Gone at 3-17

by David M. Brown

  Joe Davidson gazed down at the body of each child long enough to know for certain it was one of his. He kept a grip on his emotions, a response he had learned in battle, but this was the toughest hurt he’d ever known. After looking at his three children laid out at a funeral home in Overton, he turned away and faced a cluster of reporters who had flocked behind him, through the rain, from the ruins of the school to the undertaker’s back room. His wife, Mary, was at home, inconsolable, locked within a living nightmare. Joe needed to get home and deal with whatever would come next, but first he would take a moment to talk out loud about this—somehow speak words. He was trained as a man of action, and act he must.

  A reporter asked for the names and ages of the children he had just identified. Davidson sucked in a deep breath. “Anna Laura, eleven. Helen, thirteen. Joe Wheeler, fifteen. My daughter Marilla, fourteen, is in a Tyler hospital. She’s in critical condition, I’m told.”

  Davidson sorted his thoughts. “I dreamed last night that Dewey Deer, my derrick man, fell out of the top of the derrick and was killed,” he said. “I could see it just as plain as ever.”23

  The roughneck told the reporters he had tried to shrug the dream off as an overactive imagination at work on his subconscious mind, but now he didn’t know what to think. When he started telling members of his crew about it, early that morning before the breakfast break, the men had warned him that it was an ill omen. He went ahead and told the dream anyway, Davidson said with a helpless shrug.

  “I was a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy aviation service during the world war, but I never saw anything like this,” Davidson said. “I was shot down in my plane twice, and I saw many a dog fight. I saw several of my buddies shot down as we were escaping from a German prison camp, but nothing like this.”

  Davidson said he received the Navy Cross and the Croix de Guerre, a highly esteemed French medal, for distinguished service in the war, yet he still wasn’t prepared to face the deaths of his own children. He had hoped to send Wheeler to Annapolis after high school.

  “Boy, it’s tough,” said Davidson, his voice husky with emotion. He felt he needed to say something more. A lump caught in his throat, and he turned away.

  24

  Dawn, March 19

  By dawn the rain clouds had cleared away from East Texas. The sun rose as if it were a normal Friday. Legions of birds, anticipating the spring, chirped and sang in trees and bushes all across the region. The countryside looked as fresh and clean as ever after being swept by the rainstorms.

  Still the site of the disaster was a jumbled, muddy mess, although much of the debris had been removed during the long night. The mission was being called a rescue operation, but the workers had carted away only bodies for hours. Finally, they found an adult, a teacher, still breathing near the bottom of the heap. She died in an ambulance just minutes later.

  Tyler Courier-Times reporter Jimmie Donahue was exhausted. Donahue had been assigned to spend the night traveling across the region between the makeshift morgues and funeral homes where the bodies were being taken. A misty rain fell most of the journey. The odyssey through hell began about 3 a.m. Friday, when Jimmie climbed the steps to the second floor of a grocery store in Arp, where clusters of parents were moving among the remains of nine unidentified children. At Crim Funeral Home in Henderson, Donahue watched a dozen volunteer embalmers at work on about fifty bodies. Workers were unloading forty coffins from a truck parked outside. The reporter drove to the blast site in a downpour of rain. Near dawn, as the rain was turning to drizzle, Jimmie saw a volunteer remove a head from the debris. It was the “cutest little girl,” Donahue noted.1

  Workers located a hand about twenty yards away, apparently the same child’s, but found nothing more of her body. At Pearson Funeral Home in Overton about forty embalmers were at work in rooms where the reporter counted at least a hundred dead. More bodies were in a garage behind the funeral home. Donahue counted fifty bodies at the American Legion Hall in Overton. Thirty-five in Kilgore, eleven in Jacksonville, and fourteen in Longview. At the funeral home in Longview, a handsome man wearing a shamrock on his jacket was pleading with everyone he met to help him locate his daughter. She had blond hair, he said. Her red-headed twin sister was already identified as dead in Overton.

  Stumbling through the wreckage, one reporter spotted a steel radiator with “its ribs smashed and twisted as though it had been pounded with a two-ton pile driver.” The mass of debris hinted at the ferociousness of the explosion. “A textbook, blown straight up, went completely through one of the remaining ceilings, through the wood base of the roof and stopped only when half of it was protruding through the roof. In one classroom, a pair of scissors such as children use in kindergarten to cut paper dolls was blown with such force that the blades went into the wall two inches.”2

  Houston Post reporter Pat McNealy Barnes saw a woman standing in the rain staring at the wreckage. She was holding a scuffed brown oxford shoe.

  “Is that your child’s shoe?” Barnes said.

  “Maxine,” she said. “They haven’t found Maxine yet.”

  “What’s your name?”

  The woman didn’t answer. She just kept staring at the wreckage.3

  Ted Hudson’s eyes were bloodshot and gritty after the sleepless night and his voice at times grew hoarse, but he kept talking into the microphone with only rare pauses. The networks patched into his broadcast were taking fewer station breaks than usual. They were staying glued to Hudson’s description of the rescue operation.

  Frequently, he read announcements, such as this one from Capt. Walter Elliott, head of the Tyler office of the Texas Highway Patrol, urging sightseers to stay away from the stricken area: “The road past the London school building, and all roads entering it will be blocked Friday by Texas highway patrolmen. All persons are requested not to attempt to enter the premises of the explosion unless they have business of a very urgent nature. Otherwise, they will not be permitted to go through.”

  Millions of people were listening. One man in a little Texas town, after listening to disaster coverage nonstop for hours, apparently went berserk. The sheriff’s office was notified that the man was holding a gun on his family, blabbering about the school explosion, and threatening to shoot his wife and children and then turn the gun on himself. A sheriff’s deputy killed him, “in self-defense,” a news story said, with a single shot.4

  Doctors at Mother Frances Hospital upgraded Marilla Davidson’s condition, saying she was no longer at risk of dying from her injuries.

  Sam Bunting was now expected to live, although his skull was fractured in three places and his spine was crushed. It was decided that the boy would not be told about his sister Naoma’s death until his condition improved.

  Dr. D’Errico, the brain surgeon from Dallas, was credited with saving the lives of several children.

  Maxine Maddry took a turn for the worse, making her condition grave. She would be lucky to survive a day, one doctor said.

  Walter Freeman made it through the night, and his condition stabilized. Walter’s father and mother, in hushed voices, discussed whether to tell him that one of his sisters was dead. They decided it was best to wait; he’d been through enough for now.

  Surgeons worked feverously setting and resetting Elbert Box’s fractured leg. A serious infection had set in while Elbert was tangled in the debris. A doctor said the leg would have to be amputated if the infection continued to rage.

  The little girl whose face was badly damaged was still unconscious. Two families waiting at the hospital now thought the child belonged to them.

  Eddie Herman Gauthreaux’s mother sat on one side of her comatose boy, and his father, E. J. Gauthreaux, sat on the other. Esterlene Gauthreaux went to the school soon after the explosion. She finally found Eddie among other injured children in the basement of the Overton Baptist Church. A car salesman drove them to Mother Frances Hospital in Tyler, but the brain surgeon could do nothing to help save the gravely injured nine-year-old
. His mother now could only hold his hand, hoping her touch somehow brought him comfort. The ride from Overton to Tyler kept flashing through her thoughts. All the way out of Overton people were standing near the road, offering them blankets.5

  Elsie Jordan’s mother came to her side and took her hand. “Jimmie is awake,” her mother said. Elsie sat up in bed. A bandage covered most of her head, but much of her face was visible. The bandage angled down across her damaged eye. “Is she okay? Is she really, really okay?”

  “We think so. She thought you were dead and wants us to bring you over to her hospital so she can touch you and know that you are alive.”

  “Can I go?” Elsie asked excitedly.

  “The nurses are arranging to have you taken to the clinic, for just a few minutes. But you must be still as possible and no cutting up.”

  Elsie smiled for the first time since the explosion.

  A few minutes later, hospital attendants put Elsie on a rolling bed, took her out to an ambulance, and drove her the short distance to Bryant Clinic. They let her sit in a wheelchair on the ride in and down the hall to Jimmie’s room.

  Jimmie was lying flat on the bed, staring at the ceiling. A swath of bandage swept down over her eye.

  “Guess who?” Elsie said.

  Jimmie looked at her. “Elsie, is that you?”

  “It’s me.”

  Before anybody had a chance to stop her, Jimmie bounded out of the bed and tottered on bare feet across the room. Elsie stood up. The sisters in hospital gowns with almost identical bandages covering their heads embraced in the middle of the room, hugged, and patted each other’s backs.

  “I just knew you were dead,” Jimmie said.

  “It’s me—no ghost.”

  Tears trickled down their faces.

  “I love you, Jimmie,” Elsie said.

  “I love you too, Elsie,” Jimmie said.

  The storm clouds had swept on to other regions, and in the woods around the campus a few morning birds sang in the dripping trees. As the sun rose, casting vague light across the scene of wreckage and chaos from the night before, a mother and father sat on the ground next to the body of their son. They were silent and motionless. A reporter walking by them left them alone.

  Nearby, a pair of oil-field workers held gently onto the arms of a mother, soaked and bedraggled from the downpour. The men were trying to convince her to go home, away from the desolate scene.

  “I can’t go away,” she said. “I can’t! My baby may be alive in there and calling for me.”6

  After a while, the men, both holding her, gradually and gently escorted the woman across an area where the ankle-deep mud was crisscrossed with the tracks of trucks and oil-field equipment.

  25

  Hard News

  Associated Press Dallas manager Fred Dye chided Rives and McKnight during a long-distance call: “The body count from various news sources sounded like wild estimates; instead of reporting estimates, start counting bodies!” McKnight and Rives knew Dye wouldn’t listen to excuses or, for that matter, legitimate reasons for the count being so fuzzy. When the reporters started explaining bodies and parts of bodies had been taken to makeshift morgues for many miles around, Dye broke in with an order to go to the place with the most bodies and count them, one by one. The boss told them to divide up and visit as many morgues as possible, using stringers and other trustworthy volunteers to help with the count. The crucial facts in this story are bodies under sheets, Dye said.

  McKnight and Rives set out first for the American Legion Hall in Overton. Long lines of parents were waiting to enter the building to search for children missing since the explosion. The men in charge were letting them inside just a few at a time, to keep from being overwhelmed by a mass of grieving family members turning the place upside down.

  McKnight bypassed the lines, found a side door, and ducked inside. The place was dimly lighted. It was a large open room scattered with mattresses on the floor and a few short tables where several men in white lab jackets worked. Fumes in the room blinded McKnight instantly, making him drop to his knees to find cleaner air. The reporter started crawling from body to body. He noticed probably a dozen embalmers and assistants in white jackets scattered around the room. A quick yet primitive method of preserving the bodies was being used.

  “They had galvanized buckets, like garden buckets, with a formaldehyde solution in them, and brushes sort of like large paint brushes, and they’d dip into that solution and just kind of swish it on those sheets [covering bodies],” McKnight recalled. “You could not identify any of those children. They were just terribly mutilated. I got on my knees and crawled around those lines because the formaldehyde solution was just blinding, and I got down about half of the first row and one of the guys in charge came over to me and wanted to know who I was and he said, ‘Well, we have work for you.’”

  The reporter realized that he was being commandeered for another stint of disaster work and that it would do no good to protest. McKnight was assigned a job of retrieving fresh buckets of formaldehyde from a place in another part of the hall, lugging them back into the main room, and distributing the buckets among the undertakers. “About every two or three minutes, they’d take me to the door and stick my head out, and stick theirs out, too, so we could restore our eyesight. Tears were streaming down our faces and we just couldn’t see.”

  While McKnight was caught up with his bucket work, he had the freedom to roam about the room and count bodies. It was a gruesome and tedious process. Toward sunrise, the AP could report a more accurate death count than the initial estimates by the Red Cross and Texas Rangers. The total dead would not reach five hundred—maybe not even four hundred. It began to look as though the total would be higher than three hundred but fewer than four hundred, McKnight and other reporters realized.

  The embalmers, including J. Raymond Meissner and C. B. McBride from Shannon Funeral Homes in Fort Worth, worked on sawhorses with one-inch-by-ten-inch planks thrown across them. “There was no drainage and bed sheets were thrown down on the floor to partially absorb the great amount of blood,” Meissner recalled. “Many bodies were decapitated or crushed beyond resemblance of a human face. I made efforts in many cases to hurriedly rebuild features, but in most instances it helped but little.”

  Meissner and McBride had started for the disaster by car around 6 p.m., after catching one of Ted Hudson’s radio appeals for undertakers needed at the catastrophe site. At first, they knew only that the disaster was somewhere in East Texas; later they heard Hudson on the car radio giving directions to the New London school in Rusk County.

  “I’ve been there,” Meissner told McBride. “I know the way. Last summer I went to New London to visit my very close friend, L. R. Butler.” Meissner wouldn’t learn for days that Lemmie Butler was killed instantly when the school exploded.

  When McBride and Meissner reached Tyler, every road leading to the east was blocked with official barricades or hopelessly clogged with massive traffic jams that would take hours to untangle. Highway patrol officers on motorcycles offered to escort the embalmers to the makeshift morgue in Overton. They arrived shortly before 11 p.m. The morticians unloaded embalming equipment and hurried inside to set up their stations.

  “The scene in this American Legion Hall and skating rink was beyond description,” said Meissner, who was then twenty-six. “The enormity of the task was evident when you realized that more than two hundred bodies passed through the hall during the next eighteen hours.”

  Meissner embalmed twenty-five children, and other licensed morticians around him worked at the same brisk pace. Funeral homes, relatives, and friends were taking the bodies away soon after they were identified.

  “I worked so hard and fast, I scarcely knew what was going on around me,” Meissner said. “I do remember there was almost no outward emotion, even when a mother recognized the body of her child. People seemed dazed, dry-eyed and submissive.”

  “Yes, that’s her,” a man said. And then
the man and his wife passed quietly out of the building, holding the body of their child, without saying another word, Meissner recalled.

  “Many parents identified a son or daughter without even seeing the body,” he added. “When we embalmed a body we stacked the clothing on top of a sheet that covered the lifeless form, and parents seeing familiar articles of wearing apparel would at once recognize it. I worked all night and part of the next day without rest until the bodies were all embalmed.

  “It was pitiful how the people had to make identification. Those with children missing had to make all the rounds.”

  Meissner got word to officials at Shannon Funeral Homes that funeral coaches in East Texas were far too scarce to handle the disaster’s aftermath. A pair of Shannon hearses left Fort Worth early Friday morning and headed toward East Texas.1

  McKnight and Rives were taking turns helping the embalmers and counting bodies. “I counted for a while and the last time they let me go to the door for air, I took off,” McKnight said.

  While his partner set out to find a fresh story angle for afternoon newspapers, Rives stayed at the morgue to continue the body count. In a short while, he heard an argument break out between one of the roughneck supervisors and a woman reporter. In notes he made of the incident, Rives didn’t identify the woman, but his description of her nicely fit Sarah Mc-Clendon, the Tyler reporter who’d been helping McKnight and Rives cut through local red tape.

  The woman was demanding that people in charge of the morgue provide the news media with the names of the dead—those with positive IDs. She explained that the public has a right to know such information as soon as possible after a disaster. The man in charge, who apparently had lost a child himself, was in no mood to discuss the finer points of journalistic rules. The argument grew heated and loud, and the man threatened to throw the reporter out of the building.