Bath Massacre: America's First School Bombing (20 page)

The carnage closer to the car yielded more horrific results. Nelson McFarren was killed instantly by the blast; he lay dead under a tree where his body landed. His son-in-law, Glenn Smith, was mortally wounded. His entire left side was in ruins, one leg sheared off at the thigh, hand mangled, and body blackened.
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Metal gouged a deep hole just above his right ankle.
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B. D. Rice, a veterinarian who’d been examining farm animals nearby, applied his medical talents to the dying man, attaching splints to Smith’s damaged right leg.
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A Consumers Power man used a belt to stem the bleeding from the stump of the ruined left leg. Amazingly, Smith could speak. “I have been hit,” he told his brother Frank, the
school janitor. “It is all up with me.” Over and over he whispered to his caregivers, “I don’t want anybody to feel bad if I go.”
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Someone grabbed Principal Huggett. A panicked voice declared that the explosions were all a “set job.” “They got Mr. Huyck!” Huggett was told. “They will get you!”
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Huggett assessed the situation. Before him the school lay in ruins. Children were dead, dying, and wounded. Cars were in flames; the body of his superintendent, the bodies of his friends, lay dead in the streets. To the west, a farm was blazing.

“I realized there was nothing I could do,” Huggett later said. “I went on helping the youngsters there.”
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Ugly smells fouled the air. The fragrant aroma of morning lilacs was overpowered by the stench of dynamite, smoke, flame, gasoline fumes, blood. As the sickly fumes lingered in nostrils throughout the killing zone, the collective understanding of Bath changed. It wasn’t an exploded boiler that leveled the school. Kehoe’s farm was ablaze. Kehoe blew himself to bits. Kehoe was at the center of the horror.

Chunks of human flesh entangled in the wires above. Blood dripped like a red, misty rain. A ruined chassis and motor were all that remained of Kehoe’s truck. A steaming tangle of intestines were lodged in the steering wheel.
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Carnage was strewn across the ground, and in the trees. The helter-skelter scattering of blood, limbs, bones, guts, and inner organs looked like the remnants of a slaughterhouse hit by a tornado.

Many couldn’t take it. Stomachs curdled. Foul smells of raw and half-roasted meat—of human origin—were soon mixed with a horrible vomitlike stench.

Carlton Hollister had no idea where he was or how he got there, but he found himself lying on a couch on the porch of the telephone office, a
block and a half from the school. Through a haze he could hear Lenore Babcock, the telephone operator. Her words sounded strange.

“The school has blown up,” she was saying. “We need help.”

Gradually Carlton’s mind wrapped itself around Babcock’s words.

“People are dead and injured,” Babcock continued. “Many are trapped in the wreckage.”

Now Carlton understood. There had been a disaster at the school-house. Somehow he’d survived it.
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The fifth grader had no clue that his rescuer, superintendent Huyck, was now dead.

Nellie and Albert Cushman pulled their car up to the scene, a vision of bedlam. Someone told them that Ralph had suffered a broken leg, but they quickly learned that was a different Ralph, not their son.

Josephine Cushman saw her parents, worked her way through the crowd, ran to them, and got into the car. The first words from her mother were a mixture of fear and anticipation. “Where’s Ralph?” Nellie asked.

“He hasn’t come out of the school yet, I know it,” Josephine said.

Suddenly Josephine felt a pain just above her knee. It was only then that she realized shrapnel from the car explosion had hit her in the leg.
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In Pontiac, some eighty-five miles from Bath, Chester Sweet got word about the explosion. His niece and nephew, Dean and Ava, were students at the school. Nothing could stop him from getting to the scene.

He pushed his machine as hard as he could, the speedometer topping near an achingly slow forty-five miles an hour. Still, Sweet drove like hellfire, powered by gasoline and adrenaline. The car hung in mile after agonizing mile.

When he arrived, Chester immediately threw himself into the rescue effort. His timing was immaculate; when Sweet hit Bath, his machine shook and shuddered, blew out, and died.
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One anonymous worker had no idea where his son was. He was torn with anguish yet knew there was nothing he could do about the situation. He swallowed hard and did his duty.

The man found the body of a girl, all life gone. More thoughts of his son haunted him. He muscled on, determined to do what had to be done.

Beneath the rubble, he heard a call. “Daddy!” It was another girl,
probably a foot below the surface from the way her voice sounded. She cried out again. “Daddy, come and get me.”

Following the noise, the worker pulled brick after brick loose, reaching a board that held the girl within the pile. He tried to reassure her. “Yes,” he told her, “your daddy will be here in a few minutes.”

The board held tight. Mustering all he had, the worker pulled and strained. With a
snap
the board broke loose, freeing the youngster from entombment. Other than a few bruises, the girl was unhurt. She rushed to another man just a few feet away. He was the child’s father, unaware of how close he’d been to his daughter.

The worker said nothing. He went back to his task, praying that he might find his son just as safe as this girl.

Later that afternoon he got word. His son had been hurled through a first-story window by the explosion. The boy, thankfully, was just fine.
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Sheriff Bart Fox received news from Bath around ten o’clock. Details were scarce. There was a disaster at the school. A building had collapsed. Children killed. Help was needed.

He grabbed the county prosecutor William Searl, and the two headed to Fox’s machine. It must have been a gut instinct on the sheriff’s part, taking the prosecutor. Fox didn’t know what he’d find in Bath. Maybe it was a mechanical failure of massive proportions, but it could be something criminal. Fox wasn’t taking any chances.

His office, located in the Clinton County center of Saint Johns, was twenty miles or so from the bomb site.
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On an embankment near the wreckage Mrs. Eugene Hart, sitting with three of her children, resembled Michelangelo’s
Pieta.
Her daughters Iola and Vivian rested in death on either side of her as she cradled her son Percy—bleeding profusely, his life fading—in her arms.

Somewhere else Mrs. Hart’s son Perry tried to breathe, his body wracked with an unholy pain shooting up from his ankle, so horribly ripped apart by shrapnel from Kehoe’s truck.
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Someone found Chief Charles Lane and gave him the news; amazingly,
while investigating the basement, he hadn’t heard the sound of Kehoe’s truck blowing up. Lane quickly got to the site where he helped move two casualties from the school entrance.
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Throughout the killing field, mothers and fathers held lifeless bodies close. Blood and dust intermingled into a strange sort of mud that streaked parent and child. Howls of grief and torment blistered the air.
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Dragging his broken leg, Raymond Eschtruth managed to get to a cousin’s house near the school. The house was a mess, all the windows blown out and shards of broken glass scattered helter-skelter. Raymond’s mother took her son to her mother’s house. It was obvious that the child needed a doctor’s care and soon.
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Eventually Raymond was put into a Model T Ford for what was hoped to be a fast trip to the Saint Lawrence Hospital in Lansing. Driving conditions wouldn’t allow it. The roads were clogged with machines.

These autos weren’t just ambulances and police cars, fire trucks, or more rescue workers. A wave of cars packed with macabre tourists was descending on Bath, curious as hell to see what was going on.

None of it mattered to Raymond. He was still in a daze, totally unaware of what had happened to him or why.
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Personnel at the Edward W. Sparrow Hospital in Lansing were warned at about ten o’clock: stand by. Explosion. School. Children.
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Hearing the sirens of approaching ambulances, doctors and nurses braced themselves.

Doors banged opened; the first wave arrived. Stretchers bearing children, shrouded with dust, bandaged, and bleeding. Pieces of brick and metal protruded from wounds. Multiple bone fractures, deep lacerations, missing fingers. Shock and terror in victims’ eyes.

Blanche Hart lay on a stretcher, her body fiercely mangled. A nurse, looking at the woman, thought, “She’s really blown apart.”

Cars followed ambulances. Adults brought in more children, arms cradling blood-soaked youngsters. Doctors looked over the wounded, and made snap decisions. Called out who needed care first, ordered pain shots with a shout of “Hypo!” (for hypodermic needle), barked “Help him here” or “This one goes to emergency.” Wheelchairs and stretchers
bearing the wounded filling the corridors, nurses offering comfort— such that they could—to frightened children.