80 years ago - Worst school disaster in history - New London, Texas - March 18, 1937

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CanyonAg77
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In 1937, the London, Texas school district was one of the richest in the US, being in the East Texas Oil Field. A million dollar showplace of a school was built ($14M in today's money) The school was built with natural gas heaters, instead of a boiler system. After a dispute with the gas supplier, the school board decided to save $36 a month by tapping into a flare gas line from a nearby oil field.

The faulty connection leaked into an air space under the new concrete and steel building. Since there was no odorant in the gas, no one noticed, though students had complained for weeks about headaches.
Quote:

On March 18 students prepared for the next day's Inter-scholastic meet in Henderson. At the gymnasium, the PTA met. At 3:17 P.M. Lemmie R. Butler, instructor of manual training, turned on a sanding machine in an area which, unknown to him, was filled with a mixture of gas and air.

The switch ignited the mixture and carried the flame into a nearly closed space beneath the building, 253 feet long and fifty-six feet wide.

Immediately the building seemed to lift in the air and then smashed to the ground. Walls collapsed. The roof fell in and buried its victims in a mass of brick, steel, and concrete debris.

The explosion was heard four miles away, and it hurled a two-ton concrete slab 200 feet away, where it crushed a 1936 Chevrolet.

Two hundred and seventy students (270) sixteen (16) teachers and eight (8) others died in the explosion and aftermath. Still the worst disaster in US School history, and the third worst disaster in Texas history, after the 1900 Galveston Hurricane and the Texas City disaster.





It's sort of a strange event, that it's still not that well known. Some speculate that the loss of so many children was such a heartbreak, that no one would talk about it. Perhaps WWII overshadowed it. But there are a few long-lasting effects of the disaster.

First, the Texas Legislature immediately met and passed a requirement that all consumer natural gas should have an odorant added to detect leaks. Second, since a faulty installation caused the leak, requirements were put into place to license engineers. Basically, the reason that today you cannot call yourself an engineer in Texas unless you pass the state requirements.

Most of the reporters who showed up to the scene were told to stop reporting and help with the rescue efforts. Roughnecks came in from the oil fields with labor and equipment. The governor sent the Texas Rangers and the Highway Patrol.

One of the reporters was a 20-year-old UPI stringer from Dallas. He later covered WWII and the Nuremberg trials, and said that this was the worst story he ever reported on. His name was Walter Cronkite.

The superintendent lost a son in the explosion, but had to leave town because there were threats of a lynching.

Lawsuits were brought against the school board and the oil company who's line was tapped, both were dismissed. No one was ever held legally or financially at fault. Much different mindset than today.

The then-chancellor of Germany was so moved by the disaster, that he sent a telegram of condolence. His name was Adolph something.


I have a slight family connection. My mom's first cousin was a student there. She supposedly walked home from the school disaster, wearing only her coat, as her clothes had been burned/blown away. Mom (who would have been 7 that year, and lived 100s of miles away) recalls the adults talking about her cousin. Mom, who saw the cousin in the years after, said the cousin's face was fine, but her body was supposed to be badly scarred. Mom recalls the adults talking about whether she would ever bear or nurse children, though she did eventually have kids.

There are some holes in the family story. I have yet to find the cousin's name on survivor lists, though I found a brother. It's also unclear how she managed to find her coat and then walk away without an adult stopping her, though mass confusion is an explanation. It's also unclear why her parents would be close enough for her to walk home, yet did not react to the massive explosion.

An 80th anniversary remembrance is planned. Thoughts and prayers to the families who still mourn to this day.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_London_School_explosion



http://nlsd.net/index2.html
aggieforester05
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My grandfather was a student there at the time. He stayed home to work on the farm that day. My mother later went to school there in the 50s/60s.

CanyonAg77
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Funny how life turns on small things. Had your grandfather not stayed on the farm that day, possibly no you....


And your link is the same as mine, I think.
aggieforester05
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That's true, my whole family might not exist.

Oops sorry about that, didn't see your last link at the bottom.
CanyonAg77
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Aggie Vet
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If I remember correctly, it was H.L. Hun'ts pipeline the school tapped into. Even though he was not at fault, he paid the medical expenses for the survivors.
CanyonAg77
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Aggie Vet said:

If I remember correctly, it was H.L. Hun'ts pipeline the school tapped into. Even though he was not at fault, he paid the medical expenses for the survivors.
I've found evidence for the former, not yet for the latter.

http://myetx.com/76th-anniversary-of-the-new-london-school-explosion/


https://books.google.com/books?id=9jUGNbcD42UC&pg=PA196&dq=Parade+Gasoline+Company&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi-ypzbu8LSAhXKLSYKHSnnBVQQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&q=Parade%20Gasoline%20Company&f=false
coupland boy
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Couple of things from this that always cross my mind:

1. The State of Texas enacted the licensing of professional engineers as a result of this tragedy. Every year we have to take a one hour ethics refresher and this is a monumental case study.

2. A sympathy letter from the chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler, was received. Apparently a very nice one at that. Not sure where this letter is. Was it to the governor? I'd like to read it.

Edit - here it is.....





coupland boy
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Now let's go kill millions of Jews........
CanyonAg77
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http://www.countylinemagazine.com/March-April-2017/Remembering-New-Londons-Longest-Night-80-Years-Later/

Quote:

Last Surviving Rescuer, Marvin Dees, Never Forgets
There were five of us on a crew working in an oil field a few miles south of New London. We heard a terrific explosion but didn't know what it was. Twenty minutes later someone came by and told us the school blew up. We piled in the company truck and rushed to the scene.
I'll never forget the sight when we drove up. Horror. I've never seen anything so horrible before or after. It was chaos. Parents were crying and looking for their children. I pitched in with the others and worked all night. We rescued those we could. The rest was digging out bodies and removing the debris. We worked until 10:30 a.m. the next morning.
It's been 80 years but I remember it like it was yesterday. It flashes through my mind every day.
I try to get up to the (London) museum on Wednesdays. They have a pretty good caf there. Wednesday they serve roast beef. I go up there and eat and visit with the people who work there. I need that.
I always try to see if there's anything good in the terrible things. Far as I'm concerned, the only good thing that came out of the explosion was the odor they added to gas. It makes it easier to detect if there's a leak. There's no telling how many people have been saved because of that. Marvin Dees, age 101




ce1994
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My grandfather was working in those oil fields and was one of the men that went to assist. I was young when he died so never asked him about it but my mother told me that it was pretty rough on him.
Stive
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My grandmother and her younger sisters had moved 6 months earlier from the New London area to the "new" Talco oil field north of Mt. Pleasant. That move probably saved at least one of their lives.
Stive
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Question for those that know, I looked at a list of the deceased and the classes they were in and it looks like the "middle school" ages were hit hardest and seeminlgy much higher numbers of girls than boys.

Were the elementary students elsewhere on a different campus or in a different building? And I thought the HS students studied there on campus so why were they not hit as hard as the younger ones?
CanyonAg77
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All the lower grades had been sent home earlier, as per normal class schedule. So grades 1-4 were home.

I read an account of a bus driver who was taking the 1-4 kids home, and saw the explosion. Yet he finished his route, before returning to the school to search for his own kids. One was lost, as I recall.

One of the stories talked about a shop class being held in another building, and a PE class that was outside. Maybe that's why it was mostly girls.
CanyonAg77
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Addressed to : praesidentsen der vereinigten staaten

I don't know German, but I'd guess "President of United States"
Stive
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Makes sense I read the account of the bus driver as well and can't wrap my brain around the next stretch of time and how his brain must have been computing what had happened. It didn't dawn on me that they had let the younger ones out earlier.
coupland boy
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That's right.
drmwvr
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My uncle's oldest sister died in the explosion. He was too young to be in school at the time. Texas Montly has a good article on the events from individual perspectives for those of you that want to read more about it.

http://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/oh-my-god-its-our-children/
Old Jock 1997
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I'd guess that since this was still Depression-era, there were fewer boys in school because they were either working at home or trying to contribute monetarily to the family.
Stive
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I thought about that and if it had been mostly high school aged I would have probably agreed. It was the 11, 12, 13 year ages mostly so I was trying to wrap my brain around that discrepancy.

And I do realize that boys those ages did go to work that early, but it was just as common for them to finish 8th grade before heading out.
BigJim49 AustinNowDallas
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Good guy class ' 50 in Corps from New London - face badly disfigured from burns !
CanyonAg77
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BigJim49 AustinNowDallas said:

Good guy class ' 50 in Corps from New London - face badly disfigured from burns !
By any chance, was he a returning veteran? The only New London guy I could find in he 1950 yearbook was class of '51, and unscarred. Also, class of '50 is too young to have been in school, as grades 1-4 were already headed home at the explosion.

If he was a returning vet, it's possible he no longer listed New London as a home town, and he could have been old enough to have been in grades 5-11.

And it's also possible he simply didnt put a photo in the yearbook.

On a related note, I still can't find any reference to my mom's cousin in the New London histories. Mom has an amazing memory, but she would have been just under 7 at the time, and she may have misheard the adults talk. But she's seldom wrong about anything. They aren't 100% sure they have a complete list of the dead, much less the injured. So mom may still be correct.
P.H. Dexippus
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I don't know how I got this far through life without having heard of this. Thanks for sharing.

For those that have not heard of it, there is another tragedy that happened 10 years earlier on the other side of the country. Bath School Disaster I'm sure there were more than a few references back to it when the New London incident occurred.
Stive
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It's been referenced a bit here already but lots of people today don't understand the transient nature during that time (especially around the oil fields). My great-grandfather had a wife and 4 hungry girls in Haskell, Tx in the early 30's with a drought on and no money or jobs to be had. He was in eastern New Mexico working some kind of odd jobs when he got a letter from his brother in law saying that if he could get to New London by so-and-so date he had a job waiting for him in the oil field there.

So my great grandfather and two others loaded up in an old ford (not sure if model T or model A) in the middle of winter, and began the treck from NM to east Texas. I can't remember how long it took them but they were going to have to drive straight through to make it by the designated date that had been in the letter. They made it with a few hours to spare.

He worked there for six months sending money home as much as he could until my great grandmother and the kids had saved enough to come join him. They were there in NL for a few years, when the same BIL that had sent for him to join him in NL sent for him again to join him in Talco; he had a spot lined out for the GGF in the Humble oil camp there.

They moved to Talco and stayed there until they died in the late 80's.

Workers were coming and going in and out of those oil camps all the time. People were hungry across the country and if you didn't have work where you were, you moved to where it was (see Grapes of Wrath).

I don't get irritated about much in the world, but that's one thing that does bug me; when people sit around whining about there not being enough work where they are and wishing the jobs would come to them, I just shake my head and walk away.

BigJim49 AustinNowDallas
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CanyonAg77 said:

BigJim49 AustinNowDallas said:

Good guy class ' 50 in Corps from New London - face badly disfigured from burns !
By any chance, was he a returning veteran? The only New London guy I could find in he 1950 yearbook was class of '51, and unscarred. Also, class of '50 is too young to have been in school, as grades 1-4 were already headed home at the explosion.

If he was a returning vet, it's possible he no longer listed New London as a home town, and he could have been old enough to have been in grades 5-11.

And it's also possible he simply didnt put a photo in the yearbook.

On a related note, I still can't find any reference to my mom's cousin in the New London histories. Mom has an amazing memory, but she would have been just under 7 at the time, and she may have misheard the adults talk. But she's seldom wrong about anything. They aren't 100% sure they have a complete list of the dead, much less the injured. So mom may still be correct.
Canyon, Thanks for checking him out.

On reflection, he might have been '49 class but not a vet. There were 3 sections of '49 - I was in the first class starting in February but graduated in Jan. '50 . Navy in between . So I didn't know many of the 2 or 3 class of '49 .

It's possible he didn't want his picture in the yearbook and possibly had moved away from New London. I cant find him in the 49 or 50 yearbook. It's also possible he got his burns not connected with NL ( didn't know him personally ). Believe he was Infantry and might show up in an outfit picture - my eyes are too old for inspection..

I'm going to keep looking . See below.
p_bubel
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Somewhat related, my mother graduated from Our Lady of Angels in Chicago the year before it burned.

Quote:

If nothing else, schools in the United States today are safe, at least from fire. But progress took a calamity. Following the Our Lady of the Angels fire, sweeping changes were made across the country to prevent another tragedy like it. Today, the death of a child by fire in a K-12 educational structure is nearly unheard of. But the price of safety proved high, especially for the Chicago parish that bore the cost.
Agz_2003
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Quote:

First, the Texas Legislature immediately met and passed a requirement that all consumer natural gas should have an odorant added to detect leaks.
I've always wondered why adding odorant never became a requirement for natural gas transmission lines, only distribution (consumer) lines.
BigJim49 AustinNowDallas
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Bud class '48 remembers our guy. Turns out he had to lay out of school to recover from the burns.

He was '47 or early "48 - so if he laid out a year he would have normally been in the '46 class at A&M.

Have his last name but can't locate him in yearbook - his disfigurement probably the reason.

I'm going to stop here. If anybody wants the last name , send me a message.
CanyonAg77
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Anniversary bump
et98
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My grandma is a survivor of the New London explosion. She was in the 1st grade and her sister was older (4th grade or so).

There was an assembly in the gym that early afternoon for 1st graders (and possibly 2nd graders as well) where they presented a folk-dancing presentation for their parents that they had learned. The activity ended an hour or so before the explosion, and most of those kids had gone home with their parents afterward.

My grandma and her mother were still at the school when it exploded because they wanted to get my grandma's older sister so they wouldn't have to come back later to pick her up. They decided to get her out of school early instead of waiting until the end of the school day. My grandma's sister had left class and was in the hallway on the way to the front of the school when it exploded. Many of her classmates in the room where she would have been died, but she was far enough away by that time to escape unharmed.

My grandma and her mother were just a few feet outside of the front office door when it exploded, so they only suffered minor cuts and bruises from the debris. My grandma's sister ran out of the building with more serious cuts and bruises but nothing serious. They found each other after a couple of minutes and the three of them went home. Because of all the commotion, nobody recorded that my grandma and her sister made it out safe.

Meanwhile, my grandma's father was working in the oil field when a man ran up and told everyone what happened. Nearly all the men had children at the school, so they all went to the school as fast as possible in a panic.

By the time my grandma's father arrived, rescuers had started laying out the dead bodies...or more accurately, the remains of dead bodies...so they could be identified.

My great grandfather didn't know his wife had already taken the children home, so he went from body to body looking for his children. He was pretty sure my grandmother would have been gone already, but he knew her sister would be there. There were a hundred or so dead children with sheets covering them up. He and dozens of other terrified parents went from body to body raising up the sheet to look at the face of each child beneath it to see if it was theirs, one-by-one. He looked at the faces of nearly 100 dead children, many of whom he knew, and just couldn't take it any more.

Many of the bodies & faces weren't really recognizable, so he wasn't sure if they were his daughter or not. He eventually found one little girl's body that he was certain was my grandma's sister and he became hysterical. A coworker of his escorted him home because he was so distraught. About halfway home, he realized that he wasn't 100% sure it was my grandmother's sister and remembered that she had an infected bug bite on her leg that he'd put iodine on that morning. He & his coworker went back to school to see if that dead girl had the iodine on her leg, and she didn't. He then went through every child looking for the infected bite with iodine instead of their faces and was able to make it through. Luckily, her body wasn't there.

My wife and I took my grandma to the museum about 3 years ago, and I've never seen someone so emotionally affected by anything. She passed away about a year ago and was one of only a handful of survivors of the explosion still alive. The museum had her return so they could interview her telling the story of her, her sister, and her dad. Old age had taken a pretty big toll and dimentia had already begun to creep in, so I'm not sure if it was something they were willing to add to the museum.


In addition to the part about Walter Cronkite and the letter from Hitler, the other thing at the museum I found most interesting was this chalk board they recovered from the blast:




To clarify the picture a little bit, they set up a mock classroom around it to show what one looked like back then. The remote control in the bottom left corner is for a TV above the chalkboard. The chalkboard itself and the words on it are from the exact day the school exploded.
iamtheglove
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Stive said:

It's been referenced a bit here already but lots of people today don't understand the transient nature during that time (especially around the oil fields). My great-grandfather had a wife and 4 hungry girls in Haskell, Tx in the early 30's with a drought on and no money or jobs to be had. He was in eastern New Mexico working some kind of odd jobs when he got a letter from his brother in law saying that if he could get to New London by so-and-so date he had a job waiting for him in the oil field there.

So my great grandfather and two others loaded up in an old ford (not sure if model T or model A) in the middle of winter, and began the treck from NM to east Texas. I can't remember how long it took them but they were going to have to drive straight through to make it by the designated date that had been in the letter. They made it with a few hours to spare.

He worked there for six months sending money home as much as he could until my great grandmother and the kids had saved enough to come join him. They were there in NL for a few years, when the same BIL that had sent for him to join him in NL sent for him again to join him in Talco; he had a spot lined out for the GGF in the Humble oil camp there.

They moved to Talco and stayed there until they died in the late 80's.

Workers were coming and going in and out of those oil camps all the time. People were hungry across the country and if you didn't have work where you were, you moved to where it was (see Grapes of Wrath).

I don't get irritated about much in the world, but that's one thing that does bug me; when people sit around whining about there not being enough work where they are and wishing the jobs would come to them, I just shake my head and walk away.




Interesting point. Several years ago I did interviews with about 8 members of the 1939 national champion football team. Several told me they went to A&M because they would get 3 square meals and a roof over their head. One of them talked about hauling crops to market with a horse and cart and how they would sleep under the cart on the side of the road. The depression certainly impacted so many folks in ways that are had to imagine today.
CanyonAg77
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Bump for the new thread
Liquid Wrench
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Quote:

Several years ago I did interviews with about 8 members of the 1939 national champion football team.
Do you have these online anywhere that's easy to share here? Would love to read.
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