How the Book came to be

Gone at 3:17 will appeal to the broad market of readers of narrative history that includes books such as Isaac’s Storm, by Erik Larson, The Johnstown Flood, by David McCullough, and Timothy Egan’s books The Worst Hard Time and The Big Burn. At its heart, the work is a classical tragedy, yet this story is rooted in workaday lives such as the morning ritual of sending children off to school. Parents wave good-bye as the school bus departs, suppressing the nagging fear of what lurks out of sight with their trust in the institutions of a civilized society. This is a true story of what occurs when the trustees fail to realize, or fully comprehend, the potential for catastrophe inherent in the invisible and odorless fumes of natural gas. The heartbreak—children lost, a great educator gone mad—is tempered by redemption and forgiveness.

The book will be a sweeping account of the oil boom that financed building the wealthiest rural school system in the nation in 1934, the faulty heating system that permitted raw gas to accumulate beneath it and, at 3:17 on March 18, 1937, the resulting explosion that laid waste to a town’s future. The story continues through the aftermath: mass funerals, a military court of inquiry amazingly convened only three days after the explosion, at which school Superintendent Chesley Shaw has a nervous breakdown, and the survivors who spend much of their adult lives fighting off memories of the tragedy and refusing even to speak of it. Their silence began to give way over the last several decades, in no small part due to relationships David built with the survivors, and a diligent approach that convinced many of them that this story needed to be told.

Using interviews, testimony from survivors and archival newspaper files, Gone at 3:17 will put readers inside the shop room to witness the spark that ignited the gas. Many of those interviewed during 20 years of research are no longer living. Among the voices who will never be heard anywhere else are Felix McKnight, the renowned Associated Press reporter who was one of the first journalists at the scene, and went on to become the dean of Texas journalism; Felton Waggoner, the Junior High School principal who was steps from the high school when it exploded; Walter Freeman, who was buried in the rubble and not expected to live; Arthur Shaw, nephew of Superintendent Chesley Shaw; and two children of Shaw, a remarkable educator whose career and psyche were shattered by the blast.

This book will be much more than the chronicle of a horrific disaster. It is a story about the courage to survive shown by people like Bill Thompson, a sixth-grader pulled alive from the pocket of debris that had trapped him in darkness. Thompson had switched seats with a classmate moments before the blast. She was crushed. He survived, and carried that burden of guilt for more than a half-century, until a tearful confession to the girl’s brother. The brother immediately sought to console him, telling Bill there was nothing to forgive—his sense of guilt was unfounded.

It is the story of men like Joe Wheeler Davidson, a roughneck in the East Texas oil patch who lost three children in the blast. He had to make funeral arrangements for them as his wife was suffering a nervous breakdown and his only remaining child was clinging to life in a nearby hospital. It is the story of quiet heroes like Lonnie Barber, the school bus driver who witnessed the explosion of a building where four of his children were in classes. Realizing he had a responsibility first to children already on his bus, Barber gripped the steering wheel and drove away to deliver them safely to their homes before returning to the campus to learn the fate of his own children.

It is about Chesley Shaw, at the time considered one of the most prominent educators in Texas, who was standing outside, a few feet away, when the blast razed the crown jewel of the London Consolidated School District. Shaw’s personal tragedy—he lost his youngest son, a niece and nephew, and hundreds of students he knew well and held near to his heart—was compounded by a vigilante mood among some parents who blamed him for the disaster, hounded him into resigning and talked of lynching him.

The story is enriched by its backdrop—the great East Texas oil boom of the 1930s. The largest proven oil field on earth at the time, the Black Giant, as it was called, offered jobs and hope to thousands of “boomers” who migrated to the region to escape the ravages of the Great Depression.

Represented by:

David Fugate
LaunchBooks Literary Agency
www.launchbooks.com