" Greatest Blessings"

"The roof just lifted up. Then the walls fell out and the roof fell in," said William C. Shaw, the superintendent. "It sounded like dynamite," said a boy named Barber on the football team. ''It blew up like a tin can with a firecracker inside it," said an oil field worker. Across the plains for miles around, horrified observers on shanty porches, at oil derricks, in automobiles, thought of a hurricane, an earthquake, a battle, as at 3:05 last Thursday afternoon the high-school wing of the Consolidated School at New London, Tex., suddenly blew to pieces.

Consolidated School educates all the 1,500 children in the sprawling, oil-soaked school districts of London and New London. The primary grades had already been dismissed. But there were 690 boys and girls and 40 teachers still in the spreading story-and-a-half high-school wing. They would have been dismissed in ten minutes, when something, almost certainly natural gas from the bowels of the earth, exploded. Four hundred and fifty-five students and teachers were instantly blown, crushed, torn to death.

Paula Echols, 15, was in an English class with 20 other students when she saw the building shake and the roof fall in. Then Paula saw her teacher's leg protruding from a rumbling pile of brick and mortar. Pinned beneath her desk, Paula heard the boy across the aisle screaming for help. Another boy dragged her out through the window-frame.

In the manual arts shop in the basement, John Nelson, 17, was working on a lathe. His teacher was standing about five feet away. There were 15 other boys in the room. Then a big mass of sand and what looked like a ball of fire tumbled in. Something hit John Nelson's leg and slit the front of his pants. It felt "like a charley horse you get playing football."

Standing by the window in a fifth-grade classroom upstairs was John Nelson's brother Don, a 24-year-old oil worker who was watching over his mother's class of 25 youngsters. He heard a loud noise. Plaster started falling. He thought for a split second of the window. Then two or three of the children started running toward him. He herded them out into the open fast. Out in the schoolyard, Don Nelson saw the ground littered with bodies. Two men ran up to him and they crawled back into the ruins together. A heavy bookcase had formed a cave from under which ten pale children scampered. "There was so much confusion," said Don Nelson, "I can't remember much about the screaming."

But there was screaming. In a moment oil field workers shut off the pumps under their derricks and came running toward the pile. Fathers and mothers, 100 of whom had been attending a meeting of the Parent-Teachers' Association in the school gymnasium, rushed up white-faced. From the shining school buses lined up to take them home tumbled scores of scared kindergarten moppets to help dig under the debris from which appalling screams and cries could be heard. Slowly the diggers realized the extent of the tragedy as they found they had stretched, at the first count, 220 corpses on the ground. Many had been killed so quickly, by the force of the concussion, that there were still smiles on their white faces. More had been twisted and disfigured. Everywhere there were shoes, caps, shreds of clothing, schoolbooks.

Wired the news in Austin, Governor James V. Allred, whose wife the day before had presented him with their third son, at first hoped it had been "exaggerated." But as further reports came from New London all Texas shuddered with the story of a disaster that outranked, for horror and staggering loss of life, anything since the S. S. General Slocum burned in New York City's East River in 1904. From Houston in a chartered bus hastened the advanced classes of the Landig College of Embalming.

By nightfall a silent army of militiamen and parents, digging in the weird glare of floodlights strung above the wreckage, had recovered almost 400 bodies. Over a hastily assembled public address system the death roll was droned out to the waiting crowds of parents, newshawks, curiosity seekers. Over the rutted red clay roads, barred to other traffic, slid a steady line of trucks, bearing bodies to improvised morgues and first-aid stations in New London, Tyler, Overton, Kilgore, Henderson. A hospital about to be dedicated in Tyler was hurriedly opened, soon filled to overflowing. Ether, chloroform, bandages, coffins, everything failed. All night distracted men and women tried to identify bodies laid out in New London's Methodist Church and in private homes through the town. So mangled were many of them that they were mistakenly identified. When the number of unidentifiable bodies swelled to 50, fingerprints of Texas schoolchildren taken last year at the Centennial Exposition were hurried from Dallas.

Next day and the next New London's streets held a steady cavalcade of death. In the Pleasant Hill Cemetery shifts of workers were put to digging 400 graves. From Dallas came 200 coffins. On Saturday night almost every store except the telegraph office was deserted. On Sunday families buried their dead in a great mass funeral. Standing with the hundreds of parents on the Cemetery hillside were nurses to help the mourners who collapsed or fainted.

Stark and silent stood the forest of derricks whose clanking activity built New London and London only a few years ago. Eleven of them stood on the school's grounds. The royalties they brought furnished most of the $1,000,000 which transformed New London's old wooden schoolhouse into one of the finest rural educational plants in the U. S. Still intact were the model home economics kitchens, playgrounds, sewing rooms, laboratories, built by the black crude oil that bubbles richly under the East Texas soil. Natural gas heated the individual classroom radiators in the Consolidated School. Whether it had leaked, in its odorless and highly explosive form, from a radiator or whether it had seeped into the unfinished school basement from the soil, no one seemed to know. The superintendent, a lean Texan of 61, sleepless and stunned by the death of his own 17-year-old son Sam, had no explanation.

So a military court of inquiry appointed by Governor Allred got busy to try to find out the disaster's cause. Twelve sticks of dynamite discovered in the ruins caused a momentary stir. Superintendent Shaw revealed that "to save about $250 or $350 a month" a connection had been installed by the school janitor to take natural gas from the nearby waste line of the Parade Oil Co., pipe it through the basement to the radiators. Parade officials denied they had given the school permission to make the connection. Mr. Shaw replied that the oil company did not "particularly object." A University of Texas expert, Dr. E. P. Schoch, explained that "if only one of the 72 3/8 in. connecting pipes through the basement . . . was left flowing accidentally for 17 hours, the maximum saturation point would have been reached." This week the court of inquiry decided that gas in the basement had supplied the murderous charge, an accumulation having been ignited possibly by a light switch.

United Gas Co. added an ironic note by revealing that up to this January it had sold the New London School Board a natural gas mixed with a tell-tale odorant that might have prevented the blast. But the most ironic product of the tragedy was right on top of the wreckage. Blown out of the ruined building was a section of blackboard on which someone had scrawled: "Oil and natural gas are East Texas' greatest mineral blessings. Without them this school would not be here, and none of us would be here learning our lessons."

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