blood in your own mouth.

  Students were leaping from second-story windows of a wing of the school that remained upright. Some made hard landings and didn’t get right up, but rolled and moaned. A girl named Evelyn Rainwater was hurt badly. Students clustered around her were talking about how it happened.

  A boy said he had yelled, “Don’t jump! Don’t jump! We’ll come get you down.”

  She jumped anyway but didn’t push far enough away from the building to miss the outturned window on the first floor. One of Evelyn’s legs crashed through the glass, impaling her body on the steel window frame. Blood gushed down her leg. A boy put his arms under Evelyn’s arms, pulled her off the window frame, and carefully laid the unconscious girl on the grass.

  Her dress below the waist quickly became soaked with blood.

  “Somebody please come help this girl!” the boy yelle
d. “She’s bleeding to death!”

  Preston Crim saw a man emerge from the ruins carrying a schoolboy. “Evidently he was one of the first on the scene and he found his son the first thing,” Crim said. “I could see [the son’s] feet dangling—turned different directions like his legs were crushed. His abdomen was opened up and his intestines were hanging and he was still alive, begging his daddy to kill him. His daddy was just walking like a zombie in a trance.”

  Joe Bo Kerce took off for home, running across the school grounds and down the side of a road. His heels were steadily kicking up little spouts of dust as he faded from sight.

  Ledell Dorsey sat in a daze in the corner of what remained of her classroom, now reduced to a small portion of a two-story section of the building standing like a precarious pedestal amid the ruins. So much dust covered her she blended with the floor and walls, becoming almost invisible, like a silver moth enmeshed into the gray powder. She was conscious but in a twilight—frightened and alone.

  One of her classmates, Helen Rainwater, had jumped out through a window in the room, but Ledell was afraid the second-floor window was too high off the ground for a safe jump. She waited, hoping someone would come to help her down soon.

  A man stumbling across the rubble saw a small human foot sticking out of the debris, wiggling. He fell to his hands and knees and started shoveling away broken pieces of a wall, using his bare hands. A child’s legs, mid-section, and shoulders became visible, and a moment later, a young girl looked up at him with clear, frightened eyes. It was Billie Sue Hall, the fifth grader Bill Thompson had wanted to flirt with before the bell rang. The school explosion had cut short their romantic interlude.