Shop teacher Lemmie Butler, in his classroom on the lower level of the rear of the building, finished repairing the temperamental electric sander. He walked toward the power switch—a short metal blade, hinged on a wall-mounted plate, with two contacts open to the air spilling through the crawlspace door beside it.
John Dial, a 15-year-old freshman, bent his palms around the sides of a board and lifted it toward the band saw’s blade. He turned his head to the right and for a frozen moment caught Mr. Butler’s eye.
Butler turned and lifted the switch. Metal neared charged metal. A blue filament of plasma arced.
The air caught fire.
A violent heat, the concussive single beat of a monstrous heart, conjured chaos from oxygen. The shop became a blast furnace, white hot. Lemmie Butler died first, scorched and twisted inside a burning shock wave. The blast flicked Dial and his classmates backward into the sharp concrete cloud of a disintegrating wall.
Flames raced back through the four-foot door into the crawlspace. The atmosphere fed madly on itself in a frenzy of deflagration. Every molecule of 62,500 cubic feet of air screamed and rent itself away from every other. A concrete basement wall, 250 feet long, cracked from the ground and tilted on its heels. Soil below and sturdy foundations would yield no more, caging the screaming pressure, leaving one way out.
The dragon spread its wings.
At its base the school trembled, intensifying to a menacing rumble until, mere seconds later, the entire structure shuddered violently. The explosion burst skyward as if 70 lbs. of TNT had detonated beneath each square foot of basement ceiling.
In the English class above the shop, teacher Lizzie Ellen Thompson felt the tremor sweep through the building as the floor, walls and ceiling rattled and shook.
“Jesus help us,” she said.
The maelstrom swallowed her.
The first floor shattered like porcelain as a blazing torrent erupted through the poured concrete slab upon which the long building stood. Cement, timber and brick splintered. Rolling balls of gas, burning blood-orange, howled upward in a dense, searing, 40-ton hurricane. The first floor, blown to shrapnel, rushed toward the ceiling. Window panes shattered in sprays of glass. Locker cabinets spilled forward and added a storm of loose-leaf paper, book bags, coats and hats to the collapsing hallways. Desks and chair hurled apart. Drinking fountains snapped loose from plumbing fixtures. Book shelves disintegrated. Clocks spun free and sailed through space, smashing apart. Classroom walls disconnected and were pulverized into clouds of chalky gray powder. Throughout were children and teachers, faces, fingers, nerves and bone. All was being torn to pieces.
Helen Beard, walking through the hall with her sister at her side, suddenly was propelled upward, higher and higher, until she seemed to float alone and terrified in the sky. Twisting downward as her consciousness began to flee, she saw toy-like cars and tiny men. The men were running. Nothing made sense.
Steel lockers shot through brick walls like cannon balls. A textbook soared up through the ceiling and pierced the roof, leaving part of the book protruding through the top. A phonograph flew out of the music room and burst against a wall. A pair of scissors, riding the blast wave, stabbed deeply into the plaster of another wall. Thick timbers snapped like pencils. Iron girders doubled over and twisted, slicing in two the people between them.
Students in Miss Louise Arnold’s room felt the second-story floor buckle beneath them, and tear away from the walls. Children felt their stomachs reach for their throats as the room dropped like a giant elevator. What was left banged down against the ground floor. The children, scattered and dumbfounded, gazed at one another with faces powder-white from plaster dust. Miss Arnold and four students lay dead.
Twenty-two students in Miss Grace McDavid’s English class in the rear room of the north wing were taking a test on Treasure Island.
“We heard a noise like a giant fire cracker,” Calvin Corrie, 14, told a Tyler Courier-Times reporter. “Then it sounded like the building was crackling.”
Miss McDavid screamed for the children to all hurry to the front of the room. They rushed toward her and huddled around her as the roof crashed down behind them and a gritty, choking cloud of gray dust swirled into the room.
Shrapnel in Miss Lizzie Thompson’s English class spun through the air, slashed open Corine Gary’s scalp and crashed into the girl’s shoulder. A mass of tumbling bricks and mortar collapsed on Miss Thompson, crushing her.
Books in the library spilled off the shelves. Joe King, reading a news article about Amelia Earhart and daydreaming about a sports event scheduled for the next day, was thrown from his chair as a deep, rolling rumble shook the floor. The walls split and the explosion’s fierce pressure forced a mass of thick dust through the gap, filling the library in seconds.
At calamity’s fringe, some perceived the explosion as eerily muffled. Joe Watson, a running back on the football team, was in study hall reading Gone with the Wind when “all of a sudden, it came.”