Gone at 3-17

by David M. Brown

  All the oil companies in the region had dispatched crews straight from the oil fields to the disaster site. Crews from other lines of work also hurried to join the rescue mission.

  “We dug out rocks until our hands were bleeding. We had women out there digging, too. It wasn’t just us men,” recalled A. L. Green, who had worked all day clearing a right-of-way for a power line near Texarkana before he, his father, and his uncle heard about the explosion and rushed to New London. Up until then, Green had seen people hurt in car wrecks, but he’d never seen the results of a violent death.

  Although rumors had spread that many children were trapped alive in the debris, Green, who was seventeen years old at the time, remembered finding only the dead. “You had a bunch of little ole kids laying out there. You’d dig one out and couldn’t find the other part of him. I toted out arms. I toted out heads,” Green said. “I’ve been trying to get it off my mind all my life and I ain’t got it off yet.”

  Scattered among the thousands of roughnecks were men from all walks of life, such as Harold Emerson, a violin teacher from Dallas. Emerson, thirty-eight, had children of his own about the same age as those he was helping remove from the ruins. Early in his career he’d worked as an undertaker’s assistant to supplement his earnings as a musician, but nothing in life had prepared him emotionally for this kind of carnage. No matter, he tossed off his suit coat, loosened his tie, and joined the peach-basket brigade.

  All afternoon and into the evening, Mrs. W. H. Phillips desperately waited for word about her three children—she hoped for news that they had all survived by some miracle. Two of them, Virgil, twelve, and Camilla, ten, were in classes at the time of the explosion. Four-year-old James begged to go meet Virgil at the end of his class. Mrs. Phillips stopped for a moment at a store near the school. James, who had permission to walk home with Virgil, darted into the building. All three children were missing.

  Mrs. Phillips’s husband had been in a Shreveport hospital recovering from injuries he suffered in a recent car wreck, but W. H. Phillips was able to leave the hospital and be with his wife when they heard the news, piecemeal, that all their children were dead.8 When she heard, Mrs. Phillips collapsed and had to be taken to a hospital.

  An element of the blast that confounded veterans of many explosions in the oil field was that “while the building was shattered from the ground up, leaving no trace of the concrete basement floor, there was no hole in the ground,” the Dallas Times-Herald reported.

  “Workers... worked with their feet on the sandy clay... literally swept clean of the original foundation. Walls two feet thick at the ground line were sheared off as though with giant scissors,” the newspaper said.

  American Red Cross headquarters in St. Louis dispatched regional director Albert Evans to take charge of relief work. Evans left immediately with a crew of Red Cross workers for New London.

  “Already on the field and laboring prodigiously were scores of volunteer doctors and nurses from all parts of the Southwest,” the Dallas Times-Herald reported. “Despite their efforts, gravely wounded children, many... suffering from concussions and torn limbs, lay for hours without medical aid.”

  “Bricks, steel and the bodies of scores of children shot skyward,” the story said. “All landed in a twisted heap. Acetylene torches cut into the pretzel-like steel girders in all parts of the wrecked building.”9

  Bill Rives stopped to speak with a rescue worker taking a break near a table set up by the Salvation Army. The man was chewing on a sandwich and taking sips from a steaming cup of coffee. “This is some story, ain’t it mister,” the man said.

  Rives nodded and gazed across the debris field. He ended his next dispatch with a description of what he witnessed: men carrying the corpse of a child toward the body pile. “Some story. Yes,” he wrote.10

  Jan Isbell Fortune, a Henderson Daily News reporter, described clusters of women at the scene who “stood and stared straight ahead, unseeingly.” The women had been standing there for many hours. Their faces sagged with exhaustion and fear glimmered in their eyes. Their dresses were soaked, torn, and dirty.

  Fortune saw a small boy in blue overalls and boots. “Jerry’s in there,” he said, rubbing his red eyes with the back of his hand. “That’s his mama back there and she thought maybe he’d get out alive like Bobby Johnson did. But my dad—he’s working over yonder on that oil truck—he says Jerry’s nowhere any more except in little bits, maybe. We always played fire engine after school, Jerry and me, and his mom, she’d make us sugar cookies to eat, after we put out the fire.

  “There’s nobody to play with,” the boy said. “It’s going to be awful lonesome in London now.”

  Fortune moved on, spotting an open history textbook on the ground, with a notation: “Here—Friday.”

  “A half-eaten sandwich, soggy, in oiled paper, was pressed into the mud,” Fortune observed. “A rain-soaked sheet of loose-leaf paper was scrawled with part of a lesson, ‘Texas is bounded on the north—’”

  The reporter built up courage to “venture a question to one slight, drenched figure who had been standing there an hour, unmoving.” This was the woman the boy had pointed to as Jerry’s mama.

  “Her yellow curly hair was disheveled and she wore a house dress and an apron, as if she had been in the midst of some simple, homey task when the roar of the crumpling building first came to her ears that flateful afternoon,” Fortune wrote. “She was a young woman—not 30—yet her posture and manner gave one the feeling of old age. When she did not show by a flicker of an eyelash or twitch of a feature that she heard my voice, I ventured to touch her hunched shoulder gently and repeat my query. And slowly, like a sleep walker, she turned toward me a face that was a mask, expressionless, but with the most terrible eyes. Those eyes weren’t seeing me at all.”11

  Typesetters at the Henderson Daily News worked late into the evening preparing general descriptions of some of the yet unidentified dead children. The list was stark:

  Boy 12–14, dark brown hair.

  Girl, 15, pink and green print dress, red socks, brown hair.

  Girl, 11, blonde, small diamond rings on left hand, has a red stone set in yellow gold on right hand.

  Girl, 16, brown hair, purple crepe dress with pink slip.

  Girl, 13, green socks, print dress has a green carriage design with a man and woman in carriage, has a red and green check too.

  Girl, 15, brown hair, blue waist on dress, light and dark blue and white plaid skirt, blue socks, tan shoes.

  Girl, 11, medium brown hair, green and pink plaid dress.

  Girl, 14, dark brown hair, tan waist on blue slacks, blue collars and buttons, red sweater.

  Girl, brown print, white polka dot waist, brown skirt.

  Girl, 11, red hair, dress white waist, brown flower and brown stripes, light and dark tan socks.

  Girl, 12, dark brown hair, blue print dress with yellow, blue, and red flowers.12

  At the temporary morgue in Overton, a man stood gazing down at the body of a boy.

  “This may be him,” he said finally. “No, the feet don’t look like him.”13

  In Tyler, a man stared at the body of a girl with many broken bones, the skin blue and cut all over. He fixed his eyes on the disfigured face. After a long while, he said, “I can tell by her teeth.”

  An attendant drew back the lips. The man bowed his head and squeezed his eyes shut, tears trickling down his cheeks.

  “Yes. That’s Mary.”14

  At one of the other temporary morgues, three bodies remained unidentified.

  “There is not a mole or scar or mark,” a nurse told a doctor. “There is only a ring on this finger.”

  “I think that will be enough,” he said, telling her to put the clue out on a radio broadcast.15

  Ted Hudson held tightly to the radio microphone and read through a stack of notices somebody had handed him: offers of help and condolences pouring in from all parts of the nation and telegraphs from people in foreign lands; lo
cations of hospitals and clinics where injured children were taken; directions to places where undertakers were needed; and personal notes from worried parents. He read one from the neighbor of a family in New London whose children were missing. The father was out searching for them. The mother was waiting at home, just in case they showed up there. She was in great distress, the note said.

  “Could someone please go to the house and sit with her for a while,” Hudson said. He read directions to the house.

  Henry McLemore and his United Press colleagues had landed at the Tyler airport and were en route to the disaster scene by car. The car’s radio was tuned to Hudson’s broadcast.

  “Take me to that house,” McLemore told the driver.16

  Carroll “Boxhead” Evans knocked gently on the door of his next-door neighbor’s home. A light was on inside Lemmie and Mary Butler’s house, but nobody answered Evans’s knock. He opened the door slightly and called out for Mary. She didn’t answer. Evans stepped inside and looked around.

  “Mary,” he called again.

  Neither Carroll Evans nor his wife, Mildred, had seen Mary Butler since the explosion. They didn’t know whether Mary had learned yet about Lemmie being killed, although they felt somebody would have gotten word to her by now. Carroll ventured farther into the little house. Nobody was in the kitchen or the bedroom. Evans decided that Mary Butler must be at a friend’s house or possibly at her church.

  He took Lemmie Butler’s watch from his pocket and placed it in the center of the small desk in the living room—Lemmie’s desk.

  Evans felt certain Mary would see it there as soon as she returned home. He hoped that in some way—even some small way—she would find comfort in it.17

  Joe Davidson had helped remove many children, dead and alive, from the rubble, but he had heard nothing about three of his own: Helen, Anna Laura, and Joe Wheeler Jr. The son, whom they called by his middle name, had begun to take on his dad’s rugged good looks. Of late, he’d grown taller and lost some of the baby flat that made him look pudgy in pictures that had been taken of him last summer. He’d never be slim but likely would grow to have his father’s strong build. He’d already inherited his father’s dark hair. Wheeler admired the man and wanted to follow his advice and go to the U.S. Naval Academy. Now in the ninth grade, he had become one of the most popular boys on the campus. His classmates elected him freshman vice president. Girls were noticing him. In a recent article about social life at New London High School, Wheeler was singled out as having the “best eyes” of any boy.18 His younger sister, Marilla, might have poked fun at him about it, but the attention excited Wheeler.

  Marilla had been taken away to a hospital in critical condition. Joe Davidson didn’t know which hospital; he’d received only bits and pieces of information about her. So he dug. The roughneck’s face was caked with grime and streaked with sweat and tears. His hands were cut and bleeding.

  Reporters found out that Davidson might have lost all four of his children. One of his buddies had also passed along another tantalizing bit of information: the stocky roughneck with curly black hair, tinged with gray at his sideburns, was a decorated veteran of the world war. The reporters closed in, circling Davidson, and carefully choosing their questions, trying to be sensitive to the man’s grief, yet knowing there was no other way to ask some questions but directly, in a respectful tone of voice.

  Davidson stopped what he was doing. He felt relieved to talk about it for a moment.

  “Were you in the war?” somebody asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “I was a Navy aviator, and I was shot down two times, but this is the worst I’ve ever seen.”19

  Davidson wiped his face on the sleeve of his khaki shirt and turned back to the job at hand. The reporters scrambled away across the ruins, hurrying to get Davidson’s searing quote into their next cycle of withering reports.

  Joe Davidson worked on until a friend tapped him gently on the shoulder. “You need to break off and go to the morgue. I think we’ve found the children,” the neighbor told him.

  Lightning flashed across the sky, and thunder rolled off in the night. The storms weathermen had predicted for two days were finally drifting toward New London. According to an ancient folk saying in the South, when it storms on the night of a death, a soul is entering heaven. A big storm on this night could only mean that God was preparing for a chorus of new angels, the old people said.

  Graften Ferguson was digging graves when the storm hit. It began raining so hard that the shovel kept slipping from his hands. He was tired by this time and wanted to go home, but he kept digging in the slippery mud. The sides of the graves became so waterlogged they started caving in, dumping piles of mud back inside the holes. Graften and others started lining the graves with the wooden forms the carpenters had built earlier. The pine braces acted like a vault to keep mud from collapsing into the graves. The ground was so slippery the men were constantly falling down, and they were covered from head to toe in mud.

  Men digging graves at Pleasant Hill Cemetery heard the scream of another siren around midnight and saw the flashing beacon of an ambulance floating across the darkness like the raw red eye of a storybook phantom, visible through a gap in the pine trees before it vanished.

  Sam Bunting, eighteen, lay unconscious in the back of the ambulance. When workers dug him out of the debris, some thought at first he was just another victim for the body pile, but then somebody found a pulse in Sam’s wrist. The only chance to save him, one man said, was putting him on a fast ambulance heading to the new Mother Frances Hospital in Tyler. “I doubt he will survive the trip,” another man said.20

  Shortly before rescue workers located Sam, they had found his sister Naoma under a different pile of rubble. She had a faint pulse but died before the ambulance had made it a hundred yards from the disaster site.21

  “Mother Frances is this boy’s only hope,” a man said grimly.

  The ambulance tore away as fast as the driver could go while weaving in and out of clogs of cars and maneuvering around National Guard barricades. A nurse kneeled in the back next to the gurney where Sam Bunting was as still as a wax figure. Now and again the nurse heard—or thought she heard—a low groan from deep in his throat. She held an oxygen breathing mask to his mouth and nose with one hand and used her other hand to clean blood and brick dust and mud from his wounds.

  Once the ambulance reached the Tyler Highway and began the journey west, the driver pushed the accelerator to the floorboard. National Guard soldiers in army green gear and trucks were stationed all along the highway to keep it open for emergency and police vehicles only. The driver had lost count of how many trips he’d made between New London and various hospitals since late afternoon, but he knew he’d put many miles on the ambulance with runs that probably averaged eighty miles per hour on open roads.

  As he was nearing the halfway point between New London and Tyler, the driver smelled smoke. An indicator gauge in the dash panel warned that the motor was exceedingly overheated. A few seconds later, flames shot out from beneath the hood and swept back over the windshield. By the time the driver brought the vehicle to a stop on the side of the road, the front end of the ambulance was engulfed in fire. He jumped out and helped the nurse pull Sam Bunting out of the vehicle as the flames flashed into the passenger compartment, burning the nurse’s hands. Men at the side of the road who had seen the ambulance catch on fire were running back and forth from a ditch flowing with water from the earlier rains. Using buckets and cans, their hats and their hands, they finally showered enough water on the ambulance to douse the fire. But the vehicle obviously was out of service for now.

  It is unknown what kind of vehicle was used to transport Bunting the rest of the way to Tyler. More than likely, a Texas Highway Patrol car pulled up to the site of the ambulance fire, and officers hoisted the injured boy onto the backseat and zoomed off toward Tyler even before the bucket brigade had extinguished the fire.

  When the vehicle reached the emergency
entrance at Mother Frances, Bunting was still unconscious, but his heart was beating. None of the flames leaping into the back of the ambulance had touched the boy. The nurse with burned hands and the ambulance driver helped convey Sam from the car to hospital attendants ready with a gurney to whisk him on to the hospital’s emergency room.

  Henry McLemore located the home of the two missing children. The mother was waiting by herself for some word. McLemore interviewed her while she waited. Sometimes they both fell silent and sat without speaking at all. McLemore originally was scheduled to cover a boxing match on this day, but the story he was on was immensely bigger than any sporting event. He had covered grief before, but never had he sat still in somebody’s tiny parlor, his legs crossed, staring such grief in the face.22

  Chesley Shaw and his son Charles, the oldest of the Shaw children, finally located Sambo’s remains under a sheet at one of the makeshift morgues in Overton. They identified him by his wallet at 1:30 a.m. Chesley Shaw was trembling so much that several friends had to help hold him up as he left the morgue. Charles then drove his father home.

  The moment they came through the door, Leila Shaw knew by the look on their faces that her husband and son were bringing to her the worst possible news—confirmation that her baby was gone. Hazel helped her mother to a couch in the parlor of the superintendent’s cottage. Her father and Charles took seats nearby, and the family sat quietly for a while, occasionally sharing memories of happier times when Sambo was a little boy growing up in Minden. When they fell silent, the only sound in the room was the rhythmic tick-tock of the parlor clock.

  Hazel worried about her father’s health. His face was haggard and pale. A thin crack ran across one of the lenses in his spectacles, and he was bandaged where flying debris cut his forehead and cheek.

  He’d survived losing another school once years ago, but that experience was nothing compared with this. His school in Minden had somehow caught fire one Friday evening and burned to the ground, but nobody was killed or even injured in the blaze. And nobody blamed Chesley Shaw, the headmaster. Hazel privately feared that some of the rougher residents of New London would wake tomorrow with blood in their eyes and seek misplaced revenge against her father.