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  Gone at 3:17

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  Gone at 3:17

  The Untold Story of the Worst School Disaster in American History

  David M. Brown and Michael Wereschagin

  The prose and poetry of Carolyn Jones Frei is used with her permission.

  Copyright © 2012 by David M. Brown and Michael Wereschagin

  Published in the United States by Potomac Books, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brown, David M. (David Mark), 1948–

  Gone at 3:17 : the untold story of the worst school disaster in American history / David M. Brown and Michael Wereschagin. —1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-61234-153-8 (hardcover: alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-1-61234-154-5 (electronic edition)

  1. Consolidated School (New London, Tex.)—History—20th century. 2. Explosions—Texas—New London—History—20th century. 3. Disasters—Texas—New London—History—20th century. 4. High schools—Texas—New London—History—20th century. 5. Disaster victims—Texas—New London—Biography. 6. New London (Tex.)—Biography. 7. New London (Tex.)—History—20th century. I. Wereschagin, Michael. II. Title.

  LD7501.N4662B76 2012

  373.764’185—dc23

  2011023365

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standards Institute Z39-48 Standard.

  Potomac Books

  22841 Quicksilver Drive

  Dulles, Virginia 20166

  First Edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Gone at 3:17 is dedicated to preserving the memory of the events of March 18, 1937, in honor of the many victims who perished and those who survived to courageously carry on for the sake of all of us.

  It is also dedicated with much appreciation to Clyde Williams, a great teacher and friend.

  In the darkness with a great bundle of grief

  the people march.

  In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps,

  the people march:

  “Where to? what next?”

  —CARL SANDBURG, THE PEOPLE, YES

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  1 3:16 p.m.

  Part I. Calm

  2 Daybreak, March 18

  3 The Superintendent

  4 Sweet Chariot

  5 Pleasant Hill

  6 American Dreams

  7 Wildcats’ Pep Rally

  8 Farmer’s Boy

  9 The Black Giant

  10 Lunchtime

  11 Fateful Afternoon

  12 Last Dance

  Part II. Terror

  13 3:17 p.m.

  14 Thunder on a Clear Day

  15 Newshounds

  16 Holy Sisters

  17 Radio Man

  18 Into the Ruins

  19 Newsflash

  20 A Blue Patch of Sky

  21 Valley of Death at Sundown

  22 Mother Frances

  23 Midnight of the Soul

  24 Dawn, March 19

  25 Hard News

  Part III. Aftermath, March 20–29

  26 Coffin Train

  27 Reckoning

  28 Lament

  29 Amazing Grace

  30 Survivors Assembly, March 29

  Part IV. Epilogue

  31 Reunion

  32 A Final Word

  In Memoriam

  Interviews

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  About the Authors

  Acknowledgments

  The authors wish to thank, first and foremost, their wives, Mary Brown and Neva German, without whom this and so much else in their lives would not be possible. These two women have shepherded this project, steered our writing, reeled us in, and lifted us up. It is for them that we write.

  Mary Brown took on the additional responsibility of managing the book project in its various phases. She maintained a list of people who were interested in the book and kept them updated with e-mail newsletters. She spent painstaking hours putting together the victims list that appears in the “In Memoriam” section, gleaning information from archival records, statements by family members, and tombstones in various cemeteries. Mary also gets credit for the book’s poignant title.

  So many others helped, directly and indirectly, with making Gone at 3:17 a reality that naming them runs the risk of leaving some out. Please accept our apology for any oversights in advance.

  Hilary Claggett, senior editor at Potomac Books, cannot be thanked enough for believing that the manuscript she received from us contained a powerful story that needed to be told in a book. We also appreciate the skill and hard work put into improving the book by Amanda Irle, assistant production editor at Potomac Books, and copyeditor Julie Kimmel. David Fugate, our agent at LaunchBooks, showed the kind of determination in finding a good publisher for this work that makes him a champion in our hearts.

  David and Mary’s children—Anita and Ina Brown, Dallas Hallam, and Mackenzie, Blair, and Ted Trunzo—were of priceless assistance.

  Michael would like to give thanks for years of support from Laura and Michael and from John. He is also grateful to Joshua, Alexis, Barrett, Nikolai, and Elyana for showing what can be. Finally, he wishes to acknowledge his parents—all of them—for the unconditional and the inexpressible. Mom, Dad, Mary Jo, and Victor, thank you.

  Thanks also to Dr. William Hirsch for calculating the power of the monster.

  Those who read successive versions of the manuscript, offering editing advice and catching t’s that were not crossed and other errors, received many hugs and handshakes for that sometimes tedious work. Thanks go to Bill Thompson, Carolyn Jones Frei, John Davidson, Miles Toler, Peggy O’Leary, Joyce Lynch, Carmen Gentile, Bob Del Greco, Steve Lydick, Martha Schroeder, Mary Schroeder, and Brad Bumsted.

  Special thanks to B. J. and Agust Gudmundsson—B. J. for creating our wonderful book trailers and Agust for his enduring friendship and solid advice. Special thanks, too, for Druva, who created the hauntingly beautiful music for the first book trailer.

  We’ve thanked Rob Pratte of KDKA Radio in Pittsburgh in person many times and now give him a formal thank-you for showing strong early interest in the book and going the extra mile to let us talk about Gone at 3:17 on the air while interviewing survivors of that terrible disaster.

  Thanks to Jo Ann Gosnell for the good work she did in cleaning up some of the archival photos used in the book, and special thanks to Anita Brown for re-creating all the photos in the book from very old and weathered snapshots.

  Thanks to Robert Brown, Amy McCarty, and the staff at Inhouse Associates for creating and maintaining the book’s website. Thanks also to Robert for creating the map of Rusk County, Texas, in 1937.

  We also are grateful to have gained insights and knowledge from the groundbreaking works of Lorine Zylks Bright and Robert L. Jackson.

  Preface

  Meander along the back roads of Rusk County, Texas, into a countryside rolling with gentle hills, and you come upon a rustic ce
metery.

  The sun fires hazy shafts sideways through the branches of tall pines on Pleasant Hill. Near the graveyard’s entrance a marker quickly catches your eye. Black stains creeping down the face of the stone show its age.

  JAMES W. HARRIS

  June 19, 1924

  March 18, 1937

  GONE, BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

  Near James’s plot, surrounded by white wildflowers in the spring of any given year, is the angled headstone of Sammie Lee Shoemate, born November 28, 1925, died March 18, 1937. Behind her is another, and another behind that, markers with one date in common. Turn, and there are more.

  When the sun slips behind the pines, and the wind stirs softly through lush green grass covering the long-ago scars of a calamity, it is possible to imagine that you hear the whisper of voices. This is sacred ground.

  March 18, 1937, has been called the day a town lost its future, the day a generation perished, the day when angels cried.

  In this world there are monsters, inhuman forces that devour the innocent and the foolish, the beautiful and the shy, the strong and the weak. They are sometimes born of the carelessness of familiarity. We surround ourselves with dangerous elements, and the more we use them, the less we think of their danger. But the substance of their danger does not change.

  Gone at 3:17 is a factual account of the worst school disaster in American history, told in the words and recollections of survivors and witnesses. It is also a cautionary tale of what can happen when we lose sight of dangers inherent in nature and gamble against their predictability.

  1

  3:16 p.m.

  A sandy-haired, blue-eyed boy named Bill Thompson squirmed sideways, shoved his legs free of the desktop, and sat still for a moment, pondering his next move.

  It was a beautiful day in East Texas, sunny and clear, the kind of balmy weather that made being cooped up inside a schoolhouse all the more tedious.1 The afternoon had grown warm, nearing seventy degrees, and the teacher, Miss Ann Wright, instructed a student to open the windows. A breeze stirred through the classroom, lifting strands of hair on the heads of students nearest the long row of windows. Bill felt the air brush his cheeks. The day even smelled pleasant, carrying a hint of earthiness signaling the arrival of spring. Miss Wright gave permission for the students to talk among themselves, in low voices, for the last few minutes of class.

  Bill was twelve years old and smitten. He wanted desperately to flirt with a pretty girl two desks away named Billie Sue Hall. Whenever they met in the halls or the cafeteria and talked, something seemed special between them—at least that’s how the boy felt, and he was pretty sure she felt it too.

  Bill leaned toward Ethel Dorsey, the quiet, sweet girl between them, and whispered a fifth grader’s plea: “Switch seats with me?” Ethel smiled impishly and agreed.2

  On a ground-floor wing of London Junior-Senior High School, often simply referred to as the New London school, Carolyn Jones had followed a teacher, Mrs. C. R. Sory, and her classmate Barbara Moore into a vacant room where Mrs. Sory could help the girls prepare for a spelling contest. The girls were the finalists who would represent their school in a county-wide interscholastic match the next day. Mrs. Sory, a fifth-grade teacher, had taken Carolyn and Barbara out of their regular fifth-grade classes so they could practice.

  Carolyn felt good about her young life for the first time in a long while. Her family had moved out of the garage located a few hundred feet from the Old London Baptist Church and even closer to an oil derrick. They had shared the garage with another family; only a hung blanket separated them. The Joneses moved into a house newly built with green lumber and tucked into a stand of trees near London. The location provided more privacy, and the dwelling offered more room than the garage had. The new house had a bedroom on one side, a lean-to on the other, and a gas refrigerator and range in the kitchen. The move delighted Carolyn’s mother, who could now make ice cubes for their tea and serve special dishes and desserts to them on trays—“oven roasts and towering lemon meringue pies,” Carolyn remembered. She watched her mother cook, her “pale tapering fingers, lightly dusted with freckles like cinnamon gracing baked custard, whipping and stirring, dismembering a fryer, cutting skillfully through the joints. I looked at my own hands, small and square like my Welsh carpenter father’s, the nails on my stubby fingers chewed to the quick.” When they finished their feasts, Carolyn stood on an apple box or a chair beside the sink to wash their dishes. Some of the locals, those who’d moved to this corner of East Texas, which had been quiet before oil was discovered beneath it, called Carolyn’s family “oil-field trash.” Such derision mattered little to the workers and their families, a transient crowd robbed of their roots by the Great Depression. “All they wanted was to eke out a living until they could return to their previous homes and lives, to avoid the trek to California or to the fruit fields or logging camps of the Northwest,” Carolyn recalled. “I was happy. After so many moves, so much time as a lonely stranger, I had found home in our small unpainted house, in school and in the redbrick church. I thought I could live forever in that familiar place, withstanding the biting cold and the baking heat, trading what others might see as poverty for the wealth of optimism and the warmth of shelter.”

  Only nine years old, Carolyn had lived all over Oklahoma and Texas. She had been pulled into and out of schools as her roughneck stepfather chased jobs on wooden derricks. The East Texas oil boom that drew her family to New London in 1934 was still going strong and expected to last for years to come.

  Mrs. Sory, wife of the school’s band director, was Carolyn’s homeroom teacher. She was “a soft-spoken young woman in her late twenties with kind brown eyes behind rimless glasses,” Carolyn recalled. “Her hair was finger-waved in the latest style, her dress simple and modest as the school board and the community would require. She was slightly round.”3

  Carolyn and the students of New London had been raised against the backdrop of the Great Depression. By 1937 those hard times finally appeared to be receding.

  Hundreds of other students, teachers, and visitors—honeycombed inside the sprawling two-story centerpiece of the richest rural school district in America—grew restless as the final class period drew short. Fidgeting children slid their pants seats and dresses over smooth chairs. Elbows leaned on durable wooden desktops. The final moments crawled inside this sanctuary of solid walls and scuffed floors, sturdy doors and tall windows, stairwells built to be filled with galloping students, and ceilings planed to echo the stampeding footfall of an exodus into a bright, budding Thursday afternoon. The school day was nearly history.

  Friday had been declared a holiday for the Interscholastic League contests taking place in Henderson, the county seat about ten miles to the southeast. The school bells, silent but set to ring in less than fifteen minutes, would signal more than the end of another tiresome day in class. They were to herald that glorious, giddy prize of childhood—the three-day weekend.

  Young eyes glanced at the thin second hands gliding in measured fits around moon-faced clocks. Minds drifted, paper rustled, and seven thousand cubic feet of natural gas whispered into the darkness below.

  Superintendent William Chesley Shaw left his office with D. C. Saxon, the janitor, and Frank Hodges, the contractor. Shaw strolled toward the exit, the others in tow, to monitor the progress of school buses being loaded with students from the elementary school two hundred yards away. He pushed open the heavy door near the northwest corner of the high school, and he squinted into the light. The superintendent’s round spectacles glinted in the sunshine.

  Could Hodges finish the job in time, Shaw wanted to know. “Tomorrow, Saturday the latest,” Hodges said. As much as any man, he’d built Shaw this magnificent school. A grease trap for the cafeteria would be a snap.

  “So long as it’s done by Monday,” Shaw said.4

  James Henry Phillips, a four-year-old handful, darted toward the high school, missing the trio by inches. James’s mother, waiting outside, h
ad given the child permission to go to his older brother’s classroom so James could walk out with his hero when the bell rang.5

  The Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) meeting was winding down in the gymnasium a short distance behind the junior-senior high school. Bobby Joe Phillips, seven, was acting up, running about like an unleashed puppy, so his mother sent him to wait in the car. Felton Waggoner, junior high school principal, ducked out of the meeting and strode west toward the high school. He would help clear the halls after the bell rang and corral students onto their homeward-bound buses. But first Waggoner was on a brief mission for the PTA mothers. They needed a few more sheets of blank paper to use for ballots in the election of new officers. Waggoner was heading to his office in the high school.

  Lonnie Barber sat behind the steering wheel of one of the idling rigs parked in the roundabout, while young children, elementary students whose classes were dismissed a few minutes earlier than those in the high school, clambered into seats in the bus trailer. Barber’s four children, three sons and one daughter, were in classes in the junior-senior high school. Students in the fifth through eleventh grades were assigned to the high school. The first through fourth grades attended the adjacent grammar school. A twelfth grade was not customary at the time, nor was kindergarten.

  For a lucky, unwatched few, the weekend had begun. A business teacher had gone early to a match in Henderson. She left her class supervised only by the memory of her instructions: to spend the period copying an exercise ten times. “Yes, ma’am,” her students told her; she must have known what they meant.

  “The girls and boys were cutting up, naturally, and we were only about half through with our work,” recalled Catherine Hughes. Hughes had permission to go to the gym before the PTA meeting concluded, and she was waiting for the teacher who was going to escort her. When the math teacher, J. H. Bunch finally arrived, they walked together out of the building toward the gymnasium.6