Bath Massacre: America's First School Bombing (19 page)

Leona Weldon, a secretary in the Lansing office of the American Red Cross, wasn’t a field worker, but she knew how to pull people together. She started when a staff member at the Social Service Bureau, located just across the hall, notified the Red Cross of the explosion. Thrust into a crucible, Weldon kept her cool. She started making calls. Organization of a relief effort was under way.
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Dart Lang and John Snively, Consumers Power employees, headed toward the schoolhouse, ready to help. John Curtis, a fellow Consumers Power worker who had already been at the scene, stopped the men. “If you haven’t got a strong heart,” he warned Lang, “you’d better not go up.”

“Somebody better go up,” Lang replied.

Lang suddenly heard a car behind him. The machine was clearly going pretty fast and wasn’t going to let anything get in its way.

“Hot rail!” Lang yelled to Snively. The two men dove into a nearby ditch.

The automobile, which Lang could see was a Ford pickup, drove on. “What is the matter with that man?” said Lang. “Is he crazy?”

He watched as the machine swerved to the right, in front of the wreckage of Bath Consolidated School.
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Jay Pope looked over the smashed school roof. Perhaps, he said to his son-in-law, Lawrence Hart, we can pry the roof up with a telephone pole. Hart agreed. He headed toward the road, where he ran into Frank Smith.

“Let’s get a telephone pole,” said Hart.

The two needed a car big enough to carry a pole. Hart’s truck was at the grain elevator in town, too far to run for the moment. In the crowd, Hart saw Huyck’s wife Ethel. The Huycks owned a four-door Ford sedan, a machine big enough to transport a telephone pole and then some.

Ethel Huyck told Hart and Smith they could use her car but her husband had the keys. Could the superintendent be found amid the confusion?

“Maybe I can start the car with my jackknife,” Hart said.

He got under the dashboard and fiddled at the ignition with his knife blade. A spark lit up, kicking off the machine’s engine.

Hart and Smith drove three blocks to a spot where they knew some unused telephone poles lay on the ground. With the help of men already at the scene, including Smith’s brother Glenn, they managed to fit a telephone pole into the sedan.

They drove back quickly, pulling up to the school. Hart didn’t want to park too close to the building. What was left of it could collapse without warning.

In his rearview mirror, Hart noticed a Ford truck directly behind him drawing up to the curb.
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A young garage mechanic, Elton McConnell, had been helping pull children from the debris. For some reason, he left the scene, passing a truck
as it pulled up. McConnell recognized the machine as Andrew Kehoe’s, a man he knew from around town.
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Dart Lang saw a flash and heard an explosion. It sounds like a bomb dropped from an airplane, he thought. A great cloud of smoke rose from the street. When it cleared, Kehoe’s machine was gone.
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Within the rubble Beatrice Gibbs was in bad shape. Her left arm and both her legs were fractured. She was bruised and cut all over.

What had happened? It just didn’t make sense. Why, yesterday she had turned ten years old; now she was trapped, broken and bleeding. She could see a radiator dangling just above her. The pain was too much; Beatrice finally passed out.

A sudden
boom
from somewhere nearby shook the debris. Beatrice woke up and opened her eyes. The radiator was gone.
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Always a professional, Chief Lane quickly assessed the frenzied situation. Other people clearly were handling the rescue; he needed to concentrate on his task at hand. He was intent on finding the cause of the explosion. A gut feeling told him that some kind of high-test gasoline had caused it. Rural schools throughout the area employed this volatile fuel—commonly used to power airplanes—to run furnaces. This practice, Lane felt, was dangerous, potentially deadly, a devastating accident waiting to happen.

Lane poked through the basement but saw no signs of a gasoline explosion. Maybe someone upstairs, perhaps another fire official on the scene, would have more information.

Debris was everywhere. Lane stepped over a chunk of what looked like rubble.

It was strangely quiet down there. Compared to the chaos outside, Lane was surrounded by relative silence.
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Although she didn’t take any children into her home, Mrs. Warner’s house was a hub of activity. People came for bedding and cots to be used in the triage area. Now Mrs. Warner was making sandwiches and coffee. It was hard to believe that just fifteen minutes had passed.

Without warning a second explosion—louder this time—sent Mrs. Warner reeling. She heard glass breaking as windows shattered. A lock blew out of one of her doors; screws skittered across the floor like mice.
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Don Ewing went from playing catch to rescuing children. He wondered what could have caused such a horrendous explosion. Maybe a boiler in the cellar had exploded. If not that, maybe something in the chemistry laboratory had gone horribly wrong.

He pulled a few victims from the wreckage of the school and then went looking for his mother. Suddenly Ewing heard a second explosion.

A car must have caught fire, he thought. A gas tank must have exploded.
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The explosions at Kehoe’s farm could be heard at the school. One child, safely out of the wreckage, believed the sound was an approaching thunderstorm. We’d better run because it’s going to rain, he thought.

Another boom sounded through the air. Through the treetops, the child saw a ball of flame.
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Lawrence Hart and Frank Smith were joined by a couple of men who helped them get the telephone pole out of Huyck’s sedan. The men dragged the heavy pole toward the collapsed roof where it could be put into place as a crude lever.

Moving the pole was no easy task, but the group was determined. They had got ten or twelve feet when Hart heard another blast. This one knocked him to the ground.
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Age was no impediment when it came to rescuers. Martin Milliman, a spry seventy-two year old, was one of the first on the scene. He’d already pulled four bodies out of the ruins. It wasn’t enough. He was determined to save as many as he could.

He was working over another youngster entombed in the debris, trying to saw a plank that held her fast.

From behind him there was a sudden explosion and the sound of screams. Inexplicably Milliman felt all his strength suddenly vaporize.
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From behind him, Elton McConnell heard an enormous
boom!
He turned to see an automobile blow sky high.
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O. H. Buck, the Consumers Power man, couldn’t believe what he saw. First the burning house, now a school in shambles. He could hear the voices of children crying out from the rubble.

Just as at the house, Buck felt an explosion come from behind, and again was knocked off his feet.

He looked back over his shoulder. A terrible black cloud of smoke mushroomed over what looked like a blasted automobile.
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A loud report shook the air. Raymond Eschtruth and his neighbor jumped. The two boys took off, each in a different direction.

Raymond didn’t realize his leg was broken. He ran hard, getting away from the explosion as fast as he could.
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Another child fleeing from the blast heard someone scream, “The trees are full of it!” What did that mean? Were the trees packed with dynamite?
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Albert Detluff, helping out in the back of the building, heard an enormous roar, the sound of what had to be a second explosion. He ran toward the noise.
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Josephine Cushman froze in amazed horror as metal flew through the air up into the sky.

An airplane, she thought, this was all done by an airplane. We must be under attack.
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George Hall pulled up and saw Huyck standing by Kehoe’s machine. The two men exchanged words.

There was a flash, lighting up Hall’s eyes. He couldn’t believe what he’d just seen. Kehoe just disappeared like in a magic trick.
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Accounts differ as to exactly how it happened. In the madness of the moment, logic and coherence were among the first casualties. What can be strung together from eyewitness accounts and news reports is this.

Kehoe drove up to the school and called Huyck to his machine. The superintendent hurried over, a natural reaction. Kehoe was a school board member and must be informed of the unf0lding situation. It’s unlikely Huyck knew that Kehoe’s farm was ablaze.

When Huyck reached the truck, he asked Kehoe for help. His machine was needed to haul rope and poles for the improvised rescue.

The superintendent put his foot on the running board of the Ford.

“All right,” Kehoe replied. “I’ll take you with me.”

Instantly Huyck was filled with horror. “You know something about this, don’t you?” he blurted.
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Kehoe pulled out either a rifle or a pistol (some thought he flipped a switch), and fired inside the cab of his truck. Huyck may have tried to stop him. Regardless, Kehoe’s shot was on the mark, hitting a cache of dynamite inside the machine.

Flaming balls of gasoline ascended through the air as the car bomb set off a new wave of destruction. The blast ripped Huyck’s and Kehoe’s bodies apart. Limbs were ripped from sockets; skulls burst; bodies flew high into the air.

A wide circle of hot metal shards flew outward from the Ford. It wasn’t just the body of the machine ripping through the air; Kehoe had packed his truck with scraps of metal, used farm implements, nuts, bolts, and nails. The force of the explosion turned these loose items into deadly shrapnel.

The truck explosion, like the schoolhouse bomb, was heard throughout Bath and beyond. At the epicenter already frayed nerves reached the breaking point. People hit the ground. The screams of children and adults wracked the air. Automobiles near the truck bomb caught fire.

The fragmented remains of two adult male bodies slammed across the grounds. They landed far apart, about sixty feet from the scene, a good distance from Kehoe’s exploded truck.

Shrapnel ripped into bodies. A bolt hit Cleo Clayton, who’d escaped from his classroom without injury. It tore into the boy’s stomach and then drove farther into his body, lodging into his spine.
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Anna Perrone, the Italian immigrant, saw the car explode from her vantage point one block away. A burr, about two inches square, tore into her eye. Another piece of metal blew a three-cornered hole in her skull. Amazingly, Perrone’s maternal instincts held fast; neither her baby, Rose, whom she held in her arms, nor her toddler, Dominic, who was at her side, were injured. It was as though Anna willed her children’s safety.
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Steven Stivaviske, a sixth grader, lay in the street with both legs broken. A piece of metal blasted into his arm above the elbow. It stayed in his body, resting sickeningly just beneath the skin.
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F. M. Fritz, a father with three children at Bath Consolidated, was struck by a bolt in the chest above his heart. The metal worked its way up to his shoulder, fracturing and ricocheting off the bone, then headed down his arm, stopping just above his elbow.
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Fig. 8. The remains of Kehoe’s truck.
(Courtesy of the Bath School Museum.)

Perry Hart was struck in the heel by a piece of iron about two inches big. The shrapnel lodged in Hart’s ankle as he fell, bleeding profusely.
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Thelma Medcoff, who stood about fifty feet from the blast site, was hit in the legs by flying metal. Blood poured from her legs out of three separate openings.
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