Gone at 3-17

by David M. Brown

  Hazel Shaw and Myrtle Meador gave up trying to get any closer to the school than the outskirts of New London, where the traffic became hopelessly clogged and highway patrolmen were blocking further access by vehicle. Hazel parked on the side of the road, and she and Myrtle set out hiking the rest of the way, moving with a crowd of other people between cars and along the roadsides. It had taken them nearly an hour to travel about ten miles from Henderson to New London.

  Myrtle saw her mother from a distance and hurried to catch up with her.

  “Police had roped off the main part that had blown up, but there were pieces of body parts outside of that,” Myrtle recalled. “The Tidewater Company had a cyclone fence on the south side of the school. They had stacked bodies there, two deep, wrapped in sheets. When I saw my mother it was quite a reunion.”

  After mother and daughter released each other from a long hug, Mattie Meador told Myrtle that her thirteen-year-old brother, Junior, was dead.

  “It was such a violent explosion, bodies burst. His head had to be tied up like a sore thumb,” Myrtle said.

  They hurried away to find Myrtle’s father. Floyd Meador was digging in the rubble at a place where the typing room had been, searching for his daughter’s remains. He praised God for answering his prayer when he saw that she was alive.

  “They leaned on the strength that God gave them. They were fine Christian people, and God helped them,” Myrtle said. “It was three days before I could cry—that was such a shock to the human body to see something like that,” she added.

  Hazel Shaw soon learned hope was fading that her brother Sambo had survived the blast. She knew where his classroom was located—a part of the school crushed into a deep pile of debris. She also discovered that two of her cousins—Dorothy Oleta Shaw and Marvin Shaw—had perished.

  Her father was alive, although deeply shaken. He was wandering through the ruins, almost incoherent, somewhere among more than two thousand volunteers in the rescue and recovery operation, she was told. Her mother, Leila, was holding up, although she had witnessed the explosion from her kitchen window, standing at the sink washing dishes, and felt ill with despair.

  Hazel set out to find her father, knowing that he needed the strength and support of loved ones. Many people knew Chesley Shaw only from a distance, as a headmaster early in his career, principal of the Minden School, and superintendent at New London. He was set in his ways about some things—frustratingly headstrong. He was strict about rules of conduct he considered essential, not only as an educator but as a civilized human being. And sometimes he could be cantankerous. But he had a tender and sensitive side to his personality—an emotional vulnerability—that only those closest to the superintendent, such as his daughters, really understood.

  He had inspired Hazel and Helen to follow his example and devote their lives to teaching children. It was a cause Chesley Shaw had remained faithful to all of his life, although his administrative duties as superintendent of a large school district had elevated him to a position outside of the classroom. He still loved nothing better than taking a field trip with students, especially the little ones in the grammar school.

  Once he was finally making enough money to afford an extravagance, Chesley arranged his own version of a grand field trip, taking his two daughters on a cross-county odyssey to visit the Chicago World’s Fair in the summer of 1933. Along the way, they stopped at historical landmarks, including Civil War battlefields; they drove hundreds of miles out of the way to reach the greatest battlefield in American history, Gettysburg. Chesley walked for hours with his daughters in tow across the Pennsylvania fields and hills where the armies of the North and South clashed in the first three days of July 1863, only a decade before Chesley was born, to determine the outcome of the war. His eyes brimmed with tears as he reminded Hazel and Helen of the blood spilled by those who gave their lives—more than seven thousand Yankees and Confederates, all Americans—to settle the grave issue of slavery and ultimately forge a stronger nation.

  And then they headed back west toward Chicago, with Chesley driving the automobile at a pace so slow he was pulled over by a Pennsylvania state trooper. The officer didn’t give Chesley a ticket but wounded his dignity with a lecture on the hazards of creeping along a modern highway no faster than a mule-drawn wagon. If he was going to drive like that, he needed to pull over and let faster traffic pass, the trooper scolded. Chesley was flabbergasted. The girls had to suppress giggles, watching their old-fashioned father being called a slowpoke to his face. Chesley drove a bit faster until he crossed the border into Ohio. He still seemed puffed up over the ordeal, but more than anything else, he was embarrassed, Hazel felt. He was a nineteenth-century man who had embraced the twentieth century with enthusiasm and considered himself a modern thinker, not a relic of the past.

  Now, as she sought to find him in the maze of destruction, she felt grief from the loss of so many children and teachers, and at the same time she worried how all this would affect her father—emotionally and otherwise. Some people, no doubt, were going to find ways to blame him for the disaster, regardless of what was found to be its cause. The grandest achievement of Chesley’s life lay in ruins. The crushed body of his youngest son lay buried somewhere beneath the rubble. So many children that he had adored had perished. She hoped, and earnestly prayed, that his family and friends could shield him from any greater loss.

  When Felix McKnight and Bill Rives, panting and elbowing their way through a massive crowd of onlookers, arrived at the New London school campus, officials had set up a rope cordon to separate the mob from the rescue workers and establish a semblance of order.

  “I’m Felix McKnight, Associated Press,” McKnight told a highway patrolman on the other side of the line, handing the man his press badge. The officer glanced at it and passed McKnight and Rives through the rope barrier. Other highway patrol officers, men in American Legion uniforms and uniformed Boy Scouts were strung out along the rope to help keep order.

  McKnight planned to survey the scene, find an official, ask a few key questions, and file a preliminary story within, say, about fifteen minutes. To do that, of course, he had to locate a telephone, and so far he’d had no luck. Everybody he asked about a phone just gazed at him and shrugged. “All the phones are out,” one man said glumly. Another told him there were several working phones at the Humble Oil office about a mile away, but they were strictly reserved for emergency use only. McKnight had been at that office only a week before, when he was investigating labor unrest in the East Texas oil field, and he had made some contacts that might come in handy now, he figured.

  “How could anyone survive this?” McKnight said, waving at the wreckage.

  Rives told him that officials were estimating seven hundred students and teachers were in the school when it exploded, according to a highway patrolman.

  “I recall the scene I’ll never forget—and I’ve seen it a thousand times in nightmares,” McKnight said later. “They were literally trying to clear that building by hand. They would dislodge bricks and rubble and cement and mortar and fill these peach baskets. They formed lines with about fifty men in each line and would pass the baskets down the line and start digging again.”

  The reporters headed for one of the basket brigade lines.

  “We’re from the Associated Press,” McKnight told a roughneck who appeared to be in charge. “We’re here to get this story out to the world.”

  “We don’t give a damn,” the roughneck said.

  He ordered McKnight and Rives to join those in the rescue and recovery operation. McKnight initially was stunned and at a loss for words. He desperately needed to file a story without delay. But under the circumstances , he could not reason with these men, many of them parents of missing children, about the significance of a reporter’s work. The story had to wait. McKnight wedged into a place on one of the lines and Rives found a spot in the facing line.

  “And we passed those peach baskets from one man to the next,” McKn
ight recalled.

  The sun dipped below the horizon, glazing the debris field with a red afterglow.

  Governor James Allred realized the chaos in East Texas could escalate, given the scope and horror of the disaster. He monitored the situation closely from soon after the explosion into the early evening. Hearing reports of monstrous traffic snarls as a crowd of thousands of people formed an almost impassable loop around the New London school campus, Allred decided to send National Guard troops to the disaster scene.

  The order, directed to National Guard officers in Longview and Tyler, was to proceed with all available men in their companies and take charge of the entire situation. Allred appointed a team of military and state officials to establish a court of inquiry.

  “They will decide on the procedure and act as officers of the National Guard. As such, they will have broad powers,” Allred said.2

  The governor declared martial law for a five-mile radius around New London. The first troops arrived within a couple of hours, riding in a convoy of military vehicles. With rifles slung across their shoulders, some of the guardsmen began herding the crowd back while others cordoned off the school campus with rope barriers.

  When they drove into Tyler, Walter Cronkite and Bill Baldwin came to fully appreciate the wire service’s decision to dispatch a team of top-flight reporters to help with the New London story. The staggering scope of the catastrophe became evident.

  “Going through Tyler we saw lines of cars, ambulances and hearses and automobiles that clearly were carrying bodies in them, lined up trying to get to the two funeral homes in Tyler that were on the main highway,” Cronkite recalled. “Then we knew we had a story on our hands.”

  The main road toward New London was barricaded by highway patrol cars. Officers were clearing only emergency vehicles through the roadblock. Other routes into the oil-field region were clogged with enormous traffic jams. A car wreck with one fatality was backing up cars and trucks on one of the roads. To reach the disaster site as soon as possible, Cronkite and Baldwin had hitched a ride on a fire truck the city of Beaumont had dispatched to help in the rescue and recovery mission. The truck was equipped with a powerful searchlight.

  “We got down to New London, and some distance from New London you could see the glow of the searchlights that were playing upon the rubble.... These great floodlights were lighting this scene of utter devastation,” Cronkite recalled. “By that time, it was dark. We saw this pile of debris that didn’t even look like a building. It looked like a pile of debris that might have been bulldozed together into that little area and hundreds of men, looking like ants.”3

  When he arrived at the edge of the school campus, Cronkite’s perspective of the horror sharpened.

  “In the rubble, men were digging with their hands, tears streaming down their filthy faces as they searched for their own children,” he said.4

  22

  Mother Frances

  Walter Freeman couldn’t help but wonder, time and again, if he was going in and out of a dream. He had been at school and was knocked down and hurt badly when the room collapsed. The nightmare next put him in the midst of other students, groaning and dying, and Walter tried to say something, ask some questions, but his voice was very weak. Then he awoke in an ambulance with a siren blaring, feeling it swerve to take a steep curve. Now, it seemed an angel was gazing down at him.

  A black hood with a white collar curved around the beautiful oval of her face. She smiled at him. He wanted to say something but still felt deflated, too tired even to say hello. He heard the voices of men, his father in work clothes and a doctor in a white lab coat, standing in the doorway of the hospital room.

  “Is he going to make it?” Mr. Freeman asked.

  “If he makes it through tonight, I think so,” the doctor said.

  Although Walter didn’t know what she was doing—or what she was, since he’d never seen a nun—he felt comforted by the sister as she swabbed his head injuries and gently probed his chest and arms. She was preparing the boy for surgery to repair the compound fracture in one arm and place a cast around his entire body, from head to toe, with slits for his eyes, nose, and mouth. His broken back and cracked ribs were not believed to be life threatening; doctors were most concerned about the concussion.

  Walter Freeman soon drifted back to a semiconscious state, mixing the reality of his surroundings with dreamlike images, unaware that he was one of the first patients in the new Mother Frances Hospital in Tyler.

  Walter’s eleven-year-old sister, Jeanette, was with their mother, still looking all over the place for her other sister, Myrtle Marie, nine, who went by “Shug.” Nobody had seen Shug since the explosion. They finally located her at a temporary morgue in Overton. Her head was wrapped in cotton and one of her legs was missing. Somebody had put a leg with the body but it didn’t look to belong to Shug. “It took me a long time to get over that,” Jeanette Freeman Martin said. “You never do really.”1

  Mother Mary Regina, provincial officer of the Sisters of the Holy Family, took it upon herself to open the hospital immediately upon learning of the school explosion.

  She heard about it when a phone call came in late Thursday afternoon requesting medical assistance for disaster victims. She was visiting Mother Frances to participate in the formal blessing and grand opening ceremonies scheduled for Friday. All that could wait, she decided; these injured children were the highest priority for the new facility and its staff of sisters trained as nurses. Mother Mary Regina sent ten of the nuns straight to the disaster site, with instructions to return with patients coming to the hospital in ambulances and emergency vehicles, and then she started calling the offices of every doctor in Tyler and Smith County, urging them to report to the hospital as quickly as possible. A highly regarded brain surgeon was already en route from Dallas. Mother Regina instructed Mother Mary Ambrose, the superior charged with managing the hospital, to make a hundred beds ready to receive patients. When Bishop Joseph Lynch of the Diocese of Dallas arrived at the hospital a short while later, he praised Mother Regina’s decisions and Mother Ambrose’s quick work to organize a response to the catastrophe.

  The formalities of opening the hospital, of course, were secondary to focusing all immediate attention on helping victims of the school explosion, Lynch said. He instructed the sisters to cancel the banquet and ribbon-cutting festivities planned for Friday. Doctors who already had arrived from out of town to participate in the activities would be needed instead to administer aid. The only official item left on Friday’s schedule was a service for Lynch to ask God’s blessings on the new facility.

  “The hospital has already been dedicated by the blood of children,” the bishop said.2

  Reverend Robert Jackson was helping identify bodies at a funeral home in Overton when he heard a whimper from among those who were believed to be dead. He discovered the sound came from Marie Beard, who was critically injured but clinging to life. Jackson carried the little girl from the funeral home and put her in the backseat of his car. He took Marie to a makeshift hospital at the Rusk Hotel in Overton, where the only space available for another injured child was on the hotel’s screened-in porch.3

  One of her uncles found Marie at the hotel Thursday evening, and her parents arrived at her bedside about 11 p.m. Their daughter was still unconscious, but she was expected to survive.

  Laverne Thompson had put his brother, Bill, in the backseat of the family car and driven him to the Henderson Hospital. When they arrived downtown, several blocks from the hospital, one of the dry-rotted tires blew with a loud pop. Laverne pulled over, jumped out, and hoisted Bill from the seat.

  Bill said he was okay to walk, but Laverne wouldn’t let him. He carried his brother across the street toward a taxi stand on the corner.

  “He was in the explosion,” Laverne told a driver. “Get us to the hospital.”

  Laverne stayed right at his side when attendants put Bill on a stretcher and carted him to a hospital room with a single bed. A
few minutes later, they returned and set up a cot. Bill was moved from the bed to the cot, so the bed could be used for a boy with injuries that were much worse. Bill felt totally exhausted, as though he hadn’t rested or slept for days. Laverne kept him awake, holding his hand and talking to him, until a doctor came to the room and checked out the boy’s head injury. His scalp was cut and needed stitching, but he hadn’t suffered a concussion.

  Bill slept for a while, and when he opened his eyes again, his father and sisters were in the room. Alvin Thompson smiled at his son and patted his arm. When Bill awoke again, his mother was with him, inspecting his head where the doctor had stitched the cut and bathing his neck and arms with a damp sponge. A nurse came by and gave Bill a tetanus shot.

  When he awoke later, it was night outside the hospital window. Bill recognized the boy in the room with him, Arliss Ray Middleton, a senior. Arliss wasn’t awake. He seemed to be having great trouble breathing. Mrs. Middleton and Arliss’s sister were on one side of the bed. His father was on the other.

  Bill could hear Mrs. Middleton praying, out loud, asking God for a miracle. Arliss’s sister was crying. Mr. Middleton bowed his head and clenched his face in the fist of one hand. Arliss died later in the night.

  Carolyn Jones waited in a car outside the American Legion Hall in Overton. Her mother and stepfather were inside, searching for Helen—Carolyn’s sister—and Paul, their mother’s youngest brother. It was nearly 9 p.m. when they found Paul Greer. “He lay on the floor in a line with the other children as though he had simply lain down for an afternoon nap,” Carolyn said, recalling her mother’s description of the boy who wanted to become a doctor. The hall’s skating rink was being used as a temporary morgue.

  “Finding Helen took longer,” Carolyn wrote in a memoir of that day. “Ervin had been sleeping when she left for school in the morning, and could not picture the new spring dress she had worn. Mother, at the morgue, unable to speak, kept tracing with her fingernail on the car’s upholstery the pattern of the pink and lavender print she had sewn.