Staff, wire reports
CNHI
JACKSONVILLE —
That infamous March 18 was a Thursday, and launched a swift drive to change the way natural gas is processed and dispensed in the United States.
So many with a direct connection to the London, Texas, school explosion of 73 years ago are gone now, no longer here to mourn the 282 students and 14 adults lost in oil-rich east Texas that March.
But history never really dies in a person, place or thing — especially a painful history. And in this modern-day New London (located about 20 miles west of Tyler, then a bit south), pain is a big part of history.
Many people today are aware of the smell of natural gas — that rotten-egg aroma that alerts us to gas escaping from a stove or a furnace. But that odor wasn’t there before March 18, 1937.
Jacksonville’s Mary Lou Taylor was there the day the New London School exploded, and she said she remembers it like it was yesterday.
“I was there in the building when it blew up,” she said. “I was not hurt, but I was on the second story and jumped out. It was a beautiful spring day — beautiful. Then all hell broke loose.”
That Thursday morning, the eldest of the Elrod family’s school-aged children was working in the school office and hearing what she’d been hearing for some time: Students were complaining of headaches and watery eyes. Such complaints had been readily chalked up to allergies. It was, after all, almost spring in East Texas. And for several years, the smell of a Texas spring — and every other Texas season, to boot — had been mixed with the scent of the oil boom.
So such health complaints to the principal’s office were thought to be the result of spring allergies or late-winter colds or that raw, crude smell of crude weighing on the senses.
No one gave any thought to another —an ominous — possibility.
But a military court of inquiry would come to such an ominous conclusion just days later, and would reach its decision on the very site where, in East Texans’ parlance, a generation died that day.
Like the raw residue gas piped away from the burgeoning fields nearby, the London School was a byproduct of the East Texas oil boom that began in earnest in 1933.
The oil fields brought oil workers to the region, and the families of the oil workers began to swamp the London school system. Oil boom money fueled what was then one of the most expensive, state-of-the-art school plants in the country. The $1 million London School, a concrete and steel-reinforced building constructed in the shape of an E, had opened just a year before it was destroyed.
East Texans in northwest Rusk County had considered the discovery of oil to be one of their greatest blessings — until the afternoon of March 18, 1937. On that day, oil field roughnecks deserted their posts at the derricks and pumps to run to the school campus as soon as they heard the explosion.
According to newlondonschool.org, 293 people perished from the explosion. Some counts go higher than 300. The only place the count is written in stone is on the memorial placed in front of the rebuilt school, now known as West Rusk County Consolidated Independent School District.
A court of inquiry determined that raw natural gas had collected in open areas beneath the school and perhaps within the walls, and that a spark from something in the basement shop class — a chain light switch or a sander — set off the explosion.
Just weeks later, the Texas Legislature passed a measure to require that a malodorant be added to natural gas, and before long the entire nation followed suit.
“So some good came out of it for everyone,” survivor Geneva Elrod once said. “Maybe history won’t forget us.”
New London won’t forget. The town has the memorial and the museum, and every two years there is a special reunion/commemoration on the weekend closest to the anniversary of the disaster.
Because history, no matter how painful, never really dies.
