Anniversary of 1937 New London Explosion

The Longview News-Journal published several stories involving the 1937 London School explosion today through Thursday. The school, now the site of West Rusk County Consolidated Independent School District, was lifted from its foundation, when a spark ignited an unknown gas leak, and came crashing down. The odor found in natural gas today is the result of legislation passed in reaction to the explosion.

By CHARLOTTE STEWART

She was a girl of 15 when her world came tumbling down. Literally.

Dorothy Womack, now Dorothy Box, was one of the 500 students and staff in the London School building when it exploded March 18, 1937. About 300 people died that day.

The explosion shook the ground for many miles around the small oil town of New London, about 30 miles south of Longview. But it did not shake a young girl’s faith.

“I have always felt God in my life,” said Box, “both then and now. I never thought God was not with me.”

Box was working in the library when the walls fell down around her. She was pinned under a filing cabinet that fell over during the blast, she said, which prevented the roof and other falling debris from striking her.

Another student heard Box’s cries for help, and pulled her from the pile of debris. It was a shocking experience, Box said, but she never thought of blaming God, and didn’t know of anyone who did. “The big question I heard, both at the time and many years later, was why. ‘Why me? Why did I live when so many others died?’ Or, ‘Why did my child die but you lived?’ It is just human nature to want to know why,” she said.

“But as far as placing blame, I never heard anyone placing any blame on anyone. We just wanted to help each other and move along with our lives.”

Dealing with such an extraordinary tragedy at such a young age gave Box a sort of confidence. “I felt like if God could get me through that, God was going to get me through everything — and he has,” she said. “Death is something that you have to work through. It takes a while before you can realize that things go wrong. There are mountains to climb and valleys to go through, but life is good.”

Without her Christian faith, Box said she did not know how she could have gotten through it with her mind intact. “People who don’t have a communication with God, well, I don’t know how they do it. I don’t know how they faced it,” she said.

“I am in constant communication with God. I can talk about this to him, I can talk about anything at all to him, and I believe he is listening and that he cares. Really, I don’t know how anyone without faith could get through something like that. We were a community of faith. We all leaned on our faith in God and we leaned on each other,” she said.

The explosion was not an act of God, said Box, but an accident of man. “It was an accident and that’s all. Sometimes there is no blame to assign. Sometimes there are tragic accidents and this was one of them,” she said.

The 70th anniversary of the explosion is tomorrow and former students will come from all over the country to gather at the site of their old school, now West Rusk County Consolidated Independent School District in New London.

“I’m glad to see them, my old friends and my old classmates, but I am going to see my other friends and classmates again, too,” she said in reference to the students and staff members who died that day. “I will join them in heaven one day, probably not too long from now. I have never thought I would not see them again. No, no. I’ve always known I would see them again.”

Box is an elder at the First Presbyterian Church in Henderson. “God had a plan for my life,” she said. “I’ve never questioned that much and I’ve tried to live according to that plan. God has a plan for each life, not just mine. I have led a happy life and I am a happy person today and I know it’s because I have sought God’s plan for my life.”

Box said she likes to memorize Scripture and thought an appropriate one for people who experience tremendous tragedy is Philippians 4:6-7: “Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.”

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A shared pain: London School graduates gather to mark blast’s 70th anniversary

By MAGGIE SOUZA

A stranger walking into the Longview Fairgrounds Exhibit Building on Friday night wouldn’t notice anything unusual about the reunion going on. Everywhere, everyone was smiling, laughing, patting backs and shaking hands. Some strolled around while others sat at their class table with old friends; the sound of good times so loud that many people were talking directly into an ear.

But beneath the joyous surface rested a pain shared by all, not exactly visible but not ignored.

“I think everybody here has their own story to tell,” said Rogers Lehew, a former football coach and manager who traveled from Calgary, Canada, to meet up with old pals to mark the 70th anniversary of the New London explosion.

Lehew was 8 that sunny spring day when the London School came crashing down around him. He was OK, as was one of his sisters who went to school with him. But the gas explosion, which claimed about 300 lives, would bury his other sister, Mary Ellen, beneath mounds of rubble. Lehew said he did not see her alive again.

Later, he would go back to the school with his father to dig up Mary Ellen and take her to the funeral home. After all the bodies were buried, Lehew and the remaining staff and students did the only thing they could: They kept living.

Lehew would graduate in 1945, and would then go on to the University of Tulsa. For about the next 20 years, he would coach or manage football teams in the United States and in Canada, he said.

At one period in Lehew’s life, he was frequently asked to give speeches to groups of students. “I never failed to tell them where I came from and how much I owed my classmates for getting me through school,” Lehew recalled. Sitting in a room with about 300 of his former schoolmates and their families Friday evening, Lehew could be seen talking about the many years passed with several friends.

“I came back mainly out of respect for my mom and dad, and my sister who was killed,” said Lehew, who first attended a reunion 20 years ago. Since then, he’s been to another three or four.

“I thought it was a good idea to honor them,” he said with tears in his eyes. For Lehew and others, the reunions brought pain but also positives.

“I thought it was a good way to get a lot of people together who went through a disaster, a catastrophe together,” he said. “Before that, people didn’t talk about it. But it affected their lives. Everything was A.D. or B.C. the explosion.”

Although old faces brought tough memories flooding back, seeing everybody was still what Lehew looked forward to most, he said.

In about 10 days, he’ll fly back to Canada with his wife, Joann; he’ll keep in touch with some of his friends, as he has always done, and wait until the next reunion to see everyone else.

From time to time, Lehew will consider again the events of 1937 and how the community rallied around him and the other survivors, making sure they at least would grow up safe.

“They were looking after us,” Lehew said. “We all suffered, and we all helped each other.”
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Remembrances roll as London School graduates gather

By DAYNA WORCHEL

Lois Rainwater Johnson says “doing what I shouldn’t have been doing” saved her life. The London School Class of 1941 graduate was a 12-year-old seventh-grader at the time of the explosion. “I was supposed to be waiting outside for the school bus, but somehow a friend of mine had gotten a nickel,” she said.

“We went across the street and bought a Popsicle to split in two so we could share, and that’s when the explosion happened.” Johnson and other former students of London School stood in groups of three or four in the bright morning sunshine Saturday, waiting for the start of the 2007 meeting of the New London Ex-Student Reunion and Memorial Association in the West Rusk High School auditorium.

Snatches of conversation could be overheard, phrases such as “I haven’t seen you in years” and “I guess we’ve all gotten a little older,” as hugs were exchanged, and hands were shaken.

The alumni group has met every two years since 1977, and many people who gathered had been able to make most of those reunions. This year, about 300 people attended. The association meeting began with a prayer and a rendition of the “Star Spangled Banner” played on the trumpet by Max Dorsey of the association’s board.

Miles Toler, vice president of the association, updated the group about the new 30-minute video of the school — before and after the explosion — now at the London Museum. “It’s about keeping the memory alive,” he said of the museum. He introduced the various graduating classes — from 1933, which had one member, Evelyn Murphy Ward, represented, all the way up until 1965.

Some of the classes had good-natured rivalries between them. For example, “the classes of 1949 and 1950 had a contest to see who could raise the most in donations to the memorial association,” he said.

The representative from the Class of 1949 didn’t have the amount readily available, but someone from the Class of 1950 held up a sign, saying that class had collected $4,500. Cheers filled the auditorium.

Toler said the alumni association is proud of its scholarships, which are given to high school students. “In 1989, the association began giving out scholarships and have collected $5,000 so far, this year.” Toler said the memorial association has $84,000 in an investment account, and the interest in that account goes toward the scholarships of about $500 each.

Jean Tyner Davidson, secretary and treasurer of the association, said the scholarships are based on need and academic record, and usually cover the cost of books. “We are going through applications now to be awarded in April,” she said. “Last year, there were so many who were deserving, it was hard to make a selection.”

After the re-election of the board members, there was a slideshow of the names of class members who had died, along with the years they had graduated. With some of the names, the word “survivor” appeared at the bottom of the slide.

After the main meeting, the former students went to classrooms marked by their graduating year.

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Silence was normal for many survivors

By MAGGIE SOUZA

Wayne Shaffer was 10 years old when his school was blown to pieces. He, his brother and the girl he would later marry were all at the London School that Thursday, busy learning until their world was shaken by a gas explosion in the building’s basement. Somehow, amid crumbling classrooms and complete chaos, all three managed to stay alive.

As the dust from the explosion settled, the immediate crisis over, they were still physically intact. Many would call that lucky. But for them and everyone else who was left standing in the aftermath, the pain had just begun.

As the initial shock passed, so too did the desire to talk about the entire affair, and Shaffer, like so many of his friends and neighbors, would go a long time before ever looking back. “It was something that was very difficult for me to even think about,” Shaffer said. “I never talked to my father-in-law about it but twice or three times, and it would be a very, very brief conversation. We didn’t talk about it.”

He and everyone else went on with their lives, leaving unanswered any questions that they or others had about the event.

But decades later, Shaffer would inspire a change. In 1975, he started working on a project: an alumni association, or at least a reunion, for his former classmates and everyone else who went to his school. His goal was to get people together in time for the 40th anniversary of the disaster, and in 1977 he accomplished that.

From Shaffer’s efforts, the New London Ex-Student Reunion and Memorial Association was born, becoming a nonprofit group in the mid-1980s. Now, the alumni group works to brighten the future for the descendents of those who were involved in the school tragedy by awarding them scholarships every year.

Shaffer isn’t quite sure what prompted him to put an ad for a reunion in the newspaper that first year. “I guess because of my heritage and my wife and brother, I simply wanted to have everybody back,” he mused. “I suppose it was maybe a selfish reason just to maybe meet and see everyone again that I could.” His initial effort drew about 12 responses, along with some criticism.

“When I ran the ad, I had people call that were members of the (1937) class that didn’t want any part of it and didn’t like that I was doing that, but we got over that hurdle,” Shaffer said.

Those who were interested gathered in Shaffer’s home in Arlington to map out a plan for getting the word out, ultimately dividing up parts of Texas and surrounding states and putting one person in charge of each region.

When 1977 rolled around, Shaffer reserved a meeting place at a hotel in Kilgore and began making preparations for a reunion dinner.

“I didn’t know whether I’d have 5 or 100 (show up),” he said. About 250 attended, far exceeding his expectations. “We ran completely out of food,” Shaffer recalled. “There weren’t even any gravy and biscuits left.” It was at that meeting that the group decided to meet once every two years.

Today marks the last day for this year’s gathering. Jean Davidson, secretary-treasurer for the Ex-Student Reunion and Memorial Association and a 1959 New London graduate, expects a crowd of about 300 people.

As secretary-treasurer for the association, Davidson is responsible for keeping up with as many of the 1,400 members as she can, sending them newsletters when it comes time for a reunion. She also keeps track of the organization’s financial status, which determines how many scholarships are awarded. This past year, 17 people received $500 scholarships.

Several of this year’s attendees traveled a long way, Davidson said. One person came from Canada; others made the trip from Washington, Idaho and Virginia. “Mostly we just get together and renew old friendships,” Davidson said.

For survivors of the explosion, the reunion is a good time for mending, said Wanda Kennel, a local counselor for about 20 years.

“The fact that they’ll be able to share their memories, their thoughts on what happened — I think it will be a wonderful healing tool for a lot of people,” Kennel said. Although it’s been seven decades since tragedy struck and talking has been long overdue for some, it will help.

“I think (talking) is always beneficial,” Kennel said. “You talk about it to the best of your ability.” While it would be strange to not discuss such a disaster today, the silence that so many people shrouded their grief in was more normal 70 years ago.

“From the sound of it, it was the culture of the area,” Kennel said. “It was OK years ago that you didn’t talk about it.” For Shaffer, meeting with other survivors and finally bringing the past into the open helped him accept the situation, he said.

Shaffer, who lives in Hillsboro with his wife, wasn’t sure Thursday if he could make it to this weekend’s reunion, but remembered the alumni association’s beginnings with fondness.

“It was mighty tough starting,” Shaffer said. “What was hard about it was bringing these people back that were in that building that had lost family. … They did want to come back. I don’t know how much they talked about it, but they did want to come back.”

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Faces, forever changed: School blast survivors still unable to talk about those they lost

By JIMMY ISAAC

The world’s greatest tragedies always have given way to stories of hope, heartache, despair and determination to overcome. The London School explosion that happened 70 years ago today is no different.

Walter Cronkite, one of the 20th Century’s most well-known reporters, called March 18, 1937, the “day a generation died.” It is an apt description of the loss of nearly three-fifths of that school’s students and teachers.

“We weren’t allowed to talk about it. We were not allowed to talk about it at all,” said Joan Barton, 77, who was a second-grader when leaking gas ignited 13 minutes before school was to close for a three-day weekend. “We probably lost a lot of memories. I just remember my mother screaming.”

The screams perhaps seemed endless that night as parents, reporters, oil field workers and anyone who could help descended on the town of New London.

The explosion is considered the third deadliest tragedy in Texas history, ranking behind the Galveston hurricane of 1900 and the Texas City disaster. While no exact count may ever be determined, 298 students, teachers and others are believed to have died when manual training instructor Lemmie R. Butler turned on a sanding machine. He had no idea that the area was filled with a mixture of gas and air.

The mixture ignited, carrying the flame into a nearly closed space beneath the building, which then was lifted into the air and smashed to the ground, according to www.nlse.org, a Web site about that day and the memories that followed.

Marvin Dees was working with a crew at an oil lease about five miles south of London when he heard the explosion. A few minutes later, the lease operator came and told them what had happened. The crew piled in a truck and rushed to the site.

“By that time, there were men coming from all directions,” said Dees, 91. “We just started moving debris, removing bodies, body parts, whatever, and those that were still alive. “It was gruesome. I was only 21 years old, but I think I aged 10 years that night, because I saw things that I had never experienced.” Dees worked in the recovery from 4 that afternoon until 10 the next morning.

He now makes the half-hour drive from his Tyler home to the London Museum and Tea Room once a week for lunch and recollection.

“I can remember everything so clearly,” he said. “I could just remember exactly where I was, everything that was going on. It was a disaster, because the oil field was booming at that time, and a lot of people were moving all over the oil field.” Indeed, before 3:05 p.m. on March 18, 1937, the London School in Rusk County was a tangible example of the East Texas oil boom of the 1930s. Less than seven years before, wildcatter Marion “Dad” Joiner and his Daisy Bradford No. 3 well inaugurated what was then the largest oil field in North America. In 1931, existing towns swelled 10 times their size overnight, and new towns were formed. Wealth was abundant, and nowhere was that more evident than in London, which proclaimed it had the world’s richest school district.

The London School, with a price tag of $1 million, was built in 1932 as a modern, E-shaped building. Officials said they spared no expense, boasting East Texas’ only illuminated football stadium, a manual training shop and custom-tailored band uniforms.

To cut costs, however, gas steam was substituted for a central steam-heating system that required gas lines to be run under the school.

That proved fatal because no one could smell the gas as it leaked. “I believe there’s something good that comes out of everything that’s bad,” said Dees, a retired mechanical engineer from Texaco, which was called The Texas Company in 1937.

“The only good thing was that they started putting an odorant in gas … and who knows. That could have saved hundreds of lives years after the explosion.”

The memory of her mother’s screams and the inspiring words from an unlikely source brought Barton to tears 70 years later while eating pot roast and potatoes at the London Museum, where she has volunteered almost daily since it opened in 1994.

Her mother, who had four children, was frantic over Barton’s older sister, Jane, a fifth-grader who was in the main school building at the time of the blast. It was the mother of Jane’s classmate and boyfriend who comforted her, Barton said.

“She told my mother, ‘Now, you know, God takes care of everything,’ ” Barton remembered, “and their only son was killed.”

Jane Barton was an overall-wearing tomboy who survived the explosion. The other mother, who Barton did not name, eventually had another child and named her after their deceased son’s girlfriend. “You would think, after 70 years, I’d learned not to cry,” Barton said.

“It was just too sad. Of course, now, they want you to talk about it because it helps you and everything. Maybe that’s why I still cry.”

Barton still lives in New London. Seventy years ago today, her future husband, Gerald Barton, now deceased, was walking home from school when the blast that killed his brother occurred.

The Rusk County town earlier known as London was renamed New London when a post office came to the community in the mid-1930s and postal officials said there already was another town named London in the Texas Hill Country. At the time of the 1937 explosion, the school was still known by the older name of London.

Today, a monument and the museum are among the few permanent displays commemorating March 18, 1937. The tiny town of about 1,000 people is filled each day with the laughter and chatter of schoolchildren enjoying recess at the West Rusk County Consolidated Independent School District, whose high school and junior high building were constructed at the blast site.

There is little semblance of a place that holds one of America’s darkest memories, where nationally known journalists such as Cronkite, Sarah McClendon and Felix McKnight got their first big stories, where tough-as-nails roughnecks cried as they carried children’s body parts from rubble, and where a town’s children either died — or survived and carried grief or guilt through the decades.

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Community gathers to honor those who died in school explosion and those who lived

By RANDY ROSS

On the day of the 70th anniversary of the New London school explosion, survivors of the blast ended a three-day reunion Sunday with a memorial service designed to honor the people who died on that tragic day and the people who continue to carry on the “London legacy.”

Mollie Ward was in the fourth grade when the blast tore apart her school. Ward, now the mayor of New London, said it took years for the town to be willing to talk about what had happened. The town had experienced “too much grieving” to remind itself of that painful day. Despite that grief, the New London community bonded after the explosion.

Ward said she felt a need to be involved with the reunion. She served as the secretary-treasurer of the London Ex-Students Reunion & Memorial Association for several years, and she also became the first director of the London Museum.

The memorial service was a way for the survivors and other people who remember that day to show respect for those who lost their lives, Ward said. The service was “something that needs to go with the reunion,” and called the reunion and the memorial service a “healing process” for survivors and the town.

Joe Gibson, a 1956 graduate of the school, was the keynote speaker Sunday at the memorial service. The service opened with the singing of the hymn “Abide with Me,” which was sung at the first memorial service.

Gibson then spoke of his memories of youth and his experience at the school, often receiving nostalgic laughs from those in attendance.

Gibson’s speech also had a somber tone of reminiscence. Paraphrasing a Christian hymn, Gibson said he “walked today where schoolmates walked and felt their presence there. He said a divine hand had assisted volunteers in the creation and upkeep of the London Museum and the reunions.

Gibson stressed the importance of honoring the people who died and the people who lived that day, and, paraphrasing from the Gettysburg Address, said those who lost their lives consecrated the school grounds.

“Since our tragedy — and also our triumph — there have been other tragedies and triumphs,” Gibson said.

Marjorie Clinksales, a former New London postmaster, graduated from the school in 1958. Clinksales said she thought attendance at the reunion and memorial service increases each time even, though several blast survivors have died in the past few years.

She said the memorial service was especially important because “it brings everyone together and keeps the memory” of the tragedy.

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Odor now added to natural gas

By MIKE ELSWICK

If a positive angle can be found in the tragic explosion of the London School on March 18, 1937, it could be that hundreds, if not thousands, of lives have probably been saved as a result, according to Archie McDonald.

“The major positive that came from the New London school explosion was legislation requiring gas companies to add an odor to their product so anyone can determine when natural gas is leaking or not properly utilized,” said McDonald, a historian long associated with Stephen F. Austin State University who has researched the topic.

Naturally, natural gas has no odor. The smell today many associate with the release of natural gas comes from a malodorant agent added to the gas just for the purpose of allowing it to be smelled should a leak develop.

What some people describe as a rotting cabbage smell usually associated with natural gas comes not from natural gas itself but from mercaptans, which are added to natural gas during processing.

The London School can be credited with instigating, or at least speeding up and stimulating, laws resulting in requiring the odor agent to be added, McDonald said.

The April 1937 edition of the Quarterly of the National Fire Protection Association ran a 14-page summary of the London School disaster of the previous month. Among the conclusions in the report prepared by H. Oram Smith with the Texas Inspection Bureau, was that “the value of a distinctive malodorant in all gas supply systems by which leaking gas may be readily detected is clearly evident.”

Smith wrote there was only one explosion associated with the disaster and no fire.

“Yet there is evidence of a most terrific force in the great extent of devastation and loss of life that came almost instantly; testimony of bodies tossed 75 feet in the air; an automobile 200 feet distant crushed like an eggshell under a two-ton slab of concrete that had been hurled from the building,” Smith wrote. He said at the established point of origin of the blast the explosion had to “break through an 8-inch concrete floor slab before starting on its path of destruction.”

In the Texas Railroad Commission archives covering a summary of the agency’s activities in the 1930s was an item indicating enforcement of the new rules requiring odorants was enacted, said Ramona Nye, spokeswoman for the agency.

“As a result of this tragedy, the 45th Legislature enacted House Bill 1017 … giving the Railroad Commission the authority to adopt rules and regulations pertaining to the odorization of natural gas or liquefied petroleum gases,” the commission archives said. “On July 27, 1937, Gas Utilities Docket 122 was adopted and the commission began enforcement of odorization requirements for natural gas.”

In May 1937, the Texas Railroad Commission, at the time referred to as the most powerful board of resource regulators in the world, had passed an order in memory of those killed in New London that continues to impact the lives of people worldwide.

Shortly after the disaster, the Texas Legislature met in emergency session and enacted the Engineering Registration Act, now rewritten as the Texas Engineering Practice Act. Public pressure was on the government to regulate the practice of engineering because of the faulty installation of the natural gas connection at the London School believed to have resulted in the natural gas leak.

Many other states soon enacted rules requiring an odorant be added to natural gas, and later in 1937 federal requirements were made law, Smith said.

According to the Texas Railroad Commission, the odorants are considered non-toxic in the extremely low concentrations occurring in natural gas delivered to the end user.

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Reporters converge on New London

By JIMMY ISAAC

The newspaper headlines along the walls of a museum dedicated to the London School explosion of 70 years ago depict the chaos reporters and editors faced in covering one of America’s greatest tragedies.

From the moment on March 18, 1937, when the school’s band director dashed into a Western Union office in Overton exclaiming, “The London School is blown to bits, hundreds killed and injured! Get help!” until the next morning’s headlines, it was apparent that no one knew the full grasp of how many lives had been lost.

The Longview Morning Journal, predecessor to the Longview News-Journal, reported between 300 and 400 people killed. The Dallas Morning News thought 700 children were dead, while the Wichita Falls Post said 476 bodies had been recovered while 100 children were still unaccounted for. The Henderson Daily News reported 488 people dead, the New York Times said the count was below 500, while the Fort Worth Star-Telegram announced that more than 600 children perished.

To this day, there is still not an accurate count, but about 300 children and teachers did die that day when manual training instructor Lemmie R. Butler turned on a sanding machine. He had no idea that the area was filled with a mixture of gas and air. The mixture ignited, carrying the flame into a nearly closed space beneath the building, which then was lifted into the air and smashed to the ground.

“It was my first big scoop — but as painful a story as I have ever covered,” stated Sarah McClendon in her 1996 biography “Mr. President! Mr. President!: My 50 Years of Covering the White House.” McClendon’s 53 years as a reporter included pressing questions of U.S. presidents from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to George W. Bush. She was a Tyler Morning Telegraph reporter on March 18, 1937, when she returned from the beauty shop to find a stunned office that had learned of the explosion. She grabbed her photographer, Kenneth Gunn, and was the first reporter on the scene, she said.

“It was like a vision from the end of the world,” she stated in her book. “Most of the school had, literally, vanished, leaving a rubble-littered crater to show where it had been. I found one man walking, dazed, among hundreds of bodies, mostly children, covering the ground. He managed to tell me that he was the assistant superintendent and what little else he could. I called my office in Tyler and the International News Service in Dallas just before the telephones were out. No one could phone in or out for hours.”

In a twist of irony, the explosion seemed to give a bloody baptism to many of the 20th century’s prominent journalists. Among them was Walter Cronkite, who came from Dallas to cover the grisly scene.

“You couldn’t even recognize the building. There were no walls. There was nothing left of it. There was something that looked like a roof, but it was on the ground. It had just collapsed,” Cronkite said in a Channel 8 News report, “The Day a Generation Died,” which aired in 1987 on the 50th anniversary.

“As we got closer and were able to park the car and get out and get up to the scene, we realized that these … these tough oil field workers with tear-stained faces, and their hands were bleeding, torn away by these jagged edges of stone and brick, and they were carrying bodies out every other minute or two.”

The blast overshadowed what was a communications milestone in local history, as KOCA of Kilgore and Henderson became the first radio studio in Rusk County. Ted Hudson’s station hit the airways at 7 a.m., but when he learned of that blast around 3:30 that afternoon, he grabbed enough equipment to go on the air and went to London. He connected with a telephone line torn loose from the building and was there for the next three days and nights.

He summoned doctors, nurses and others to help, directed rescue and clean-up efforts and would later inform ministers and singers where to go for the next funeral, according to museum accounts. His listeners were not just anxious and grief-weary East Texans but Americans throughout the nation, many of them parents mesmerized by what could have been their own worst nightmare.

“As long as I had not known the broadcast was going beyond our own section, I was perfectly at ease,” Hudson once said, “but when I learned we were on the national network I got a real case of mic fright and turned it over to another announcer.”

McClendon would become the Tyler newspaper’s reporter for governmental hearings which sought to explain why the blast happened, she said in her book.

“The one good thing that came out of this disaster was the campaign initiated by the National Junior Chambers of Commerce which led to putting an odorant into gas so that leaks can be smelled,” she stated.

“Thousands of lives have been saved because escaping gas is now easily detectable. I know I am especially alert to that warning aroma whether in my home or in public places. And I like to think my stories helped put it there.”

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During oil boom, before explosion, the school was the PRIDE of New London

By SHERRY KOONCE

During a time when many Americans found themselves in the throes of a hardscrabble Depression-era existence, the discovery of oil in 1930 brought people to East Texas in record numbers. Almost overnight, the London School District began a transformation, the result of boomtown prosperity.

Brought by oil wealth, the school district would enjoy a bountiful time until a tragic explosion in 1937 at the district’s new high school ripped through the building to claim an estimated 280-plus students, 15 teachers, two visitors and a school secretary.

“Oh, before the explosion, that school was something to see, they had plenty of money to spend, and they spent it” said Charles Dial, an 83-year-old survivor from Houston who was in the sixth grade at the time of the explosion.

For many years, it was the richest rural school in the world, and one of the most envied, said John Davidson, docent at the London Museum and Tea Room.

The elementary school had its own rhythm band complete with uniforms, and the football field was the first in the nation to be lighted, Davidson said.

Oil wealth provided free uniforms and instruments for the high school band, as well as uniforms for the school’s pep squad.

A gymnasium, auditorium and 10 other school buildings and playing fields were surrounded by derricks, pipelines and temporary camps, according to The New London Museum’s Web site.

Roofed in red-tile, the brick high school housed 650 to 700 fifth- through ninth-grade students. By 1937, the London School campus was a showplace, funded by $20 million in oil wealth taxable value flowing freely along the 100-square-mile district.

Dorothy Box, 84, of Henderson well remembers the years she attended London schools. “The school was so nice. We had a big, roomy auditorium, a science lab with all kinds of equipment and a homemaking cottage with everything in it — all kinds of things available for first class kitchens at the time,” Box said.

Boys could take shop class, where any type of tool they needed was available, she said.

As the oil poured from the East Texas field, exploration companies moved in to the area. With them came jobs —and people that would change the fabric of the city.

“New London became a transient city with people coming in and out every day,” Davidson said. “In 1931, Humble moved its headquarters to New London, and the number of employees grew to 750 by 1934.”

Davidson said the camp provided 25 homes for families, had a recreation home with cooking and canning facilities, a mess hall and five bunk houses.

Other oil companies soon came to Texas to drill in the vast oil field.

“There was Tidewater, Gulf, Phillips, Ohio, Texas, Standard, H.L. Hunt and J. Paul Getty. All had operations in East Texas,” Davidson said.

Dial said he could still remember how proud the students were of their campus during a time when the rest of the nation was caught up in the Depression.

“I loved every day of school. I never missed a day, and loved to learn and be with the kids,” Dial said.

According to the school’s 1936 yearbook, the 21-room high school boasted a science laboratory, home economics, laboratory, shop and such other well-equipped rooms that would qualify it as a Class A school.

The school sponsored athletics and had an award-winning band — an activity that Dial participated in.

Dial was a student in the band who played the french horn.

“We took pride in our band and had a wonderful band. We played at concerts, at the football game, went to competition and won a lot of awards,” he said.

Though many students brought sack lunches or ate the cafeteria food, Dial and his brothers would drive home for lunch every day to save money.

“It was in the middle of the Depression. There were plenty of oilfield jobs, but they still did not pay much of a wage, so for some families money was real tight,” Dial said.

Some students had enough money to splurge for refreshments.

“Down at the bottom of the football field was a little cafe called Alf’s. They sold soft drinks, moon pies, hamburgers. Kids could eat there for about 25 cents,” Dial said.

Though just 10-years-old, Dial said he and his older brother took turns driving an old wrecked car to school, while other children rode the bus.

“It was not unusual for a kid to drive a car to school, and there were a few of us as young as 10 who did, but most of the students rode the bus to school,” he said.

While the school had an expansive library, Dial said most of the boys were too busy running around to spend much time there.

“We was playing football and chasing girls. I chased them all and loved them all,” he said.

Maxine Kelley Lawson, 82, of Caldwell, was one of Dial’s sixth-grade classmates. Like most of the students enrolled, it was the lucrative oilfield that brought her family to the London school district.

“I was new that year. My family had just moved from Breckenridge, and I remember thinking how nice the school was. It was one of the best around, and we all knew that,” Lawson said.

Like most of the girls in her elementary school class, Lawson wore simple print dresses with her straight hair pulled back.

Billy Dale, 78, travelled from his home in Connecticut to attend this weekend’s reunion. During his time in New London, Dale lived with his family in the Humble Oil Co. camp and attended classes at London School.

Like most boys, he wore blue denim overalls to class, but no blue jeans.

He was only 8 years old at the time of the explosion, but remembers the city bustling with activity when the rest of the nation was in the midst of the Depression.

“I know there was a depression. I could hear grown folks talking about it, but the people I knew seemed to drive cars and have plenty to eat,” he said. “Our school was nice, one of the best around.”

Still ranking as the third-worst disaster of the 20th century in Texas, the explosion signalled the end of a prolific seven-year period the district had enjoyed since oil was first discovered in Rusk County in 1930.

A new state-of-the-art high school was constructed at a cost of $300,000 in 1932, and in 1935, a new elementary school was added.