Bath Massacre: America's First School Bombing (18 page)

Fifteen minutes had passed since the initial explosion at the school and the fire at Kehoe’s. Amid the screams, debris, and mass confusion, it seemed more like an eternity compressed by chaos.

Workers peeled back more of the roof. Two boys, huddled beneath the debris and clearly terrified, were released. They needed no help from the rescuers at that point, picking themselves up and running away from the field of destruction as fast as they could.

If two boys had been found alive then there might be more in that section. Gingerly the crew lifted out huge beams splintered and sagging onto piles of collapsed bricks. The work was steady but agonizingly slow
as they realized the form of another child lay just beneath their hands. Their work became more heated, brick by brick by brick.

Fig. 7. The temporary morgue.
(Courtesy of the Bath School Museum.)

The child, a boy, was covered with dust and did not appear to be breathing.

The work continued. They reached the body, preparing to transfer the tiny corpse to the growing lawn morgue.

Suddenly the child sat up. He rubbed his eyes, looked at the workers and let out a “phew!” of relief.

Before they could get his name, the boy raced across the mountainous debris and into the crowd.
⁷¹

Monty and Mable Ellsworth ran across the front lawn of the school, desperate to find their son. He’s safe, someone told them. We’ve got to help the children inside.

Ellsworth looked at the rubble. Beneath the heavy roof he could see a group of five and six year olds trapped in a grisly pile. Their small body parts—heads, arms, and legs—poked out at random from the debris. A sickly cover of dust, plaster, and blood made it impossible to tell who the children were.

With no cranes or heavy equipment immediately available, work was done with the most rudimentary of tools—steady hands and strong backs. The heavy roof was a major concern. It needed to be wrenched free if the men were to reach the children trapped farther inside the north wing. Perhaps it could be moved with rope.

“I have lots of rope in my slaughterhouse,” said Ellsworth. He ran back to his Ford pickup and headed for home.
⁷²

Detluff headed toward the telephone exchange on Main Street. Run by seventeen-year-old Lenora Babcock, the exchange was Bath’s communications center. Certainly calls had to be made to inform the authorities in Lansing and ask for help from nearby communities. Within all the confusion, it was important to make sure no one forgot this task.

Babcock worked the lines furiously. She called Lansing, Dewitt, and other nearby towns. “The school has been blown up!” she repeated over and over. “We need help.”
⁷³

Huyck—still a calm center in the maelstrom—was at the telephone exchange as well. Now that the initial rescues were under way, the superintendent had taken it upon himself to make sure calls went out for help. “Bert,” Huyck told Detluff, “there is no use calling anybody. I have done all that can be done. I have called the State Department and the State Police, and there is no help that you can get. It is all done.”

“All right,” Detluff replied. “I will go and get a private doctor for my girl.”
⁷⁴

It took only moments for Chief Hugo Delfs, head of the Lansing Fire Department, to assess the situation once he got word of the unfolding disaster. The details from Bath indicated a disaster of unprecedented dimensions. Delfs’s response had to be of the highest order. He first sent out a chemical firefighting unit under the supervision of his assistant chief Paul Lefke. Next went a truck with telegraph and telephone equipment. Communications, Delfs knew, were vital.

The trucks roared toward Bath, sirens wailing. It took just twelve minutes from the time Delfs got the call for the rescue vehicles to arrive on the scene.
⁷⁵

Assistant Chief Lefke couldn’t believe his eyes. He’d seen disasters before, but nothing in his professional career had prepared him for this. The school looked like a building destroyed by guns or bombs during the world war. Bodies were on the ground, the wounded, the dying, the dead—all children. Adults were running everywhere. Some carried bleeding children; some provided supplies to workers. Others knelt beside small, still bodies. The cries of these parents were ghastly, the sounds of people ripped to the core with sudden grief.

Their wails were mixed with unearthly sounds emerging from the school rubble, terrified children screaming for deliverance.
⁷⁶

The chief of security for the Fisher Body Plant, an automobile supply factory, in nearby Flint, was in Bath for the day. He heard the explosion, ran to the scene, and found a telephone. He called his superiors at Fisher, telling them, “Send every man you can to Bath.”

Next he called the REO Motor Car plant in Lansing. Today the two companies weren’t competitors.
⁷⁷

Job Sleight at the roadside saw someone drive by in a Ford pickup. For a moment he thought it was Monty Ellsworth. Slowly he realized it was Andrew Kehoe. What on earth was he doing?

Kehoe waved and continued driving east.
⁷⁸

Homer Jennison started his morning with plans to deliver some wheat in town. He filled his cart and flicked the reins of his horses. A machine passed by. The driver looked at Jennison, nodded his head in recognition, and continued onward. The man looked familiar.
⁷⁹

Looming in the distance was a farm, its buildings ablaze. Jennison picked up the trot of his horses.

He saw Job Sleight at the side of the road. He asked about the mysterious driver.

“Wasn’t that Kehoe?” Jennison called out.

Sleight replied that he thought it was.
⁸⁰

Monty Ellsworth drove south from the school, then turned west toward home. He saw Kehoe driving east into town. Kehoe raised his hand, waved at Ellsworth, and gave a strange grin. It struck Ellsworth that he could see both rows of Kehoe’s teeth.
⁸¹

One youngster, pedaling his bicycle as fast as he could to get home, passed a Ford truck heading into town. Although the child was distressed, the driver ignored him.
⁸²

Sleight caught a ride to town on the running board of a neighbor’s automobile. A war zone greeted him. Wounded children were laid out in front of Frank Smith’s house.

Someone asked Sleight to bring water. He got a pail and took water to the children on Smith’s lawn.

“What’s the matter with me?” asked one boy. “I can’t move.”

Sleight could see the boy trying to wiggle his shoulder. A fist-sized lump jutted from the child’s head.

“What is on my left hand?” the child asked.

It struck Sleight that the boy’s mangled hand looked like a pumice stone.
⁸³

One kindergartner ran wildly from the scene as fast as his legs could move. His mother met him at the door of their home, her eyes glued to the disaster unfolding at the school. Seeing her baby, coming home safe filled her with relief.

“Why are you carrying that chair?” she asked.

It was only then that the child realized he’d picked up his chair when he fled the school and carried it all the way home.
⁸⁴

Monty Ellsworth threw his ropes and a block and tackle set into the back of his Ford. He jumped back in the truck and raced to the disaster zone.

Just after ten o’clock Charles V. Lane, chief of the Fire Marshall Division of the Michigan Department of Public Safety, got word of an explosion in Bath. He headed to the scene.
⁸⁵

As he woke, Raymond Eschtruth realized someone was carrying him. The stranger brought the boy across the lawn and placed him on the sidewalk with some other children.

Raymond’s mind was in a fog. He felt no pain, though he was amazed at all the dust covering his body. His eyes and ears were filled with plaster and blood.

Someone came up to him, a neighbor, and sat down. Her brother, one of Raymond’s classmates, was dead, she told him.

It was all so confusing. Raymond didn’t know what to think.
⁸⁶

Frank Smith’s house, located across the street from the school, was one of many homes serving as a temporary triage center. Wounded children were being brought there, then loaded into automobiles for transport to hospitals in Lansing. Rows of hastily installed cots filled the living room; other wounded children were tucked into the Smiths’ bed.

Superintendent Huyck, fresh from the telephone exchange, looked over the situation. With Smith’s wife Leone at his side, he paused at the makeshift bedside of one little girl.

“I think she is dying,” he said. Leone Smith thought so, too.

Huyck asked Mrs. Smith if she could accommodate more children. She told him yes; as she went upstairs to open more rooms for the wounded, Huyck quickly went back to the killing zone to see what else he could do.

Minutes later, as Leone came back downstairs, the house was rocked by another explosion.
⁸⁷

Flames licked the Kehoe house and barn, rapidly consuming the structures. Periodically there was a loud
bang from
inside, as though someone had randomly fired a gun.

Driving east, Chief Lane saw a farm with buildings ablaze; he drove by the inferno but didn’t stop. The school disaster took precedence over a house fire.
⁸⁸