Bath Massacre: America's First School Bombing (17 page)

One look and Willett Whitney realized the school was a disaster area. He hurried from the wreck that was the north wing to the east side, hoping to find someone in charge. High school students, desperate to escape, were perched atop the roof. Superintendent Huyck came around the side of the building. In the midst of chaos, Huyck maintained his strong sense of professionalism. “Go and get some ladders,” he told Whitney, “and help get those scholars off the roof.”

Whitney did as he was told.
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He ran into Arthur Woodman, who helped the older man bring a ladder back to the building.
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A fledgling rescue effort was under way.

Lee Mast woke up in a daze. A school desk was on top of him. He shook it off and looked up. Through the dust in the air, he could see the sky from a hole in the roof. Ahead he made out one of his classmates, Virginia Richardson, walking across the rubble. Lee stood up and took some hesitant steps. Unsure of what to do, he followed Virginia out of the school. An adult, someone who had some authority, must be told that something terrible happened.

He was joined by other children, some running, others stumbling in shock. Covered with white plaster dust, Lee and his classmates looked like ghostly apparitions wandering through the streets.
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Mrs. Warner ran to the back of the school. She saw, to her horror, a youngster lying still in the grass; the boy was clearly dead.
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But sounds of
life abounded with the cries coming from the rear of the building. She saw Superintendent Huyck on the roof, trying his best to make order from chaos. High school students, many ready to jump from the precarious height of the dangerous building, surrounded him. Fearing they would be injured, Huyck begged the students to hang on for a few more minutes. He spotted Mrs. Warner and called out to her. “Please,” he beseeched, “bring ladders and axes.”
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Once Frank Smith regained his bearings, he darted up a staircase, Harrington close behind him. He could see through the hallway to the south door of the school, which appeared to be relatively safe. Children from Miss Sterling’s and Miss Gutekunst’s rooms were lined up as though ready for a fire safety drill. Many times throughout the school year children had to practice how to evacuate in case of fire; now, with a real emergency at hand, the first-and second-grade students were putting theory into practice. Smith led them outside to safety; he noticed that Harrington was holding the door.
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Willis Cressman looked out the windows of the assembly hall. He couldn’t see a thing through the glass, which seemed like it was enveloped in some kind of dusty cloud.

Then the cloud broke. Through the dust, Cressman saw one student jumping from the window to the ground, some twelve or fourteen feet below.

Superintendent Huyck didn’t like this at all. He implored them not to jump, just please wait for someone to bring a ladder.

This was one time the students didn’t care what their superintendent had to say. Windows opened, and teenagers took flight. Beneath the windows was a shack. Students jumped onto the shack’s roof, quickly got their bearings, and made the second leap to the ground. It didn’t seem that dangerous, and it certainly looked safer than staying in the assembly room.

Cressman made his leap, landed, and realized that the shack’s roof wasn’t big enough to hold everyone trying to escape. He made a second jump to the ground; it felt like he instantaneously hit the earth. Other teenagers landed all around him, thumping hard on impact. Cressman wasn’t sure if they were jumping or falling. Some kids had broken legs.
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A little girl’s body was suspended in the rubble by her heels, limp and torn like a discarded rag doll. Doris Johns, dead at age seven, hung upside
down in plain view until someone got through to dislodge her body.
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Rubble rained down on eleven-year-old Dean Sweet. His head was badly slashed, one leg was broken, and his chest was smashed.
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Elsewhere in the ruins Dean’s thirteen-year-old sister Ava couldn’t understand why her classroom had been plunged into inky darkness. She remembered hearing a terrific roar, then being hit by things from above. Now she couldn’t see a thing and couldn’t move much either. A board lay atop her skull. The skin was cracked open; a map of black and blue mottled her face. Her right arm felt useless. Ava, trapped in a coffinlike space, was terrified that the layer of debris holding her in would collapse any moment and bury her.

Through the black, she could hear someone nearby, her friend Lillian Wildt. The two girls talked to one another, trying to figure out what happened and how they could get out of this trap.

There were twenty-six children in her class. All Ava knew of them now was that Lillian was alive and close.
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Ava and Lillian remembered an old lesson about what to do in sudden accidents: keep still. Now they took heed of the wisdom, reserving energy and oxygen should they need them later.
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When Sidney Armstrong and the Howells pulled up to Kehoe’s farm, they saw an inferno engulfing much of the property. Hot winds whipped the fire, threatening to set Armstrong’s automobile ablaze. Quickly, the Howells got out so Armstrong could move his machine to safer ground.

Through the thick smoke and flame, Howell could make out a small figure next to one of the buildings. It was a man backing up a truck. The man got out of the vehicle, pulled a funnel from the gas tank, and then got back in. The truck pulled forward, disappearing into the smoke, then emerged again.

Howell could finally make out the driver. Kehoe. There was a wild gleam in his eyes, the look of someone trying to focus on a thousand visions of perdition all at once.

Before turning out onto the road, Kehoe pulled his machine up to the Howells.

“Boys,” he said, “you are my friends. You better get out of here.

“You better go down to the school.”

Stunned, Howell and his sons ran to the road and looked for Armstrong. Kehoe passed them, heading east.

In the direction of the school.
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The classroom where Eva Gubbins was giving her sixth graders their geography exam was now in ruins, smashed by the falling second floor. Gubbins was in a haze, trapped by debris. A concrete beam had crushed her legs; an iron radiator was pinned against her spine. Blood seeped from gashes on her head. Gradually she became aware of her environment, her eyes adjusting to the darkened interior of the wreckage.

Just above her face, she made out the features of a schoolboy. The same beam that now pinned her in the rubble had flattened the boy’s body against her legs. The child’s eyes were wide open, his face just inches from hers.

She tried to move her legs, but they held fast.

The boy didn’t move; he made no sound.

To her horror, Gubbins realized that the child was dead. His eyes were frozen wide open just above hers. Her screams joined other cries within the rubble. She tried to turn away, but her head was wedged tight. All Gubbins could do to avoid the boy’s death stare was to close her eyes.
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Now on the ground, Emory Huyck picked his way through the rubble. Bodies of dead children were being pulled out; other children were digging their way out, emerging from piles of brick and wood like dust-covered moles.

Huyck gingerly picked up one boy and carried him across the bricks. The child remained unconscious as the superintendent hurried him to safety. He carried the boy to the telephone exchange office, laid him on a couch someone put on the front porch, and went back to the school.

The boy, fifth grader Carlton Hollister, it was later said, was the first injured—but alive—victim pulled from the rubble.
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One moment he’d been taking the sixth-grade geography exam; now Earl Proctor was wedged tight, unable to see anything. Intense pain seared up and down his lower back and into his legs. He tried to move, but the best Earl could do was wiggle his fingers a bit.
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Through the darkness, nine-year-old Raymond Eschtruth stared at a beam of light about the size of a dime. He called for the janitor. No answer.

Maybe I’m dreaming, Raymond thought to himself.

Gradually he realized this was no dream. Unable to move, he concentrated on what he’d done earlier that morning. He was pretty sure he’d gotten all his chores done. But how he’d gotten trapped beneath the bricks, that was a mystery. The last thing he remembered was being in Miss Weatherby’s room, then all went black. He hadn’t heard any noise.

Raymond felt something pressing against him from above. It was another child. He wriggled a little and finally was able to move his right arm.

How on earth had he and the other kid ended up like this? It was too much to comprehend. Mercifully, Raymond lost consciousness.
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Elsewhere in the rubble, Raymond’s eleven-year-old sister Marian—like her brother—thought she was in the midst of some terrible dream. She hadn’t heard the explosion at all. She opened her eyes, wondering if she had just woke from a deep sleep.

Piles of plaster and other debris covered her. Marian screamed. She didn’t stop screaming, not for hours, hoping someone would hear her.
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The explosion at 8:45 drew people from their homes, customers from the barbershop and pharmacy on Main Street, businessmen, housewives, and farmers from the fields surrounding Bath. The scene was dire. It was later estimated that 230 to 275 children were in the building at the time of the blast. Just about every family in the area had at least one child at Bath Consolidated School; some had more.

The familiar faces of Bath were all at the scene. Glenn Smith— Frank’s younger brother—the local postmaster who was celebrating his birthday on this day. His father-in-law, Nelson McFarren. Leonard Hiatt, who operated a Standard Oil gas station. Simeon Ewing, Bath’s grocer and the chief township officer. Jay Pope and his son-in-law, Lawrence Hart. Ed Drumheller, the local highway commissioner.

Homes were opened as temporary hospitals. Bedsheets became bandages as wounded children were brought out of the wreckage. Mrs. Warner and other women made coffee and sandwiches; the men would need food to keep up their strength for the heavy work.

The school was a site of epic destruction and epic heartbreak. Parents, desperate to find their children, clawed with bare and bloodied hands through the wreckage. On the sidewalk in front of the school, one man knelt over the body of his dead son. Wracked with grief and shock, the man slammed his hands into the ground over and over, screaming prayers.
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A mother and father, voices drained by shock, wandered the grounds, asking in a heavy German accent, “Have you seen our liddle Mary?”
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Parents called out names. The lucky ones had frantic reunions, pulling their dust-covered children into tight hugs.

Slowly, on a grassy field in front of the school, a morgue was growing. Blankets covered each body as dead children were laid out. Mothers and fathers, partially in hope of what they wouldn’t find, but mostly in dread of what might be underneath, gingerly lifted blanket edges for a glimpse of the body. Now and then, a howling cry of anguish pierced the chaos of rescue as parents identified a dead child.

Working through her own pain, Evelyn Paul shepherded her students toward the light. She climbed over a window ledge, dropped to the ground, and commanded her girls to jump into her arms.
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One girl, Albert Detluff’s daughter Marcia, had a deep wound in her ankle.
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Her father, guided it would seem by sheer parental instinct, arrived on the scene within moments. With help of his mother-in-law, Detluff carried his bleeding daughter to safer ground and then home where he bandaged her ankle. Once Marcia was stabilized, Detluff went back to the school to see what more he could do.
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