Bath Massacre: America's First School Bombing (23 page)

By some miracle—be it a short in the wiring, a bad connection, or some other cause—only the north wing’s explosives had detonated. Some experts suggested that Kehoe, despite all his electrical knowledge, had made a serious error. There simply wasn’t enough power in the two remaining timing devices to set off the massive amount of explosives he’d planted under the main school building.
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Removal of these newfound explosives was critical. Haldeman and McNaughton, working in the dark basement lit only by flashlights, carefully disconnected the blasting caps from the labyrinthine wiring. They approached the delicate task with the touch of fine silversmiths; any slight mistake conceivably could result in more explosions. After this stage was safely completed, the blasting caps, wiring, dynamite, and pyrotol were removed from the building.
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But some cavities and burrows were too small to accommodate a full-grown man to get at the explosives. A search went out for a person possessed
of both the size and the maturity needed to take on this dangerous job. They found their man in fourteen-year-old Chester Sweet, the older brother of Ava and Dean. No longer enrolled at Bath Consolidated, Chester had opted out of school to work on the family farm. Without hesitation, he volunteered for the potentially deadly mission. Chester was short, young, and perhaps touched with a bit of daring-do
worthy of screen idol Douglas Fairbanks. Between his stature and his tenacity, State Police officials knew that Chester had the stuff they needed.

Fig. 12. Michigan State Police officers holding some of the dynamite planted by Kehoe.
(Courtesy of the Bath School Museum.)

He was led into the dark passageways of the basement. Showing no fear, Chester squeezed his body through tight spaces, gently removed the dangerous material from hidden alcoves, and handed it to men waiting just beyond the entrances.
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More explosives were found in a carefully concealed hideaway. A trail of eaves troughs, the rain gutters found along rooftops, was precisely secreted within the basement ceiling. Rows of dynamite sticks and pyrotol lined the troughs, which were shoved deep within the recesses using either metal well rods or bamboo poles that stretched for twenty-five to thirty feet at some points.

School janitor Frank Smith spent a good deal of time beneath the school, yet never once saw the gutters. And why not? They were hidden in the ceiling, practically invisible in the darkness. Realistically, they were unnoticeable to anyone except the man who put them in place.
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In all, 504 pounds of unexploded dynamite and pyrotol were pulled from the building on May 18. The material included at least nine bushel baskets full of dynamite, several thirty-pound sacks of pyrotol, ten blasting caps, and two timing devices.
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An estimated 100 pounds of explosives had detonated beneath the north wing.
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It was supposed to be a typical luncheon, a dry, dull talk about fund-raising for Lansing’s Edward W. Sparrow Hospital. Walter Foster, president of the hospital’s board of directors, regarded his lunchtime crowd at the downtown Olds Hotel. Two tables reserved for doctors were empty. These guests were either headed to Bath or furiously working in the hospital’s emergency room.

One of Sparrow’s leading medicos, Dr. Fred Drolett, came to the luncheon, late and urgent. After the first emergency call came in from Bath, he reported, thirty-five nurses from the Sparrow and Saint Lawrence hospitals were sent to the scene bearing blankets, sheets, stretchers, and medicine. Both hospitals were given dire instructions: prepare to receive between twenty-five and thirty victims.

“This is the worst disaster I ever saw in my life,” Drolett said. “While Lansing can be proud of the police, fire and hospital aid rushed to the sufferers, the catastrophe brings home the needs which this campaign is designed
to care for more than anything that could have possibly happened.”

Perhaps it was a little off-putting, discussing fund-raising with diners eager to hear news about the situation in Bath, but Drollet certainly knew the importance of donations. If anything, the bloody school site drove home the hospital’s overall financial needs with sobering reality.

The next speaker was Fr. John O’Rafferty, a Catholic priest. He too spoke of the importance of fund-raising, telling the gathering that the spirit of God would be in anyone who donated to the hospital. The unfolding disaster only underscored this point, he said, adding that such charitable work built the character of a community.

In about forty-eight hours, Father O’Rafferty would discover for himself exactly how the disaster would affect his own character.
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Joseph Dunnebacke was at the luncheon, just as shocked by the sudden news as anyone else in the room.
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In the darkness Eva Gubbins prayed for the child above her. She was alone, scared, wondering what was going on.

There was a noise like the sound of someone moving. It was close, very close.

She could see through the rubble a space next to her. A man was crawling through. Gubbins quickly recognized her would-be savior, one of her colleagues at the school, Mr. Fiora.

“Eva,” he told her, “I can’t get you out—we can pray.”

The beam pinning Gubbins in the wreckage had to be removed before she and the dead student could be freed. The men quickly assessed the situation. Unless they supported the fallen beam, Gubbins would remain trapped.

A makeshift frame was erected. Once the beam held firm, work began. Using sledgehammers, the men struck blow after blow. Slowly, surely, the thick wood splintered. Pieces fell away, were taken out, and the hammering began anew.

When enough of the beam had been broken up, work began on the concrete chamber holding Gubbins and the boy. Minute after minute went by, an excruciatingly slow pace. Sweat rolled off the men; they refused to let up from their muscle-weary work.

It took forty-five minutes for Gubbins and her dead companion to be released.
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Ethel Huyck lumbered through the grounds, stunned, numbed. A pretty red-haired woman, she now was a shadow of herself, deep in shock over the devastation of the school, the enormous loss of life, and her husband’s sudden, violent death.

A woman was nearby, trying to comprehend her own bitter news.

“My husband is dead,” Mrs. Huyck told the woman.

The woman, Florence Hart, had just been told about her son. “My Robert is dead,” she answered.

The two parted ways. There was nothing left to say.
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An old woodshed behind Lenore Babcock’s telephone office turned into a makeshift headquarters for the newspaper writers descending on Bath. An electric telegraph line was set up with wires strung to the building so reporters could flash news back to their editors.
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Another pressroom was improvised in the train depot, now empty. The station agent was gone, looking for his son.
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The unfolding story sprinted across the telegraph lines. Publishers and newsreel producers in their editorial offices recognized the school bombing demanded the fastest technology available to provide details to fact-hungry newspaper readers and moviegoers.

On the edge of his family’s farm, Harold Burnett later remembered, he was amazed to see a genuine airplane landing in the fields. He’d seen planes before during air shows but never one this close. It seemed as if Bath was suddenly the center of the world with farm fields transformed into landing strips.
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Airplanes played a significant role in getting the news out to the world in those first hours. “Representatives from newspapers in all of the large cities in the central part of the United States were at Bath Wednesday evening and Thursday forenoon obtaining photographs and news matter, much of which was rushed to their respective office by plane,” wrote an anonymous reporter in the
Lansing State Journal.
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They came earlier than Wednesday evening. At 12:30 p.m. Central Time (1:30 in Bath), word first reached the
Chicago Herald-Examiner.
Its editors wanted the tale told in pictures as well as words. Quickly an agent
was contacted in Detroit. A secretary, in turn, found Billy Brock, a veteran flying ace of the World War and now a barnstorming stunt pilot. Brock was hired on the spot, and at 3:15 p.m. he was sent from Detroit to Lansing. In just half an hour he reached his destination, where local reporters gave Brock negative plates with some of the first photographs of the bombing. He jumped back in the plane, took to the skies, flew pell-mell to Chicago, and landed at an airport in suburban Mayfield just an hour later. Men from the paper who met Brock at the airport rushed back to the city, put the precious photographic plates in their editor’s hands, and by that evening Chicagoans could see what the Bath Consolidated School looked like for themselves. The devastation, captured in bold black and white, took just a little over eight hours to move from Bath to Chicago. This rapid delivery was gleefully detailed under the headline “Blast Photos Rushed by Air for
Herald-Examiner
‘Scoop.’” No doubt the publisher enjoyed taking a jab at his slower rivals in Chicago’s hypercompetitive newspaper trade.
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Brock wasn’t the only pilot winging his way to Bath. Newsreel photographers rushed in, some shooting their stories from the ground, others from the sky. At one point a lone plane could be seen soaring just above the ruins of the school. Once word of the disaster hit the East Coast, Pathé News, the international leader in newsreel production, sent its top New York cameraman, Thomas Hogan, to shoot footage. Hogan arrived late Wednesday and filmed the devastated school well into the early morning hours of May 19. Once the job was completed, he hired a taxi and rushed along back roads to Lansing’s Capital City airport. Just before 6:00 a.m. Hogan’s hired plane took off for Chicago. Carl Clifford, a top pilot, made it to the Windy City just in time to meet an air mail plane heading to New York. That night filmgoers in New York and Chicago saw the first motion pictures of the Bath Consolidated School ruins, not quite thirty-six hours after Kehoe’s bomb went off.
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