Gone at 3-17

by David M. Brown

  “You heard testimony before you this morning regarding the arcing of a switch. All right, if this installation had been made explosive-proof, there would not have been any arcing of that switch. That is not hearsay. That is a statement of fact. What else is indicated is [the need for] a state building code, a state electrical law, a state exit code, a state boiler safety code, and all other general safety measures giving to governmental agencies the right, power and authority to make them behave without fear of God or anyone else. Now, I don’t want to be heroic about this thing, but I realize it is a matter of concern to many people. If that condition which was found within six miles of this place is typical, why, I think it is time to get busy. I don’t believe I have anything else to say.”

  A local superintendent spoke up from the audience. “I would like to know what he means by the arcing of a switch.”

  “Well, in opening a switch, if you will notice—”

  A photographer’s flashbulb snapped.

  “—there will be a flash. Just like that.”

  Coombes looked at the spent flashbulb and back at his witness.

  “Thank you very much, Mr. Hawley.”

  The Texas Inspection Bureau conducted a separate investigation immediately following the disaster. The bureau, an investigative body representing fire underwriters, issued a report nine days after the explosion. Like the military court of inquiry, the organization laid no specific blame on school officials.

  “No one individual was personally responsible,” concluded H. Oram Smith, the bureau manager and an expert on the safety of gas and its dangers. “It was the collective faults of average individuals, ignorant or indifferent to the need of precautionary measures, where they cannot, in their lack of knowledge, visualize a danger or hazard.”4

  The school board that had stood behind Chesley Shaw in the hours and days following the disaster reversed itself and asked for his resignation. Several members said, privately, it was in Shaw’s best interest to remove himself and his family from the spotlight, considering rumors of violence festering throughout the community.

  Shaw resigned. He later wrote this letter for publication in the local newspapers:

  I do not bear any resentment against those who demanded my removal. It must be remembered that they were under an intense emotional strain, and regardless of the findings of the court of inquiry, they felt someone must be held accountable. Because of my position, I was the target.

  New London is and shall always remain my home. My people and my wife’s people were reared in the community. Our ties of friendship date back to childhood. We could not be content anywhere else.5

  With visible rage and threats of violence spreading across the community, the Texas Rangers and Highway Patrol sent armed guards to stay with Shaw and other school officials who felt they might need protection.

  Nine-year-old Priscilla Kerns, who performed in the Mexican hat dance in the gym before the explosion, learned that some angry men with guns had congregated in front of her home and called out her father, J. R. Kerns, a member of the school board. He walked out into the yard, without a coat, and rolled his sleeves up to show bare arms. “I have no gun on me. I have no gun in the house,” Kerns said. “I’ve never kept guns in the house. I will be glad to speak with you men, but it will be without guns.”

  A short while later, a pair of Texas Rangers arrived at the house, riding horses. It was mainly a precautionary measure, officials said, to keep the situation from escalating. Oil-field workers had a reputation for settling disputes with their knuckles. Even before the roughnecks arrived, Henderson and Rusk County had experienced lynch-mob violence.

  Priscilla was excited to see the big horses. She watched them ride around the house, again and again, until it became too dark to see them anymore.

  28

  Lament

  She lay nameless and alone in a makeshift morgue in Overton. All the rest—those who had filled this morgue and all the others—had been claimed.

  Thousands had shuffled past her, most of them peering at the child’s disfigured face, seeking recognition and praying they wouldn’t find it. Jessie and Luna Emberling looked not at her face but at the girl’s feet. The night before the explosion, their ten-year-old daughter, Wanda, had had a party with her friends and pretended to be a grown-up, like the girls in high school. The girls had taken crayons, for lack of nail polish, and colored their toenails. Wanda chose red. This child’s nails were the pale blue of the cold skin beneath, and one toe had a scar unfamiliar to the Emberlings. The lost parents moved on, through the hospitals, morgues, and funeral homes of East Texas.1

  Three days after the explosion, someone finally suggested the child might be Dale May York, a ten-year-old, like Wanda. Dale May had missed several days of school because of an illness but had returned the day of the explosion.

  “Impossible,” said another. “Dale May has already been buried.”

  Word reached the Yorks, and although they had suffered through their daughter’s funeral, they returned. They saw the scar, where Dale May had clipped her toe with a garden hoe, and it was almost too much to bear.

  They exhumed the body they had buried. Jessie and Luna Emberling came, for there was nowhere else to go. They stood together and saw auburn grains of dirt, a miniature casket stained by the earth, and, inside, delicate toenails colored red. Luna Emberling, exhausted from three sleepless days and nights, was carried to and from the cemetery on a stretcher. Mr. and Mrs. York faced the heartbreak of a second funeral for Dale May.

  “Please, Lord, don’t let me faint,” Mrs. York murmured, repeating the prayer again and again as her daughter’s burial repeated.

  Jessie and Luna placed their daughter in a grave with her own name in Pleasant Hill Cemetery. Later that day, their son, George, died from injuries he suffered in the explosion.2

  Felix McKnight awoke on Sunday morning on a cot in an attic room above the Western Union office in Overton. Sunshine streaming through a small window startled him. McKnight’s heart raced as he jumped up and started pulling on his clothes. The AP reporter had slept for just a couple of hours, but he was afraid that he might have missed some major part of the story.

  In reality, he had nothing to worry about because the Associated Press now had enough reporters in New London to cover every aspect of the story while McKnight and Bill Rives took a much-overdue breather. In the wee hours of Sunday morning, McKnight had become nearly incoherent after three days and nights without sleep. Finally, he surrendered his typewriter to a fresh replacement and headed upstairs to rest. He had fallen asleep only after taking two long pulls from a half pint of Blue Roses whisky that somebody had gotten from an Overton pharmacy.

  McKnight made plans to go out to Pleasant Hill Cemetery, where nonstop funerals were taking place all Sunday.

  UP reporter Walter Cronkite also finally took a rest. His boss told him fellow UP staffer Henry McLemore had rented a room with twin beds at a small hotel in Overton. Cronkite could go there for a few hours. Also, McLemore had brought extra shirts. After he slept for a while, Cronkite could shave and put on a fresh shirt in McLemore’s room.

  Cronkite went to the room and tiptoed in so he wouldn’t disturb Mc-Lemore, who was sound asleep in one of the beds. Early Sunday, Cronkite awoke refreshed. McLemore was already gone. Cronkite shaved, showered, and borrowed a clean shirt from McLemore’s belongings. When he arrived at the newsroom in the Western Union office, Cronkite learned there had been a mix-up about the location of McLemore’s room.

  “I hadn’t been in the UP room,” Cronkite recalled many years later. “I had shared the room of the manager of the area’s semipro baseball team. I never met him. I still don’t know who he thought it was sleeping in his other bed that night, or if he missed the shirt.”3

  Felix McKnight freshened up and drove toward Pleasant Hill Cemetery. Leaving Overton, he noticed most of the businesses had the shades down on their front doors and crepe fluttering from the doorknobs. An officer stopp
ed traffic to let men carrying coffins cross the street.4 As McKnight drove through communities in the New London school district, he saw dozens of houses with bouquets of flowers tied with lavender ribbons affixed to the front doors. He followed a slowly moving funeral cortege toward the cemetery. McKnight parked near an old country church and hiked to the top of a rise overlooking Pleasant Hill Cemetery, a spot where he could observe graveside services without encroaching on the privacy of grief-stricken families saying good-bye to loved ones.

  Dozens of open graves darkened the grassy turf across the graveyard. Men were shoveling dirt into some of them as pallbearers carried coffins toward others. Clusters of men, women, and children dressed in church clothes followed each. A quartet singing hymns moved from grave to grave. The words and melody of “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” drifted through the tall pines skirting the graveyard.

  McKnight felt overwhelmed with sadness. He’d spent nights in rubble and days in cemeteries seeking the line between proximity and respect. Bottled-up emotions swam to the surface. He thought about his own daughter, Joan, at home with Lib—the blessings in his life—and life itself, which he suddenly treasured more than ever before.

  A tale long-repeated by the Shaw family maintains that Walter Cronkite strode up to a car Chesley Shaw and his wife were sitting in and unabashedly asked whether he could ride with the family en route to graveside services for Sambo Shaw. Chesley Shaw said no, according to the legend.5

  No information exists to suggest the story is anything but legend, possibly an embellishment that came about after Cronkite became world-famous as a CBS News anchorman. On the other hand, Cronkite, in his memoir, A Reporter’s Life, wrote about Chesley Shaw as though he and the superintendent developed a rapport during the disaster’s aftermath. It’s not inconceivable that an aggressive reporter like Cronkite possibly asked to join the family on such a heartrending occasion, to better tell their story and honor the memory of Sambo Clifton Shaw. Questions, even when they seem insensitive or disrespectful, are a good reporter’s best tool. Cronkite was a very good reporter. Unquestionably, Cronkite, like Felix McKnight, was deeply affected by the sorrow that engulfed an entire East Texas community in the early spring of 1937.

  “You’ve got a job to do so you’ve got to keep thinking about that rather than thinking about the horror,” Cronkite said in a 1987 television news interview. “The horror comes later. Driving back to Dallas I was overcome with grief. I had to drive off the road for a minute. It suddenly hit me.”6

  Felix McKnight returned from the cemetery to his desk in the Western Union office and worked into the evening, crafting the lead AP story for the morning newspapers.

  Late that night, the door opened and five men came into the makeshift newsroom. One was holding the front page of a Shreveport newspaper, which had a headline that read, “East Texas Roughnecks Bury Their Kids Today.” The man waved the newspaper in front of McKnight and demanded, “We want to see this guy—McLemore.”

  It was obvious they were upset about something Henry McLemore had written.

  “You know where he is?” the man asked.

  “Nah. I don’t know where he is,” McKnight said, although he knew McLemore was sleeping upstairs on an Army cot.

  “Well, he works for you and you ought to know where he is,” the man said.

  “I work for the Associated Press and he works for the United Press.”

  “It’s a damn lie. You know where he is and we want him.”

  Another reporter spoke up, telling the men there was no connection between McKnight and McLemore.

  The group of angry men began a search of the building. They located the wooden steps going to the attic, and two of them stomped up the stairs. A moment later, they returned, pushing Henry McLemore in front of them. The men led the famed United Press writer outside, put him into a car, and drove away into the night.

  McKnight learned the next morning the men had taken McLemore to the county line, put him out of the car, and told him never to return to New London. Although they worked for competing wire services, McKnight and McLemore had become friends after sitting side by side at various sports events they’d both covered. McLemore called McKnight early on Monday and said that he was okay, although he was obviously a bit rattled by the experience. He needed McKnight to contact the United Press staff to let them know he had hitchhiked to Tyler and needed somebody to send him over some clothes. All he had was the outfit he was wearing when the men roused him from his nap.

  McLemore didn’t say where he was going from there, whether he would chance returning to New London or look for a story somewhere else. The blue-eyed swashbuckler of a reporter was a good improviser. On an assignment once in Durham, North Carolina, McLemore found his style cramped when he discovered he couldn’t buy a cocktail in the dry community. He left the hotel, roamed around for a while, and returned shortly with enough moonshine whiskey to last him the week.7

  Such skill might have served him well on that day because Tyler was a citadel of prohibition sentiment and the dry gulch of the Bible belt.

  29

  Amazing Grace

  Schoolchildren in Cherbourg, France, conducted a drive to help children and parents stricken by the explosion in New London, Texas. They collected $8.74—among the first of many donations and expressions of sorrow from around the world.1

  “Nothing makes us more sadly sensitive to the feelings of international solidarity than cruel catastrophes which suddenly plunge an entire country into mourning,” said Jean Zay, the French minister of national education, in a message to Texas parents who lost their children.2 “Every mother and father of French children mourn with the Texas parents in America,” he added.

  Elementary school children in Japan sent a sympathy telegram. A Girl Scout troop from a town in Kansas collected coins to send to New London. A five-year-old girl from Galveston sent the pennies she’d been saving for a new doll. The New London tragedy galvanized the attention and grief of people across the boundary lines of states, nations, and continents from America to Europe and Asia in a way that had not happened before the age of global radio and telegraphic communications.

  On the Thursday after the disaster, one week after the explosion, a half-million students and teachers in Chicago stood, faced southwest, and participated in a one-minute silent observance for the lost students and teachers of New London.3 The principal of a small rural school in North Dakota asked students there to pray for victims of the Texas disaster.4 But nothing was more indicative of the human spirit reaching out to help those in crisis than the story of C. H. Crawford of Joinerville, Texas. He worked in the rescue mission in New London wearing a pair of borrowed overalls and canvas shoes, all the clothes he could muster because his home and all his belongings had been destroyed in a fire the day before.5

  “It seemed as though the entire world was touched in but a few minutes,” wrote the Reverend Robert L. Jackson, the New London Methodist minister who spoke at the school on the morning before it exploded and worked that afternoon in the rescue operation. “Every phase of our civilization sprang into action. The whole world listened with a sympathetic ear.”6

  The donations helped establish a fund to memorialize the children and teachers who perished. Within days, organizers laid out a plan for a monument at the site: a cenotaph, or empty tomb, to be carved from 120 tons of Texas granite and soaring to a height of thirty-four feet. At the crown of the impressive twin columns, the sculptor coaxed from rock a vivid circle of buoyant children and their teachers reaching out for one another. At its base, the names of most of the victims were inscribed on beveled tablets of granite.

  Ministers tried their best to explain, in a wide-ranging variety of sermons, meditations, and funeral messages, how the concept of a loving, personal God can be reconciled with the devastation of a disaster that claimed mostly innocent children.

  “We can’t understand but we shouldn’t question God’s ways,” proclaimed the Reverend W. T. Bratton, pastor o
f the New London Baptist Church. “Only last week these boys and girls were happy in their work and play in the community. We miss them but we must bless God that He gave them to us and remember his promise in the Fourteenth Chapter of St. John: ‘Let not your hearts be troubled for I have gone to prepare a place for you.’”7

  Many preachers, like Robert Jackson, gave uplifting sermons about Christian beliefs in life after death.

  “Why?” asked the Reverend A. D. Sparkman, pastor of the Old London Baptist Church. “The fault is not God’s. It is man’s error.”8

  Many East Texans were deeply traumatized, oil-field historians Clark and Halbouty concluded. “These people felt that the lives of the innocent had been claimed in payment of spiritual debts piled high during the most sinful and reckless period of the boom.... God had slaughtered lambs.”9

  The idea of such a vengeful Creator—crushing to death little children to make a point—frightened some people and was dismissed as absurd by others.

  John Lumpkin was one of the few people in East Texas rich enough to afford the luxury of a movie camera. He bought it for recreational use and to preserve family memories. He used it to film his son’s funeral.10

  During the service, Lumpkin dropped to his knees and asked God to help him through the loss of his boy, John Jr. The elder Lumpkin hadn’t given much thought to religion before the explosion, but he found that praying soothed his spirit. He promised God that he would devote the rest of his life to helping the less fortunate. He bought a bus and began driving it around the community on Sunday mornings to pick up children who wanted to attend Sunday school, taking them to the church of their choice.11

  The Reverend James Shera Montgomery, chaplain of the U.S. House of Representatives, reached for a place beyond the spirit, into the soothing calm of mystic light, when he opened a congressional session with this prayer the morning after the explosion: “O speak, mighty life, and let in the morning of hope and peace. Thou blessed Christ, whose love for little children was so divine that it would not let them go, take and keep them in the white light of the Father’s Throne. Their shadow was love, their language was music, and their steps were a benediction.”12