From Chapter Two – Dawn
(Background sequence on Carroll and Mildred Evans, New London teachers)
During the early part of the Great Depression -- after the stock market crashed in 1929 and the jobless rate began to soar across the United States -- the future understandably looked bleak to many Americans.
On the other hand, it was as good a time as any to fall in love.
Carroll Evans and Mildred Jones didn't worry a lot about bankers and brokers running amuck on Wall Street. Their investments were safe.
They had each other.
Their romance was intoxicating and their dreams were vivid. When you are young and in love who gives a hoot about the price of cotton? Speaking of which, the cash crops that supported farming communities of East Texas where the Evans and Jones families lived shriveled up well before the Depression hit Main Street U.S.A. The boll weevil, cotton blight and cattle tick fever made hard times a way of life for many Texans early in the 20th century.
So Carroll and Mildred grew up knowing that life doesn't give out blessings for free. Hard work, stamina, resourcefulness – those qualities paid dividends. And it's a good thing the young couple realized that important truth, because they sure didn't have much money.
They built their dreams from scratch.
From Chapter Three – Sweet Chariot
(On the bus ride to school, Bill Thompson’s mind wonders back to the previous summer)
During the summer of 1936 -- one of the hottest summers on record across the United States -- Bill and his friends spent much of their free time swimming, splashing, diving and clowning in nearby streams. Their favorite place was on Caney Creek about a mile from the farm where Bill and his family lived.
As his buddies set off down the road raising a cloud of dust behind their bicycles, Bill climbed astride his pet calf, Tony, and prodded him in the direction of Caney Creek. The born-and-bred country boy had faith his animal would get him to the water ahead of the others. It would be faster, of course, if he had a horse but the calf was better in bushy terrain. Bill named his calf Tony after the horse ridden by Tom Mix, the most popular hero in Western movies.
“There was a sandy hill and all that land in there was sandy with grass burs everywhere,” Bill Thompson recalled. “They had to go down the road on their bikes. I’d ride that calf and cut across the fields. I’d always get to the swimming hole before they did.”
It was a summer rich in those qualities that make life thrilling when you are twelve years old and free for a season from the rigors and containment of a classroom. The landscape was a luscious green and smelled of honeysuckle and wildflowers. The sky was clear most days, so wide and blue the beauty and enormity of it just stopped your thoughts, washed away petty annoyances like stickers in the grass and mosquitoes buzzing near your ears, and distilled a profound sense of well-being into being alive at that very moment. The weather was sultry but filled with rare adventures for Bill and his best friends, Joe Busby, Leo Warren and Randall Rodgers, all twelve or so and nearing that mysterious and magical benchmark when you transform into a teenager. The boys carried firecrackers and canon balls in the pockets of their jeans from a stockpile left over from the Fourth of July. And they discovered the amazing power of explosives.
“We’d take a can and punch a hole in it, put a big firecracker inside and pack the can down into the sand. When the firecracker blew, the can shot up like a rocket.”
From Chapter Five – Wildcats’ Pep Rally
Alvin Gerdes, New London’s star athlete, could recall all the big plays from all the football games that season. Football is a thrilling sport for those who are really good at it, and Gerdes was really good.
Whatever the scene, the fields were always a little dusty in those days, except when it rained and turned the contest into a muddy free-for-all. He could see, hear, smell and feel segments from some of the games as vividly in his memory as scenes in a movie flickering through his thoughts:
Then after the dust settles slowly downward, the grunts and groans subside, and the stripped-shirted official sorts through the sprawling pile of bodies, an announcer on the public address system calls the play:
Gerdes carried for twelve. First down Wildcats!
A burst of applause and wild cheering from one side of the grandstand, while the opposite side hoots and boos. The teams huddle. Break with a clap. Form lines opposing one another. A lanky, freckle-faced quarterback, standing some distance back from the center, calls the signal. One, two, hut! The pigskin sails in a low wobbling arch like a plump chicken taking flight. The ball is handed away to one back who deftly switches it to another who makes a reverse sweep away from the flow of runners. The stiff-arm comes up, wham! A big boy in a grass-stained red jersey and worn leather helmet tumbles down. Clumps of sod and grass fly away from the runner’s cleats. He gallops. Another quick stiff-arm. Wham! Another big boy in a red jersey hits the ground. Then a collision of bodies near the sidelines, raising a cloud of yellow dust. A shrill whistle pierces the crisp October air. Blood glistens. The announcer, truly excited now, calls the play:
Number 47 Alvin Gerdes for a spectacular carry of twenty-two yards! What speed! That boy’s faster than greased lightning! First down London Wildcats!
London’s cheerleaders pipe in from the sidelines: “Cigarettes, cigarettes, rolled in cotton, the Gaston Red Devils sure are rotten!”
The Wildcat band, resplendent in blue and gold caps and capes, rushes into a drum-and-bugle fight song to prep the team for the next play.
Gaston’s fifty-member pep squad, outfitted in maroon gabardine, belted jackets with three rows of gold braid on front and on each sleeve, join the Red Devil cheerleaders in an urgent chorus: “Locomotive, locomotive, steam, steam, steam! Pull together, pull together, team, team, team!”
Cheers rise high into the big Texas sky, and then fade as the dust settles once more and the ritual closes on another Friday afternoon.
From Chapter Ten – 3:17 p.m. March 18, 1937
The first wave of responders – oil men, shopkeepers, truck drivers, car salesmen – washed onto the wreckage. Nearly all had someone to find, but to look at this great disjointed mass was to lose hope. L.A. “Tiger” Mathis, Donald’s older brother, did not know even where to begin looking. He joined a group of men who formed a line and started pulling debris from the huge pile and passing it, hand-to-hand, away.
A blizzard of paper from loose-leaf binders lay scattered throughout the wreckage and across the campus. Hundreds of textbooks had been tossed helter-skelter, mocking the order and knowledge of the civilization whose story they told. On a small blood-smeared pamphlet, mashed into the debris, was written, “Tips on First Aid.”
Waggoner’s eyes swept the detritus, and locked on the monstrosity at its heart. He muttered a prayer at the wreckage, even as its worst came into focus. Waggoner walked numbly forward into a field of small bodies, crushed and torn and missing pieces, and it was too much even to cry.
From Chapter Eleven – Thunder on a Clear Day
Bill Thompson’s heart slowed down as he sank into a state of shock.
The previous instant, a flicker in time, lodged in his brain as a flash of some moment in his future: déjà vu waiting to occur.
It was strange -- whirling through space like his school desk had become a wild carnival ride. He twirled over and over in a realm between life and death until the boy, compacted inside a tangled mass of debris, was sucked back to earth by forces of gravity at war with the physics of exploding gas. Bill was encased in darkness.
Chapter Thirteen – Valley of Death at Sundown
E.D. Powell was at work in his garden about a quarter of a mile from the school. He heard a loud boom and felt the ground shake. Powell, an oil field worker, figured a storage tank had blown up. A moment later he saw “a great cloud of smoke circling skyward in the direction of the school.” Arriving at the scene, he saw bodies which had been blown onto the campus and several hanging from shattered windows. He began digging into the debris, pulling bodies from it and keeping an eye out for his own children. He first found Edna, 12, and then Eloise, 14.
“My heart was gone,” Powell said. “They were our babies.”
Chapter Fourteen – Mother Frances
When he raced into the house, Olen Poole caught his mother off guard. She knew nothing about an explosion. “When I told her, of course, she went to crying.”
“I told her all my brothers were all right.”
Olen that evening didn’t have empty spaces across from him at the dinner table, such as those at tables in many homes in New London. But there was an unaccustomed anguish in his heart.
Charles Hasbrook, his best friend, was dead. Gone. Just like that.
Chapter Sixteen – Daybreak March 19
Houston Post reporter Pat McNealy Barnes saw a woman standing in the rain staring at the wreckage. She was holding a scuffed brown oxford shoe.
“Is that your child’s shoe?” Barnes said.
“Maxine,” she said. “They haven’t found Maxine yet.”
“What’s your name?”
The woman didn’t answer. She just kept staring at the wreckage.
The storm clouds had swept on to other regions, and in the darkness around the campus a few morning birds sang in the dripping trees.
As the sun rose, casting vague light across the scene of wreckage and chaos from the night before, a mother and father sat on the ground next the body of their son. They were silent and motionless. A reporter walking by them at dawn left them alone.
Nearby, a pair of oil field workers held gently to the arms of a mother, soaked and bedraggled from the downpour. The men were trying to convince her to go home, away from the desolate scene.
“I can’t go away,” she said. “I can’t! My baby may be alive in there and calling for me.”
After a while, the men gradually and gently, each holding her, escorted the woman across an area where the ankle-deep mud was crisscrossed with the tracks of trucks and oil field equipment. Even from a distance, it was plain to see she was crying her heart out.