Gone at 3:17
By Eastan McNeal on January 9, 2010 at 3:30 PM in Current Affairs
The Untold Story of the Worst School Disaster in American History
| During the 2008 presidential campaign, journalist David M. Brown, then a veteran reporter at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, broke a major story documenting ACORN’s link to a supposedly independent political consulting outfit called Citizen Services Inc. His story, appearing almost simultaneously with a NoQuarter posting about the CSI-ACORN link, bolstered calls for investigating ACORN’s books and prompted the Obama campaign to amend a shaky FEC report regarding money it paid to CSI. |
“..many public school districts have significant weaknesses in their emergency and disaster plans.” |
Now Brown’s attention has shifted from digging in to contemporary politics to unearthing the true story about the worst school disaster in American history. I interviewed David about his new project.
Brown left the Tribune-Review last year to work full-time on finishing a book about the 1937 natural gas explosion at a large school in New London, Texas. The work-in-progress, titled Gone at 3:17, employs his long experience as a reporter to shed new light on a largely forgotten tragedy that sank the entire nation into mourning on the day it happened. Brown told NoQuarter he will complete the project in time to publish the book by autumn of 2011, shortly before the 75th anniversary of the March 18, 1937 catastrophe that killed more than 300 people, most of them children.
“The deaths of these children led directly to laws everywhere requiring a foul-smelling additive in odorless natural gas. The disaster was a wake-up call for stricter safety standards in schools across the nation,” he said. “We’re hoping a book that vividly recalls what happened in New London will memorialize the victims and put a new focus on vigilance when it comes to schools and other places where children and young people assemble.”
“This is especially important in an era that has witnessed such atrocities as the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, the terrorist takeover of a Russian school in 2004 that claimed more than 300 lives, and the 1999 shooting rampage at Columbine High School near Denver, Colorado,” Brown said.
A national study released in 2006 by the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and Arkansas Children’s Hospital Research Institute found that many public school districts have significant weaknesses in their emergency and disaster plans. The random survey of 3,670 of the nation’s 14,000 school districts found that 30 percent had never conducted an emergency drill. Eighty-six percent of respondents reported having a mass casualty response plan, but just 57 percent had a written plan for prevention of such an event.
The book will be riveting and powerful, based on excerpts and background reported on the recently launched website for Gone at 3:17. Here is Brown’s reminiscence of how this book came to be:
“Helen Smoot rests beside her sister, Anna, in a grave marked by an oblong, blue-gray stone, atop a pastoral hill in East Texas. I stopped there one restless afternoon 22 years ago, curious about the age of the cemetery, and couldn’t help but pause a moment at the Smoot sisters’ plot. Helen was 17 and Anna was 15 when they died on the same day in 1937. ‘Together in the sunshine, together in the rain,’ is inscribed in the granite marker. What a tragedy, I thought, to lose two children at once.
“As the father of two daughters born, like Helen and Anna, two years apart, I wondered how any parent could even begin to cope with such an enormous loss.
“Near the sisters, another gravestone has colorful toy marbles imbedded in the concrete footer that spell the last name Payne. Here rests Lewis, born Sept 27, 1921, died March 18, 1937. Another tombstone, white beneath seeping gray stains, stands nearby—James W. Harris, born June 19, 1924, died March 18, 1937. Across from it, one for Virginia Allen Loe, born January 5, 1924, died March 18, 1937.
“Gazing across the cemetery, I saw other tombstones—scores of them, mostly children—sharing the same date of death: March 18, 1937.
“I wandered through the hilltop graveyard, stunned. Inscriptions on the markers offered hints of a catastrophe: “Victim of the explosion,” “London School Tragedy,” “Victims of the New London, Texas School Disaster.” I had been living in East Texas for a couple of years and had heard bits and pieces about a calamity at a school in the 1930s during the Great Depression, but it didn’t register as anything I’d read about in history books. I had been a journalist and professional writer since 1970, and I didn’t recall any anniversary news stories or articles about the disaster. Quite by accident I was standing in the place, Pleasant Hill Cemetery, where 110 of the students, teachers and visitors—about a third of the victims of the explosion—were buried.
“This book found its genesis in that graveyard. During the next two decades, I unearthed the story of the afternoon a town lost its future.”
We appreciate David’s for his work with us and we thank him for spending years working on bringing us a part of our history, even if it is sad. We break news at NoQuarter with numbers, analysis and facts. David M. Brown has taken a step beyond and entered the realm of the heart.
David M. Brown began his journalism career in 1970 as a reporter for the Memphis Commercial Appeal, and later worked for United Press International and several newspapers in Mississippi and Texas. He was at the Tribune-Review in Pittsburgh for 14 years. His longtime friend, colleague and now co-author of Gone at 3:17 is Michael Wereschagin, a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporter with numerous prestigious journalism awards. Over the span of his career, Brown has conducted scores of personal interviews with well-known public figures, including then-Senators Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton and Sen. John McCain during the ’08 campaign; then-President George Bush and Vice President Dick Chaney during their ’04 re-election bid; the late Sen. Ted Kennedy; and Muhammad Ali after he regained the world boxing title in 1978.
Here is the link to the book website, SchoolDisaster.com and David’s site. Book trailer video produced by Patchwork Films.
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