Bath Massacre: America's First School Bombing (35 page)

One of the duties of the company nurse at the REO Motor Car factory in Lansing was to note the physical appearance of workers lest they try to blame their employer for past injuries. On this day, a worker, his face lined with old scars, came into her office.

She tried not to stare but managed to steal a few glances. The worker caught her furtive looks and started to explain. Almost twenty years ago when he was a kid, he’d attended a rural school where something terrible happened. “You would not know about it,” he told her. “It was a small town you never heard of. A crazy man who worked as our janitor one day blew up the school, his house with his wife in it and his farm buildings, cattle, horses . . . and finally himself.”

He did not know the company nurse had formerly worked at Sparrow Hospital. She was there on May 18, 1927. She’d borne witness to the bombing, to the chaos. She’d tended to the horror of the wounded children.

“I know,” she told the man.
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In one home, a closet remained padlocked year after year, growing dusty and seemingly unused. Stored within was the clothing of a child who died on May 18, 1927. The victim’s mother couldn’t bear to part with her son’s clothing, the last vestige of the boy’s brief time on Earth.
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Throughout his life, Dean Sweet’s head was marked with a jagged purple scar, a permanent reminder of the debris that had cracked his skull. Periodically his skin would become pockmarked with small bumps, remnants of wood particles still trapped within his body trying to work their way out.
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Earl Proctor’s fears of disability and poverty never amounted to much. He had a long career in the insurance industry before his retirement. He made his home in the house once owned by his grandparents, the place where he spent so many hours recovering after the bombing.

Yet he always limped on the left side and in his later years relied on a
walker. He was unable to stand straight on his left ankle, which remained forever bent at an odd angle.
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During World War II, Florence Hart’s son Neal fought in the South Pacific. She couldn’t help but worry; her older boy Robert, gone some eighteen years now, was always close to Florence’s heart. She didn’t want another child to perish by violence. “I don’t know if I can stand losing another son,” she often told people.

On one rare occasion, Neal called home, spending a few precious minutes speaking with his mother from overseas

The connection sounded tinny and crackly at its best. “He’s calling from so far away,” Florence thought. “This must be what a phone call from Heaven must sound like. This is what it would be like to talk to Robert if he could call me.”
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The vanquishing of his ten-year-old daughter Elizabeth haunted Roscoe Witchell throughout the years. When he was in his early sixties, Witchell suffered a minor stroke. During his rehabilitation, therapists tried to help him relearn how to write his name. It was a fruitless endeavor. Every time he took pen to paper, Roscoe would write “Elizabeth.”
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In the 1960s and 1970s there were periodic bomb threats made on the Couzens School. These were forewarnings not taken lightly. Children were evacuated, sent home on school buses, and not allowed to return until the school was deemed safe.

Julie Hudnut was on the young side of her first grade class in 1968. She’d started school at five years old, a year sooner than her classmates. Regardless of her age, she thought school was fascinating with so much to see and do and learn. The teacher, Mrs. Bethel Pierce, was a sweet woman and wonderful instructor who cared deeply about her students. Julie felt great affection for Mrs. Pierce, though she couldn’t help but notice her teacher was older than most of the other faculty.

On one memorable day, the shrill clang of the alarm bell sounded throughout the Couzens School. Mrs. Pierce, asked the class to get up, please walk outside and stay in single file. Her students did as they were told, following their teacher down the hall to the doors. As she marched with her class, Julie heard two words being whispered throughout the hallway.

“Bomb threat.”

Mrs. Pierce led the students to what was referred to as “the safe spot,” a small field at the edge of the school property. Standing quietly with her classmates, Julie was stunned to see tears running down her teacher’s cheeks. Although Mrs. Pierce remained in charge, not wavering in her duty to the children, Julie knew her teacher was going through something terrible. Through her tears, Mrs. Pierce’s face had a haunted quality. Was it something about this moment, those words
bomb threat?

Mrs. Pierce never told her students why she cried that day.

When Mrs. Pierce died on March 19, 2007, Julie fondly recalled her teacher. As she read Mrs. Pierce’s obituary, a sentence leaped out.

Mrs. Pierce—formerly Bethel Tihart—was one of the children who survived Kehoe’s bombing.
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Each time a bomb threat was made, Bath’s volunteer firemen would go through the school to make sure all was safe. Each time it happened, the threat turned out to be nothing—just the work of pranksters with a penchant for scraping Bath’s psychic wounds.

Wayne Loomis, a member of the volunteer firefighters, was well suited for inspecting the school whenever a threat was made: he worked in construction, knew how buildings were put together and where potential weaknesses might be found. He became an old hand at this sobering work. Six times he went out on such calls and six times found no bombs.

Though not a native of Bath, Loomis had family ties to the 1927 bombing. His mother-in-law, Ava Sweet Nelson, and her brother Dean were both survivors. One man he worked with had lost a child in the blast.

Whenever there was a bomb threat at the school, Loomis would crawl into the dark crevices of the building, carefully combing the floors, walls, and ceilings inch by inch. The beam of his flashlight would bounce around these tight spaces. In the darkness, bits and pieces of the past were illuminated. Loomis often saw scars in the building rafters where the original ceiling had been knocked loose. And when he went below into the depths of the basement, Loomis looked on aging patches that hid holes made by dynamite.
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Over the years, the remains of the old farmhouse could still be seen on the former Kehoe land. The property regained its status as good growing soil. Ownership changed hands a few times, but those old bricks lingered on. Weeds and bushes shrouded this vestige. For years parents warned youngsters to stay away lest they accidentally set off an old cache of dynamite. Of course, kids being kids, such warnings went unheeded. The wreckage turned into a taboo playground, but no one was ever blown to kingdom come.

Fig. 19. Remnants of the Kehoe farm stood for several generations.
(Courtesy of the Bath School Museum.)

And then one day the bricks were gone. The last traces of Kehoe had quietly been scrubbed from the Bath landscape.
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The post–World War II era was marked by remarkable growth in population and technology, two shifts that were reflected in school systems throughout the country. Bath was no exception. The James Couzens Agricultural School no longer met all of the community’s educational needs. An elementary school was built in 1953, followed in 1961 by a second building. Both were across the road from the old Couzens School.
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In the late 1960s it was clear that the James Couzens School had outlived its usefulness. It was a shell of its former self, a worn and tattered structure no longer able to evolve with the times and plagued by a withering infrastructure. A 1967 study by experts at Michigan State University recommended “abandonment at the earliest opportunity.”
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School board members and administrators struggled over a solution. But change was inevitable. Couzens closed its doors in 1975, replaced by a modern high school at another location.
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Now stuck with an empty building, the school board contracted with a wrecking company to tear down the shuttered facility. Razing what was left of James Couzens Agricultural School was not a popular idea with some Bath residents. It was almost like tearing down a sacred tabernacle. The old building still had some life in it, they insisted. It could be turned into a library or retirement housing for senior citizens.
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Sentiment was overruled. On May 18, 1975, Julie Hudnut, now a pretty thirteen year old, sat quietly with her seventh grade classmates in the Bath Middle School. She looked out the window, gazing at the old Couzens School. An enormous wrecking ball, resembling a mechanical dinosaur about to devour its prey, loomed next to the building.

Mr. Vandyke, the school principal, asked for a few minutes of silence for those killed in the 1927 bombings, timing his announcement to the moment of the first explosion. Julie bowed her head. She expected the silent meditation to come and go and inevitably be pocketed with giggles and whispers.

She closed her eyes, thinking hard about the children of 1927. The silence went on far longer than she expected. Not a person moved, not a laugh or muffled voice broke through the solemnity. “It’s so quiet you could hear a pin drop,” she thought.

Julie shivered a little as a strange chill coursed through her body. The silence was eerie, a void of sound, a profound contrast to the chaotic pandemonium of 1927.

She raised her head, then looked out the window. Julie saw the sun glinting off the wrecking ball across the street. It took a hard swing, signaling once more the destruction of the school. Debris crashed to the ground as the first section scheduled for razing, the north wing of the building, was knocked down.

Again Julie shivered. Kehoe’s dynamite had destroyed the north wing of the Bath Consolidated School on this same day at almost the same time.
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After it was torn down, the school remains were scattered. The hole that once was the basement was filled in and covered with fresh sod. Some residents took bricks as precious talismans of the past. Other debris was dumped in a nearby swamp. The marshy land later became a housing development.
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“Girl with a Cat” was relocated to the Bath High School foyer. The white cupola, which originally crowned the Bath Consolidated School, was saved.

What remained of the old school grounds was still sacred within the community. The area was landscaped, outfitted with benches, and rededicated as the James J. Couzens Memorial Park. On the edge of the park stood the Bath Methodist Church, essentially the same as when the class of 1927 planned to use it for its commencement. Just outside the sanctuary was a plaque with the names of all who died in the blast.

The old cupola was placed in the center of the park, close to the spot where it originally stood.

May 21, 1977, was graduation day at the high school. The event sparked renewal for some former students. During the commencement diplomas were given to alumni from the class of 1927.