History Lesson 
“Oh, My God! It’s Our Children!”
On March 18, 1937, the combined junior-senior high school in the small East Texas town of New London exploded without warning, killing nearly half of the students and teachers. To commemorate the seventieth anniversary of that tragic day, survivors remember the horrific events—and the heroic response—that changed their lives forever.
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“It dawned on me then that my friends were probably gone.”
Within two weeks of the explosion, children and teachers returned to finish the school year in portable buildings and makeshift classrooms. There was little talk of the disaster, and prom and graduation went forward as planned. To prevent similar tragedies, Carolyn Frei testified before a special session of the Texas Legislature, which enacted the country’s first law requiring the odorization of natural gas on May 17. Yet some hard feelings remained as the district rebuilt the school in front of the previous site.
Bill Thompson: About ten days after the explosion, we were trying to assemble classes in the gym, but we had no gas in there and it was cold. On March 29 it started snowing, and when we got out, everything was solid white, a blanket of snow.
The teacher called roll for our class to see how many were there. Someone would answer, “He’s in the hospital” or “His folks moved back to Arkansas.” And sometimes it was that he had been killed. When they called the name of the little girl I had switched seats with, I realized she had been killed sitting in my seat. I didn’t know that till that day. I buried the guilt for many years before I came to deal with it. I took the blame for a lot of things.
Amos S. Etheredge: Today, if something happens, they send in 1,500 psychologists to talk to the kids. We didn’t have that.
Nadine Dorsey: I wanted to go to the school. Finally, about a week later, Mother took me. That was a shock. Even though I had been in the blast, I didn’t realize the building had been completely destroyed. It dawned on me then that my friends were probably gone. I asked one of the teachers wandering around outside the school about the kids in my class, and he said they had survived, but everybody in the two other seventh-grade classes had died. I can’t explain how that hit me. We’d been in school together from first to seventh grade.
Margarett Woods (whose maiden name was Stroud) was in the seventh grade. She now lives in Henderson: Our class was quite a bit smaller when we reconvened, and everybody was on edge. One day, my teacher’s crutch fell on the floor, and we were so startled we ran out the door.
Marjorie Kinney: I was in sixth grade at that time, and there were four sixth-grade classes. After the blast, about fifty students from those classes were dead. This grade was hit harder than any other.
William Follis: There were four rooms of us in seventh grade. I’m guessing 120 kids, with 30 a room. And when we went back to the temporary rooms, there were only 20 of us. Where were they? Killed?
H. G. White: While I was in the hospital in Henderson, with my head wrapped in a turban, a Shreveport Times reporter interviewed me. She wrote that in one of my answers to her questions I said, “Gee whiz.” Well, I don’t know where she got that; I never said that phrase. But the article was reprinted in the local paper. So when I started going back to school, they called me Gee Whiz. I could’ve shot her.
Martha Moore: The senior class held the prom at a hotel in Henderson in the latter part of March. Some of the students arrived in ambulances, on stretchers, but we got everybody there. There were about one hundred of us that were supposed to graduate, and we had about fifty at the end of the year. The prom was sad, in a way, but we tried to make it as happy as we could. Nobody danced because too many people had broken legs. But we signed each other’s yearbooks. When graduation time came, we held the ceremony on the football field. It was just a regular graduation. Those that were able to come in wheelchairs and stretchers arrived and did their best to participate.
Carolyn Frei: I was a very outgoing little girl, so I wasn’t nervous when I got up before the Legislature. I had just been through an explosion! I met the governor and the legislators; then I spoke for about five minutes, asking them to pass laws preventing this from happening again.
Billie Mathews: One lady told my dad to talk to her husband, who was getting ready to shoot the superintendent or whoever let this happen. My dad went up and talked to him and calmed him down. Then people threatened to sue and all that.
Lois Johnson: Lawyers came to my uncle’s door asking him to help in a lawsuit against the school, and he almost got his shotgun.
Bill Thompson: The superintendent, Mr. [W. C.] Shaw, was brought into court time and time again. He was acquitted. Still, a lot of people blamed him for switching to this raw gas. That man had a burden no one else had. He had a nervous breakdown. Some people wanted to tar and feather him. Eventually, he resigned and left town.
Charles Dial: Yes, they were angry. Especially my father. He wanted to hurt somebody because they took his child. I told him, “Papa, the superintendent lost family too. He didn’t do it on purpose. You can’t blame him.”
Amos S. Etheredge: That summer a lot of us went to work scraping the mortar off the brick from the old building. They were reusing it for the new building. I turned fourteen in July that year, but I got my Social Security number, since you had to have one to work. I think we got 15 cents an hour, which was good pay back then.
Fran VanAssen: My parents heard that some parents were saying that if they opened another school, they’d kill all the kids in there.
Margaret Nichols: A lot of the parents of friends who were killed found out that I’d survived and threatened to kill me. It was just the shock of it, I guess.
Barbara Page: One day my mother went to garden club, and the women were talking about the explosion. My mother said, “The Lord was so good to me, because my two sons and daughter weren’t hurt.” And of course she was grateful. But another woman spoke up and said, “Well, why wasn’t he good to me?” It broke my mother’s heart. She never mentioned it again.
Marjorie Kinney: Two mothers of children in our class never came out of their depression. They had emotional problems. I can understand why. A lot of people said, “God took the best children and left the others.” That hurt. But man caused it, not God. I guess people did what they thought was the best at the time. That’s all we ever do.
Amos S. Etheredge: In 1938, when we started school in the new building, the students decided to have a holiday on March 18. So we left the building and gathered under a memorial that had been built. And Mr. [Willie] Tate, who was a science and math teacher, talked us into going back to class. He said, “You’ve got to forget this. You can’t keep thinking about it the rest of your lives.” So we went back and finished classes. Life goes on. It has to.
Max Holleyman: We tried to be as normal as we could. Carried on with our regular activities. Our sports teams played, and our band performed as it had before.
Nadine Dorsey: No one mentioned the school explosion after they built the new building. With kids, it was just like it never happened. It’s the strangest thing to me. But you know how kids are. They can put things behind them. They were more resilient than the parents in a way.
“When I got the invitation for the fortieth anniversary, I thought, ‘Okay. I’m ready.’ ”
The success of the first reunion, held forty years after the disaster, prompted biennial gatherings, and in 1998 the London Museum opened its doors, dedicating a large portion of space to the explosion. On the weekend of March 16, an estimated five hundred survivors and their friends will gather at the high school auditorium for the seventieth anniversary.
Opal Hamill: None of us could even cry when it happened. We didn’t for years. At that reunion we finally talked and cried, you know?
Nadine Dorsey: When I got the invitation for the fortieth anniversary, I thought, “Okay. I’m ready.” That’s the first time I cried. Before that, I wouldn’t think about it. I blocked the memory out of my life.
Amos S. Etheredge: I think we had two hundred people at the first reunion. It wasn’t sad, like some people thought it would be. It felt good to think about it after all those years.
Bill Thompson: Around fifty years after the explosion, I called the sister of the girl I’d traded seats with and told her that I had to unburden myself of this guilt.
Ledell Carpenter: I didn’t know Bill Thompson from Adam or Eve. He told me he had asked my little sister, Ethel, to swap seats with him just before the school exploded. He said if she had been in her seat, she wouldn’t have been killed. I told him, “Well, Bill, it was her appointed time. I could have gotten killed, but it wasn’t my time. My brother was in the explosion and he survived. This was Ethel’s time.” He said he had never looked at it like that.
Carmen Peppe (whose maiden name was Osburn) started first grade in September 1937. She now lives in Garland: There is never a day when I don’t have thoughts about the New London event. The day that my mother passed, she was holding up her hands and saying, “Do you see all those children up there?” We are sure she was referring to the schoolchildren of New London.
Margaret Taylor (whose maiden name was McCune) was in the third grade. She now lives in Shreveport, Louisiana: This sounds morbid, but the entire experience left me with a feeling like I had stepped on that thin line that joins this world with the other world. I remember dreaming I was in a body of water and I could hear my dead brother yelling, “Over here! Over here!” Then I’d wake up. I’d almost resent, as a young person, people who were old, who were grieved for. Because they had lived all those years.
Billie Mathews: I want to go to the next reunion. Some survivors tell me, “I don’t live in the past. I live in the future.” But so few of us were left in that sixth-grade class! And now there are even fewer left. I want to see them.
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