Bath Massacre: America's First School Bombing (4 page)

Once he was established, Philip Kehoe was joined by his brothers and parents. Tecumseh was seemingly a second homeland for immigrants such as the Kehoe clan; the area was largely settled by Irish natives. In time, Kehoe built up a successful farm where he raised both crops and cattle.
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Philip wed Mary Malone, whose background—having been raised by an Irish Catholic priest—was similar to Kehoe’s. Their first child, a daughter, was born in 1860, and a second child arrived in 1862. The birth probably had complications, for Mary was dead about a week after the infant was born. Philip soon remarried another Irish Catholic émigré, Mary McGovern, whose family came to the area from New York state. Between 1862 and 1870, the couple had four daughters. On February 1, 1872, the first son, Andrew Philip Kehoe, was born.
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Two more daughters and another son followed shortly.

Andrew fulfilled the Old World sense of primogeniture, an Irish son finally arriving after a brood of daughters. Though the Kehoe household was enormous, their home was rather small, a simple farmhouse overflowing with children. Like his sisters before him, Andrew began his education at the Culbertson School, a small building not far from home.
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Andrew learned basic skills of reading, mathematics, and geography at Culbertson. Outside of school, he developed a fascination with electricity the way other children might have indulged in sports. Philip’s farm became a giant laboratory for Andrew. He regularly toyed with new ideas for improving farm production through the use of crude electric-powered gizmos.
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One neighbor was amazed by the contraptions used on the Kehoe farm, machinery probably devised by the creative boy.
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Andrew also developed a proclivity for being alone, lost in his thoughts, isolated and inward in spirit from his older and younger siblings.

Philip Kehoe was a community stalwart on several fronts, a larger than life figure who held minor elective offices in the region. Though a staunch Democrat, he managed to succeed in a largely Republican area.
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A deeply religious man, Philip was an influential member of a Catholic parish located in nearby Clinton.
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The elder Kehoe’s religious
beliefs certainly spread to his children; one Kehoe daughter eventually entered a convent.
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He was also active in local organizations that served as venues for social outings to rural populations. These groups provided an opportunity to voice opinions and learn more about factors influencing their lives. Philip zealously participated in these meetings, using them as a platform to expound on his theories of farming. He was of the mind that the farmer should be in control of his own destiny and engaged in heated discussions with his peers on ways to oversee every aspect of production, from raising crops to setting prices. Kehoe firmly believed that by withholding crops from the market, farmers could maintain financial control over their product.
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It is quite probable that Andrew attended some of these meetings; certainly Philip Kehoe’s philosophies stayed with and influenced Andrew after he acquired his own farm in Bath.

Other issues raised at these salons focused on taxation. Again, Philip made his thoughts clear to anyone within earshot. He insisted there be firm oversight of public funds. If the people’s money was being spent on local government, utilities, and schools, then, by God, the people must control how these entities were run. Once more, Philip’s strong fiscal ideas made an indelible imprint on his son.

As Andrew approached age ten, there was a noticeable change in his mother. Mary was often ill, and her energy level simply couldn’t keep up with the large Kehoe clan. It was “a disease of the nervous system” that afflicted her, a condition that slowly and painfully drained physical abilities. Throughout Andrew’s teen years, Mary was confined to bed, the beginning of a decade-long decline.
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As he completed school, Andrew grew involved in local activities. He often participated in community theater productions and earned favorable reviews in one newspaper.
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By the time Andrew turned eighteen, his mother’s condition had reduced her to complete paralysis. On November 5, 1890, Mary McGovern Kehoe finally succumbed.
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After her death Philip Kehoe, some sixty years old and suffering from arthritis, married once again. His new wife, Frances Wilder, was—like Philip—a widowed single parent raising several children. She was considerably younger than Philip, yet an older man taking on a “child bride” was not uncommon for the times. With his life taking a new direction, Philip Kehoe built a sturdy brick home near his wooden farmhouse for the new Mrs. Kehoe.
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Frances and Andrew—who was three years older
than his father’s new wife—developed a mutual loathing, which ultimately led the son to depart from his father’s home.
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Kehoe’s life grows murky at this point. It’s thought that he enrolled at Michigan State College (later Michigan State University) in East Lansing, where he briefly studied the burgeoning trade of electrical engineering. As a student, one would think he showed the same aptitude for working with electricity that he displayed as a child.
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A man who knew how to harness this force had unlimited potential. Andrew Kehoe was one of many modern Prometheuses, tempting the electrical Zeus as he learned to conquer the new fire. Undoubtedly Andrew knew the dangers involved in harnessing this raw energy that could sneak through wires to cause serious damage or death.

At some point Kehoe headed south to Missouri, where he studied electrical engineering at a Saint Louis school. Not much is known about his time in Saint Louis, one of the many missing pieces in the Kehoe enigma. In the days following the Bath blast, one of his sisters-in-law revealed that sometime during his Saint Louis years Kehoe was knocked unconscious.
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Whether it was a jolt of electricity or perhaps falling off a ladder she couldn’t say. But for two weeks Kehoe lay in a coma, floating in and out of consciousness. The big question, of course, is did this accident damage Kehoe’s brain to the point where his psyche was permanently seared? This is an intangible that simply cannot be answered. Clearly something happened when Kehoe was knocked out, for it was enough to put him in the two-week coma.
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After recovering, Kehoe returned to his electrical passions. For a time he worked in Saint Louis, then drifted throughout the Midwest honing his electrical knowledge. At some point he headed north to Iowa where he found employment as a lineman. He returned to Michigan in 1905, the dawn of the new century.
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Life at Philip Kehoe’s household had changed considerably. There was a new Kehoe child, three-year-old Irene. Although his relations with Philip’s new family were still strained, Andrew Kehoe moved into his childhood home and resumed working Philip’s land.
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Like many farmers, Andrew cleared his father’s fields of old tree stumps and inconveniently placed boulders. He turned to the resource commonly used for this purpose: dynamite and war surplus pyrotol.

Over time Kehoe’s resentment toward his father’s new family developed into detestment. The first son, seemingly poised to inherit his ailing father’s estate, now had competition from a stepmother of his own generation and a half-sister young enough to be Andrew’s own daughter. Philip Kehoe’s arthritis had crippled the old man terribly; he now used canes to lug his heavy body through the house. His dependence on Frances was all-consuming.
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Relations between the elder Kehoe and his son deteriorated. It took a terrible tragedy to change all that.

Sunday, September 17, 1911. Accounts differ as to how the incident began. One story has Frances and her daughter picking hickory nuts in the forest behind the Kehoe home, then coming home to make lunch.
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A different version holds that Mrs. Kehoe was in town and hurried home to fix the noontime meal.
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Regardless, Frances went into the kitchen, a small room in the back of the house. A large stove dominated the space. For the times it was a state-of-the art apparatus with a large fuel source on top. Again accounts differ as to the source of power: one story claims that the stove ran on gasoline;
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another says it was oil.
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Despite its enormous size, the stove had a small defect. Frances always had to light the pilot before she could use the appliance. The ignition temperature of a gas stove is generally about 495 degrees Fahrenheit; an ignited match head ranges between 600 and 800 degrees.

Frances struck a match and touched it to the pilot light. The world changed in an instant.

A flame of enormous size and power whooshed out of the stove, engulfing Frances in a mini-tornado of fire. A petroleum-based fire, such as gas or oil, generates incredible heat, somewhere in the range of 1,650 degrees at its lowest point to around 2,280 at its hottest. It takes 2,750 degrees to melt the iron of a stove. Human flesh is another matter.

Skin is the largest organ of the body. It covers the dermis, an under-layer that separates the outer portion from fat, muscle, and bone, vital organs, arteries and veins, and an intricate web of nerves. The human body is filled with water, which can take the form of blood, spinal fluid, or bone marrow. Fat is a sponge filled with water. Some parts of the body are more water rich than others, such as skin and muscles, which hold about 75 percent of the average person’s bodily liquid. All told, the typical human body is 60 to 75 percent water.

Whether sitting in a pot or circulating inside a person, water boils at 212 degrees, transforming liquid into steam. When a human body is subject to these extreme temperatures, the intense heat burns through muscle and bone, organs and fat. The skin gives way, melting as though it were candle wax.

Frances was in agony. She stumbled through the kitchen, desperately trying to put out the fire consuming her body. Her screams rang throughout the house, unearthly sounds bouncing off the walls, careening down hallways, through open windows, out into the yard.

Irene flew in from outside toward the terrible sounds, fingers white-knuckle tight around the hickory nut bucket handle. Her mother was unrecognizable, a body flailing about, arms pounding at its flame-engulfed head.

Philip Kehoe moved as quickly as he could to the kitchen, canes dragging him inch by inch. He was helpless, drenched in the psychological agony of a man who is desperately needed yet trapped in a body that cannot respond.

Andrew heard the loud thunder of the stove, a split second of silence, then the piercing screams of his young stepmother. In a moment he was in the kitchen. Thinking fast, he grabbed a pitcher of water and flung it on the inferno that was Frances.

In gas stove fires, flour or baking powder is the quickest way to smother flame, effectively using a concentrated rain of particles to stop the blaze from spreading. Water, which does not mix with petroleum, is useless and in fact dangerous in these situations. In essence, water spreads gasoline or oil into a thin layer. In a fire this causes rapid spread of the flame.

The water Andrew used to douse the fire only made the situation worse. The flames raced across Frances’s body, rapidly liquefying what little skin she had left.

Somehow the fire was quelled. Andrew and Irene took the moaning, smoking Frances to a bedroom where they tried to make her comfortable. Frances’s skin was blackened, her muscles roasted to the bone. A hellish stench permeated the house.

All the while Philip Kehoe valiantly pushed on toward his wife.

Any movement sent massive pain surges throughout Frances’s ruined body. Since the Kehoe home had no telephone, Andrew and his half sister headed for the Murphy house, their closest neighbor, to call a doctor.

Hettie Murphy was in her kitchen, preparing lunch for the family. She lived with her husband and in-laws, who were overjoyed that Hettie was pregnant.

Years later, when asked about her experience that day, Hettie remembered a simple knock at the door, a nonchalant rap, not the adrenaline-charged banging of someone in a dire situation.

She dusted off her hands, then politely went to answer the door. Hettie greeted Kehoe, who stood on the front porch, seemingly without a care in the world. He might well have come over asking to borrow a shovel.

Instead, Kehoe asked Hettie to call the local doctor. When she asked if someone was sick, Kehoe’s answer was calm.

“No,” he told Hettie. “Frannie got burned.” It was as though she had spilled a pot of boiling water on her foot.

He also asked Hettie to call a priest.
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They gathered around Frances with Philip, a man lost in dire thought and bottomless grief. Frances, little more than a blackened lump of a woman, cried in tortured pain. There was nothing for the doctor to do but watch the priest deliver the last rites.