Bath Massacre: America's First School Bombing (15 page)

Having dropped off Ralph at school, Josephine Cushman headed to the woods to pick wildflowers with some of her girlfriends. The woods just south of the school near the cemetery, were blooming with wildflowers and lilies. Josephine had received a B in deportment class, the study of manners and personal conduct, and as a result she didn’t have to take any final exams. Now freshman year was done, and it felt great to be free from school for the summer.

Besides, it was a wonderful morning to pick flowers.
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Carlton Hollister, a fifth grader, and his classmates normally met on the first floor in Mrs. Hart’s classroom. This morning was different. Because the sixth grade needed to take a geography exam it was decided that the older class would switch rooms with the fifth graders since Mrs. Hart’s classroom was more conducive to testing. The fifth graders marched through the hallway in single file, passing their sixth-grade peers on the stairway.

Now resituated, Carlton took a seat in the center of the second-floor classroom. Naturally curious to see whose seat he had, he lifted the desk lid and pulled out a book. It belonged to Galen Hart, a good friend of Carlton’s. The two boys often played together and were in the same church Sunday school class, too.
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Beneath the north wing of the school, in a quiet nook in the basement, a small alarm clock ticked away. When the hands reached 8:45 a wire connected to the clock set off a spark. The spark started a chain reaction, firing electricity along a series of thin wires. Electrons raced along these preset pathways, careening along lines rigged throughout the basement.

Throughout their journey, the electrons heated the wires. At the end
of each wire were blasting caps. The hot current ignited the blasting caps, sending more electrons into caches of dynamite and pyrotol.

Electrons smashed into each other with unrelenting fury. The minuteness of the particles belied their energy. On this bright May morning, a carefully planned trail of electricity unleashed an explosion of spectacular proportions beneath the north wing of the Bath Consolidated School.

At about 8:45, in her henhouse tending to the family chickens, Lulu Harte heard a loud
thump
on the roof. She went outside to see what had happened, then heard what she instantly thought was a gunshot coming from the Kehoe property across the road.

She had seen Kehoe drive his machine off the property around seven or so that morning. Now Lulu saw smoke curling and billowing from the roof of Kehoe’s corncrib. In a moment, flames licked the structure.

Lulu ran to find her husband. Kehoe’s corncrib is on fire, she hastily told him. They raced to the front and saw that Kehoe’s barn was ablaze as well, flames ripping through the building. Smoke, thick as fog, was pouring from the Kehoe house. The Hartes heard more gunshot noises blasting inside the home.

“Don’t go over there!” cried David. “He certainly set it himself.”
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After Harrington arrived, Smith took him down to the school basement. They entered the small pump house, and Harrington began his work.

The two men went at it for about fifteen minutes. Then, without warning, an enormous roar sounded throughout the cellar. The force of it threw Harrington against the wall.

He struggled to get his bearings. He could see Smith trying to regain his footing. “For God’s sake,” Smith said, “what happened?”
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No matter how rock steady a building is, when met with the right amount of force it will collapse like a flimsy house of cards. On April 19, 1995, using a crude bomb made of ammonium nitrate, an agricultural fertilizer, and nitromethane, a highly volatile gasoline, Timothy McVeigh easily blew off the front of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The morning of September 11, 2001, terrorists using hijacked airplanes, fat
with jet fuel, as missiles, effectively laid to waste the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. These edifices, seemingly mighty structures, proved to be incredibly fragile.

Fig. 4.
(Photograph by Fred A. Stevens.)

So it was, too, on this morning under the north wing of the Bath Consolidated School, a building meant to last for generations. Dynamite and pyrotol combined in a powerful ball of energy. This forced the walls of the north wing upward about four feet. They fell back to earth, collapsing outward with a crash of wood, glass, plaster, and iron. The roof of the building slammed down onto the crumbling walls. A cloud of dust hovered above the ruins.
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For a moment there was silence. And then a cacophony of screams.

The western wall of Leona Gutekunst’s classroom blasted into the room, smashing onto the empty desks. Had she not agreed to read one more tale to the children they would have been crushed beneath the collapsing rubble. “That story saved their lives,” she later realized.
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Fig. 5. Hazel Weatherby.
(Courtesy of the Bath School Museum.)

Bernice Sterling, the first-grade teacher, felt a sudden eruption as though a powerful earthquake had hit the classroom. She rode the floor as it shot into the air a few feet. Her students, who only moments before had been marching around the room for morning exercises, were instantly hurled like rag dolls, slamming into walls, crashing out of windows.
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Throughout the rest of building walls shook and floors buckled. In the assembly room, where Superintendent Emory Huyck was giving exams to seniors, light globes on the ceiling swung wildly. One broke loose and crashed to the floor.
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Windows of nearby homes were blown out. The blast sounded throughout the farmlands of Bath Township, and continued to echo for miles beyond
. On several farms, it was later said, horses terrified by the exploding roar broke loose from their plows and scattered.

Mrs. LaHall Warner, a widow who lived just a block from Bath Consolidated, was putting a new curtain on her front porch window. She heard a powerful noise rock the air; a moment later she was pelted with glass.

Immediately, she ran outside. In horror she watched as the roof collapsed onto the remains of the school’s north wing.
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Willitt Whitney, a sixty-six-year-old retiree, stood on top of a chair in his kitchen, washing the woodwork over the door frame. There was a roar from down the street. The chair rocked against the noise, sending Whitney hard onto the floor. “My God, what is that?” he said. Mrs. Whitney, already out the door, cried out that something had happened at the schoolhouse.
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Debris rained down on the classroom of twenty-one-year-old Hazel Weatherby, the third-and fourth-grade teacher. In a desperate, instinctive move, she reached out to shield her students. She pulled two children into her arms.

As Arthur Woodman reached for the falling baseball, he heard a tremendous sound. The force of the noise knocked him to the ground. He looked up to see the school roof caving in. It collapsed with a roar, engulging the air with thick plaster dust. Through the dust, Arthur saw the crushed remains of the building and the forms of small children helplessly trapped in the rubble. Their screams hurtled through the foggy dust.
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Two boilers, suspended from the basement ceiling, were wrenched loose from their supports. They fell hard, closing off any connection between the north and south sections of the school. They may also have loosened some wires planted in the ceiling.
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The school roof crashed down on Carlton Hollister and his fifth-grade classmates. The second-floor classroom smashed down onto the sixth graders below. Had the two grades not switched classrooms just minutes earlier, their places would have been reversed.
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The blast heaved Sylvester Barnard, a fifteen-year-old sophomore, through a window. He landed with a thud. His body ached, but he managed to get up.

Bodies were strewn throughout the area. Some dead, some dying, some broken and wracked with unbearable pain.

It was too much to comprehend. Sylvester’s eyes fluttered as he passed out.
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