The New London School Disaster

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1937 Headlines

President Roosevelt restricts Japanese planes bomb and sink U.S.

U.S. weapon trade with Japan.

Gunboat Panary in Chinese waters.

Nazi demonstrations taking place in Austria are supported by Hitler.

294 people are killed when an explosion destroys a building in New London Texas.

The German airship Hindenburg is destroyed by fire in New Jersey.

Technetium, the first manmade element is developed.

      

Click here to view the article, "Today, A Generation Died", by Carlton Stowers - 02/21/2002

      

      

NEW LONDON, Texas --On March 18, 1937, Mollie Ward, then a fourth-grader at the New London School, left an afternoon meeting early to board a school bus that would take her home.

But at 3:17 p.m., as she sat on the bus waiting for classes to end for the day, her life and those of hundreds of other New London residents were shattered.

An explosion tore through New London School, leveling much of the building. At least 275 students, 15 teachers and two visitors died, making it the worst tragedy in the history of East Texas.

On Saturday, three days after the 61st anniversary of the tragedy, Ms. Ward's work to memorialize the school and those who died there will come to fruition with the grand opening of the London Museum.

"This museum really is a dream come true," Ms. Ward said. "It carries the history, and by having the museum, I think we can keep the memory alive."

Located across the street from the West Rusk High School on Highway 42 in New London, the museum is housed in an old drug store where survivors congregated for reunions in the years following the tragedy.

The idea of a museum began in 1980 after Ms. Ward began researching the explosion for students. As more people heard about Ms. Ward's work, donations of money and artifacts began to arrive at her house, and she finally ran out of room.

"As more artifacts turned up I realized we needed to have a museum," she said. "I never thought we could get this much together."

The drug store eventually closed and was purchased for use as a museum. Two years ago, the London Museum Tearoom opened in the front of the building, while renovations continued in the back section. Using the ideas of Ohio designer Jimmy Humphries, who volunteered his expertise, volunteers painted murals and created the displays.

Encompassing three rooms, the museum begins with the settlement of New London during the oil boom. Moving on, guests encounter papers and objects belonging to teachers and students from the New London School.

One display, affectionately named "Ms. Wright's Classroom" by Ms. Ward, earned its name because many artifacts surfaced from teacher Ann Wright's class after the explosion, including her grade book and students' English papers.

On an antique blackboard is chalked the poignant phrase: "Oil and natural gas are East Texas' greatest mineral blessings. Without them this school would not be here and none of us would be here learning our lessons."

In the aftermath of the blast, investigators discovered that a pocket of natural gas trapped in the basement of the school had ignited from a spark from a saw in the shop, causing the explosion. Rescuers found the original blackboard bearing the quotation in the rubble.

"It was there and they saw it and they thought, my goodness, someone writing about the greatest blessing to this community and then to think what happened a half-day later," Ms. Ward said.

Along the walls of the museum are hundreds of photographs, old newspapers and carefully typed stories. One large display case contains the clothes of two victims, including the shredded dress of Fedelia Lee Jones, who was a childhood friend of Ms. Ward's.

One area is devoted entirely to East Texas newspapers that covered the story, while another displays telegraphs and condolence letters from throughout the world -- including a radiogram from Adolph Hitler to the president of the United States, expressing the sympathies of the German people.

Before leaving, guests have the opportunity to study a mural of a clock with the hands stopped at 3:17 p.m., and a timeline of events.

Although nearly 61 years have passed since the explosion, many survivors are still coping with their emotions. Prior to the museum's opening, two survivors toured the exhibits and gave Ms. Ward their opinion.

"We had two survivors tour it, and they were so proud of us," she said. "They were elated."

Distributed by The Associated Press

With the usual pressures in a one-man bureau, I didn't dig through the exchanges for the journal until the last minute. Out it came and I flipped with confidence to the oil column. The oil column was mine. No byline, of course, but there it was. The column exactly as I had written it . . . or rewritten, as the case was, from the Journal's column of a week before.

It was too late. There was nothing for it now but that I should rewrite again the column that I had rewritten the previous Thursday from the Journal column of the previous week. This time I was not nearly as sanguine as I filed the column on the overtime wire. I waited for the blast from Kansas City headquarters when my perfidy was discovered. It never came.

Back in Kansas City the next week I got a brief note with an enclosure from the UP headquarters in New York. The note said simply: "Congrats. Well done." The letter was to the big boss in New York praising the recent oil columns as the best in some time. It was from the Chicago Journal of Commerce.

Shortly thereafter I was sent to Dallas to temporarily relieve a personnel shortage. I had been there only a couple of days when the New London school in East Texas blew up. I was the editor of the state wire, and it was just coming upon three o'clock, when the wire was to be closed down for the night. Three bells rang on the machine and a coded message came across from Houston. The code was simple, but I hadn't had much reason to use it in my Kansas City duties, so, rather than take time to translate it right then, I went ahead with the procedure for closing down the wire. Now the bell rang frantically and, in the clear, came a message from Houston: "Don't close this wire!" That's what the coded message had said, too, and the reason became obvious within a minute or two.

Houston filed the first bulletin reporting that oil field sources had said there had been an explosion in the consolidated school at New London and requesting all the ambulances the area could send. The Dallas bureau manager and I took off immediately for New London, a good four hours away. We had to find it on the map, but our only delay was a slight detour so he could visit his bootlegger. There weren't car radios then. We had no idea how bad the explosion had been until we reached Tyler, twenty-five miles from New London. There was a funeral home on the main road, and for blocks around it there were ambulances and hearses and pickup trucks, all unloading bodies.

We hurried on to New London. We reached it just at dusk. Huge floodlights from the oil fields illuminated a great pile of rubble at which men and women tore with their bare hands. Many were workers from the oil fields, but among them were office workers and what appeared to be housewives. Many were parents, other volunteers, searching desperately for children still buried in the debris. Before they were through, they would bring 294 shattered, crushed bodies out of what had once been a two-story building, only four years old and considered one of the most up-to-date school structures in Texas.

The architect had reinforced the building with vertical rows of tiles. The building was heated with residual gas from the oil fields, gas so volatile and unstable that it is usually burned off in the flares we see around most oil fields. The gas is odorless and invisible. It leaked somewhere in the subbasement of the school building. It filled those vertical columns of tiles. The school was a bomb waiting to explode. Two minutes before classes were to be dismissed for the weekend, a student in the basement woodworking shop switched off a band saw. The spark did its work.

To add to the horror, the Parent-Teacher Association was meeting in the school's gymnasium, just yards away. The mothers were there from the start of the frantic search for the few survivors. When we got there, the school superintendent, William Shaw, superficial cuts from the explosion bleeding across his face, was still wandering through the ruins. "There are children in there, there are children in there," he kept muttering. His own seventeen-year-old son was somewhere under the debris with two of his cousins.

A news reporter's duty can sometimes be difficult. It is not easy to approach someone in such distress to seek answers to the questions that need asking. It was never a problem that bothered the public until television came along. But now that reporters at the scene of a disaster can be seen asking those questions, the public asks its own questions about what it perceives as journalists' total insensitivity.

There is a perfectly rational excuse for the newspersons' seeming callousness: Stories change with each retelling. Even a person really trying for the most faithful recital of events is almost invariably susceptible to slight modifications, certain little embellishments, with each recital. Accuracy of a story is in direct relation to how soon after the event it is recorded, and how frequently the story has been retold.

Thus, I talked to the superintendent. I didn't know about the school's use of the highly dangerous residual gas. But he told me about it. He wept as he told how he and the school board had decided to tap into those gas lines. The use of the gas was illegal, but nearly everybody in the small towns adjoining the oil fields did it. The New London school simply was terribly unlucky. On one tottering wall a blackboard carried an ironic message: "Oil and natural gas are East Texas' greatest mineral blessings. Without them this school would not be here and none of us would be here learning our lessons." The world press poured into the little town of New London and its slightly larger neighbor, Overton. The United Press sent down Delos Smith from New York, one of our fastest and best writers and editors, to head up our staff, which consisted of Tom Reynolds, a top Washington correspondent who later, and for years, would be the UP's White House man; and, to handle the feature stories, Henry McLemore, our top sports writer.

Early Sunday morning, after some forty-eight uninterrupted hours on the job, Delos suggested I get some sleep. It was midnight when he sent me off to the Overton Hotel, a one-story structure with a single hall, off of which were the rooms. In Texas they call that a "shotgun" building, meaning you could fire a shotgun down the hall and hit everybody in the place. "You won't need a key," Delos said. "Our room is the first one past the men's room on the right. McLemore's there right now. He brought some stuff to us. There's shaving stuff and toothbrushes. There are a couple of extra shirts in his bag." So I stumbled down to the Overton, located the room and fell into the twin bed opposite McLemore, whose snoring was of classic dimensions. Delos had sent me off at midnight with instructions to "get a good night's sleep," noting that he would have someone wake me up at six. Some night's sleep! I was awakened by the sun forcing its way through the cracks in a window shade too tired to keep out the rays. It was eight o'clock. I was grateful to Delos for giving me a little bonus. Mac was up and out. I found a toothbrush, borrowed the razor and shaving cream and stumbled to the shower. Slightly more awake upon my return, I realized that Mac was even more of an eccentric than legend had it. He had arrived in New London directly from the baseball spring training camps in Florida, but, my gosh, to come to a two or three- day assignment like this and decorate the room with framed pictures of baseball players? Wild. And when I went into his bag for that clean shirt, there were baseballs there.

In my clean shirt I appeared back at our headquarters. Delos looked up and, without any notable early morning cheerfulness, said: "Well, that's a young buck for you. You don't sleep for two nights, you get a few hours off, and you go shack up with some broad somewhere." I was stunned. I protested. "Cronkite," said Delos, "don't give me that. I sent for you at six o'clock and you weren't in the room. I sent down there at seven and you still weren't there." He was right. I hadn't been in the UP room. 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. The UP sent me to Austin to cover a special session of the legislature to rescind pari-mutuel horse race betting, and from there to El Paso to organize a new United Press bureau. It turned out I was a pawn in a typical early skirmish between the print press and radio. It would be years before the United Press had a wire serving radio stations, but D' Armand had sold an El Paso station, KTSM, on subscribing to the UP's regular newspaper wire.