Gone at 3-17

by David M. Brown

  “I finally fell asleep in the backseat, and when I woke, the grown-ups were talking in low voices outside the car. I heard the word ‘mangled.’ I understood that Helen had been found.”

  Ervin took Carolyn and her mother home, and then he went back to work the rest of the night at the disaster site.

  “Mother and I lay on the double bed not touching, hearing the sirens of the ambulances, louder as they approached, and then fading into the distance as they raced toward Henderson or Tyler,” Carolyn said. “Dogs barked and howled. I lay awake, thinking of the conversation outside the car, what they had seen inside the morgues. Finally I slept.”4

  When Felix McKnight was finally able to break out of the peach-basket brigade, he began a desperate search for an operable phone. He needed to phone in a story as soon as possible; he knew the bureau manager in Dallas and AP editors across the nation would be ready to pull their hair out if a story didn’t come soon. He didn’t have time even to sit down and scribble the story out in a notebook. Even so, much of it was written in his mind. He could easily dictate it, word for word, over the phone—if he only had a phone. During the search, McKnight continued to fill in gaps in the story.

  “I scrambled over brick, steelwork, tattered clothing, shoes, school-books, parts of bodies,” McKnight recalled. “I started talking to people. None would say immediately what I wanted to hear.”5

  A Texas Ranger captain estimated 450 deaths. McKnight looked for a second source to confirm that number. A school official told him the death toll could be more than six hundred. The reporter stopped inside a makeshift hospital on the school grounds and talked to injured students about the explosion—gathering details and quotes to flesh out the story.

  “It was time to get going. The nearest phone was a mile and a half away. I made it, clearing fences, gullies, weeds. In the oil field office sat the most determined woman I have ever known—a switchboard operator. Her phone lines were clogged. She would not listen to me.”6

  The woman said he might find a working phone in Overton, about four miles away. Frustrated, McKnight hurried back to the explosion scene, where he located Sarah McClendon, the Tyler-based reporter. McClendon told him she had a friend who worked at another oil-field office.

  They dashed away to the other office, where the operator let McKnight sneak into an executive’s office. He crouched in the dark, holding the phone cupped to his ear, as the operator put him through to the telephone company in Tyler. A woman answered.7

  “I need to call Dallas,” he told her.

  “There will be a delay of three hours on your call,” she said.

  McKnight pleaded with her to no avail.

  “Can I get through to Kansas City?”

  “No.”

  He asked her to place a call to the AP office in Chicago.

  “No.”

  “New York?”

  “No.”

  “What about Seattle, Los Angeles, or San Francisco?”

  “No.”

  McKnight came up with an ingenious plan he felt sure would get the operator’s attention. He asked her to call the AP bureau in London, England. He could dictate the story to London and have them phone it back to New York.

  “I guarantee you a thirty-minute call,” McKnight pledged.

  “I can’t give you any station,” the woman said.

  He tried a backup plan.

  “Give me the Western Union office in Tyler.”

  She put the call through, and a couple of rings later, a Western Union operator answered. Success at last, McKnight thought. He started dictating the story to a telegraph operator, with instructions to wire it to the AP office in Dallas. McKnight had dictated about seventy words when the phone connection snapped. The switchboard operator in the oil-field office had commandeered the line for an emergency call. McKnight stuck his pen in a shirt pocket and his notebook in a hip pocket; then he headed back into the night to find another way to file his story.

  At least the AP had seventy words—three tightly composed paragraphs, packing a wallop. It was a start.

  Medical services at Mother Frances Hospital shifted into high gear as dozens of explosion victims arrived in ambulance after ambulance. Crowds of curious pedestrians gathered on sidewalks near the hospital, straining to glimpse New London students being carted into the emergency entrance. Those close enough to see the children saw that many of them appeared unconscious and most were in bloodied clothes.

  The people of Tyler had been eagerly awaiting the opening of the new hospital designed to serve the needs of the rapidly growing region. Tyler’s metropolitan area had prospered from the oil boom and now had a population of more than fifty thousand. As the hospital neared completion over the past few weeks, people who worked downtown and many who visited Tyler to shop and go to restaurants had streamed by the construction site frequently to check the building’s progress and gawk at the long-awaited medical center. At first, many people in the largely Protestant area were amused by the sight of Catholic sisters in long black tunics and headpieces shaped like hoods, with wide white collars and wearing silver crosses suspended from black cords against their chests and rosary beads hung from woolen belts. They wore plain black shoes. Their only adornments were simple silver rings worn on their left hands, signifying their vows of perpetual faithfulness to Jesus Christ.

  The town had only one Catholic church and no parish schools. By now, though, the Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and members of other denominations had become accustomed to seeing the sisters and often nodded or waved at them when they appeared on a downtown sidewalk or street corner. Not everybody was happy that a Catholic group received the contract to operate the hospital instead of a Baptist organization that also made a pitch, but most residents were so pleased about and proud of the modern new hospital—at no cost to the taxpayers—that most of the grumbling about who would manage it had ceased.

  The first explosion victims arrived soon after the phone call asking for assistance. “Mother Regina was the first to open the door for them. Mother Ambrose directed locations to those conveying the victims,” according to an article printed in the order’s newsletter. “More wounded arrived, much blood streaming over them.”

  Mother Mary Regina and Mother Mary Ambrose had long experience working in hospitals, yet they were stunned by the sight of so many children with horrible, disfiguring injuries.

  “Parents seeking their children were everywhere but found it a difficult task since all the children were so badly hurt. Two families wanted to claim the same girl since the features and the birthmarks were almost identical, and since the child was unconscious, one could not be certain whose girl it was,” the article said. “It was questionable whether the little one would live since her skull was cracked and she underwent surgery twice. Another child was brought in without eyes. From the holes where the eyes were, parts of the brain were protruding. The latter lived only a few hours, never regaining consciousness.”

  Nuns returning from New London had viewed even more horrible scenes. Some of the victims were flattened as though their bodies were run through a press, they said.

  Bishop Lynch went from room to room to say comforting words to children who were conscious. He counseled distraught parents to find solace through faith in God. Religious differences between Catholics and Protestants became insignificant at the time of crisis, as the entire community focused on supporting the victims.

  “People, as if they fell out of clouds, gathered to offer their help,” the article said. “It was amazing to see such selfless interest and sacrifice. Doctors as far as Pittsburgh [Pennsylvania] called to ask if help was needed; Red Cross volunteers came; some airplanes came to transport the victims.

  “Nobody failed to recognize the sacrifices or self-giving of the people. They brought food, clothing, bedding, and even money for the parents of the victims. The telephone at Mother Frances Hospital rang endlessly with offers to supply medications and hospital instruments—free.


  “Such was the evening before the blessing of the hospital.... Possibly no hospital was publicized as was this hospital named for our Foundress. All afternoon, evening, and night, and the following day, the happenings at Mother Frances Hospital were told and retold. The public stated that no formal opening was needed. God’s Providence announced Mother Frances Hospital in a way not too pleasant, but a way in which people proved their love and concern for their neighbors just as Jesus taught them.”8

  Felix McKnight wasn’t the only newsman looking for creative ways to file his stories. With telephone communications in and out of New London jammed by thousands of calls and many lines restricted to emergency uses, all reporters at the scene were stymied with similar problems.

  Even local reporters, such as Sarah McClendon, had to improvise. Needing to return to Tyler in a hurry, McClendon climbed aboard an emergency vehicle loaded with injured children and heading for Mother Frances Hospital. This was shrewd. Not only did she get a fast, express ride back to her newsroom, where she could meet a deadline to get fresh material into an extra edition, she used the travel time to gather additional firsthand details from people in the truck and started composing a draft of the story.9Without good local contacts, it’s doubtful she would have been allowed to ride with some of the victims. Many people at the scene were incensed by reporters asking questions and photographers snapping pictures at such a time, when children lay dead and dying all around. Some became hostile. One husky roughneck, irritated by flashbulbs popping all around him, wrenched a camera from a photographer and hurled it across the rubble. The photographer grabbed a spare from his backpack and started shooting scenes in a different direction.

  McKnight trotted through the dark to his car, a couple of miles west of the disaster, and set out for Tyler across back roads he’d learned during his recent assignment to cover labor unrest in the oil field. He felt relatively sure he could use a phone line at the Tyler Courier-Times, an AP member newspaper. As a backup, he was planning, if necessary, to rent an airplane to fly his story to Dallas.

  At about the same time, a chartered plane was zooming toward Tyler, cutting across Tennessee and then Arkansas, with a load of reporters and photographers from New York, including Henry McLemore and other United Press staffers assigned to the catastrophe.

  Bill Rives scouted a huge crowd of onlookers just beyond where rescue workers were scouring the ruins, beneath glaring floodlights, for more dead and wounded. He spotted a group of teenagers clinging close together, some in tattered clothes, with several leaning their heads on their friends’ shoulders. He took them for New London students who had survived the explosion, and his detective work paid off with a good sidebar—the typically short stories adjacent feature articles that explore individual elements within the major story.

  Rives found an eighteen-year-old student named Martha Harris who was articulate and willing to tell her tale in extended detail. Instead of using her for one or two quotes, Rives took down her comments word for word so he could use them as a first-person account with her byline, written for the Associated Press.

  “I was in the home economics building, about sixty yards from the school, when I heard a terrible roar,” she told the reporter. “The earth shook and brick and glass came showering down. I looked out a window and saw my friends dying like flies. Kids were blown out through the top onto the roof. Some of them hung up there and others fell off two stories to the ground. I saw girls in my class jumping out of windows like they were deserting a burning ship.”

  Her sixteen-year-old brother, Milton Harris, jumped from a second-story window and received only a bruise on his knee. But all were not so lucky. Martha saw Evelyn Rainwater plunge into a first-floor window with such violence it nearly ripped the girl’s leg off.

  Martha Harris told Rives at least twenty-five of her friends were blown from the building, and their bodies were scattered near the home economics cottage. One part of the building caught fire and burned until men running with buckets of water put it out, she said. The men got the water from Alf Shaw’s hamburger stand.

  “The bodies of the kids were stacked up, after the explosion, just like you would stack up hot cakes,” Harris said. “I’ll never forget how I saw my friends’ bodies torn. Some of them were blown to bits and never will be found.”10

  Walter Cronkite also found a student who agreed the reporter could use his comments for a similar first-person account. The byline said the story was by Charlie Clair (as told to the United Press). The boy said he was standing beside his desk in his eighth-grade classroom, reading from a book, when the explosion ripped through the school.

  “Suddenly there was a dead silence then I heard a noise and was thrown up in the air. I saw other boys and girls thrown up in the air, too,” he said. “Some of them were screaming. Some of the others were knocked down. I saw a lot of arms and legs being thrown around.

  “Then I went unconscious. When I came to again, some man was standing over me, looking at me.... All around me were other children. Some of them were dead. Some of them were hurt. They were crying and screaming. People were running, nearly everybody hollering or screaming.”

  He realized he had been thrown some distance from the school, which now lay in ruins.

  “It was awful. It made me sick and I lost consciousness again.

  “When I came to again things were a little bit quieter but folks were still hollering. A lot of mothers and fathers were crying.

  “I was lucky. I wasn’t hurt much.”11

  Ted Hudson’s makeshift radio studio was set up on the back of a flatbed truck. Using a flashlight to read a message he’d just been handed, Hudson said into the radio microphone, “We’re trying to find the parents of a little boy at the doctor’s office in Arp. The boy is seriously injured and he is unconscious. He’s in khaki clothes. He had a little knife in his pocket that looked like it had been painted with fingernail polish.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Otis Wiley, friends of the Cox family, had been listening to the radio constantly since hearing of the explosion in hopes of learning the whereabouts of Perry Lee. When they heard Hudson’s description of the boy in Arp, they looked at each other sharply. They set out to find Mr. and Mrs. Cox.12

  Once he arrived at the newspaper offices in Tyler, Felix McKnight made arrangements for a local pilot to use his single-engine plane to ferry stories to Dallas, should that be necessary. Phone circuits in the Tyler area were just as overwhelmed as those around New London. McKnight plopped down at a typewriter and began pecking out a lead story for the Associated Press. A couple of minutes after he crafted a top for the story, the reporter’s fingers began to dance wildly on the keyboard as though he were a pianist playing the molto allegro section of a concerto.

  Sarah McClendon was at another desk in the newsroom. She had finished a front-page piece for the next extra edition—the newspaper’s third since learning of the explosion, scheduled to hit the streets around mid-night—and now she was working on a roundup story about Tyler residents providing medical assistance and doing other jobs at the disaster scene.

  Jim Donahue, publisher of the Tyler Courier-Times and Morning Telegraph, tapped McKnight on the shoulder. “Here,” said Donahue, who had been on the phone. “Here you are. Dallas.”

  McKnight was ecstatic. “For thirty minutes I pumped the story at rewrite man Dave Cheavens,” he recalled. “It was 8:30 p.m. Two hours to shake out one of the biggest stories of the year.”

  The opening line of McKnight’s first AP dispatch from the scene would become a classic epitaph for the disaster. “Today,” he wrote, “a generation died.”13

  Ted Hudson described for radio listeners much of everything he witnessed in the late afternoon and early evening. That’s all he could think of doing; he had no script to go by and most of the time he was alone at the microphone. Occasionally, a short station break gave him a chance to catch his breath. The networks cut in with national headlines and sports briefs, and then released the signal back to Hudson�
��s ongoing, eyewitness account of the New London school disaster. All regular network programming had been suspended since he had gone on the air shortly before sunset.

  Hudson was still under the impression that his broadcast was being heard only in a small area of East Texas, including Henderson and Rusk County, where he had many friends and neighbors. He imagined he was speaking directly to his friends and that image bolstered his confidence. Had he known that by 9:00 p.m. most stations across the nation had picked up the broadcast and that millions of Americans were listening to every word he said and each heartbreaking scene he described, Hudson might have been dumbstruck with stage fright, he later acknowledged.14

  Each time a person handed him a strip of paper with a message or additional plea for assistance, Hudson read it over the air. The place where he’d set up his makeshift mobile broadcast station was not well lighted, so he had a volunteer hold a flashlight for him when he needed to read something.

  He received a note that said First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, at an event in Denison, Texas, expressed sympathy for the victims. “Something must be done to guard against such calamities,” she said.15 The radio man read the note.

  Hudson took another note from somebody, held it under the flashlight, and read, “All men willing to volunteer for grave digging, please report to Room 106 at the Rusk Hotel.”

  He then read a list of morgues and funeral homes in fourteen towns where the bodies of explosion victims had been taken. Parents whose children were missing could visit those places and attempt to identify their remains, Hudson said. A lot of the dead were at the American Legion Hall in Overton, he said, but bodies also had been taken to Henderson, Arp, Wright City, Longview, Tyler, Jacksonville, Joinerville, Nacogdoches, Gilmer, Kilgore, Turnertown, and Gladewater in East Texas and to Shreveport in Louisiana.