MFDJ 10/31/23: Gathering Limbs at New London

Today’s Devastating Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

The New London School explosion occurred on March 18, 1937, when a natural gas leak caused an explosion and destroyed the London School in New London, Texas, United States. The disaster killed more than 300 students and teachers. As of 2021, the event is the third-deadliest disaster in the history of Texas, after the 1900 Galveston hurricane and the 1947 Texas City disaster.  The following is an account of the aftermath of the disaster.

Ralph Estep rushed in his ambulance to New London with a load of emergency supplies, including glucose and caffeine. This man who had seen people cut to pieces beneath train wheels and faces blasted away by buckshot looked upon the carnage at the school and began to weep. He helped those he could and collected those he could not.

“I gathered two tubs full of hands, arms, legs, and feet for which we could find no bodies,” Estep said. “I helped to gather nearly a bushel basket full of shoes—tiny shoes that kiddies wear—in which we found no feet. They were just shoes, laced and tied and which had been blown completely from the victims’ bodies. I watched a doctor administering morphine to a little slip of a girl. Still conscious, she was suffering the agony of the damned.”

Estep watched another man rush to the doctor. His chest heaving, the man said they’d found the remains of the doctor’s son.

Other fathers and mothers needed no intermediary. Estep remembered watching a red-eyed man digging for his son amid the rubble. The man found an arm protruding from a heap of bricks and boards. As he tugged to pull the body loose from the pile, the man’s face turned white with recognition.

J.B. Dial, a decorated veteran of the Great War, rushed into the wreckage to find his sons. Dust still sifted down through the dead air. Panic-stricken, with a surge of adrenalin, Dial grabbed a slab of concrete and heaved it upward. A little girl wiggled out from a narrow space behind it.

“That’s my child!” a woman shouted with hysterical joy.

The first wave of responders—oil men, shopkeepers, truck drivers, preachers, barbers, a professional violinist—washed onto the wreckage. Nearly all had someone to find, but to look at this great disjointed mass was to lose hope. L.A. “Tiger” Mathis, Donald’s older brother, did not even know where to begin. He joined a group of men who formed a line and started pulling debris from the huge pile and passing it, hand to hand, away.

A blizzard of paper from loose-leaf binders lay scattered throughout the wreckage and across the campus. Hundreds of textbooks had been tossed helter-skelter. On a small blood-smeared pamphlet, mashed into the debris, was written, “Tips on First Aid.”

Felton Waggoner’s eyes swept the detritus and locked on the monstrosity at its heart. He muttered a prayer at the wreckage, even as its worst came into focus. Waggoner walked numbly forward into a field of small bodies, crushed and torn and missing pieces, and it was too much even to cry. John Nelson, the son of math teacher Jonnie Marie Nelson, walked into view, and in his face Waggoner saw what he was feeling. Nelson asked Waggoner if he’d seen his mother. Waggoner would not find out she was dead until the next day, so he told Nelson he had not. Nelson thanked him and turned around, and Waggoner saw the hair had been burned away from the back of his head. The boy walked away, looking for what he’d lost.

Culled from: Gone at 3:17

 

Car Crash Du Jour!

One of my favorite books is Car Crashes and Other Sad Stories by Anaheim photographer Mell Kilpatrick. It’s a collection of car crash photos from the 40’s and 50’s, often with corpses still strewn across the enormous interior (or out of it, since there were no seat belts in those days). It combines my love of old cars with my love of morbidity and is the perfect ambulance chaser book!


Smith Crossing, train and car—fatal

 

Andersonville Prisoner Diary Entry Du Jour!

This is the continuation of the 1864 diary of Andersonville prisoner Private George A. Hitchcock (see the archived version for all entries up until now).

Here’s today’s entry:

July 15th. A few cripples and “bummers” from Sherman’s army came in. The rebels are suspicious that large tunnels are in progress, and are hunting for them near the dead-line. A petition has been made up to send to our government, praying for a speedy release of all here. Death is doing his share of the work faithfully.

Culled from: Andersonville: Giving Up the Ghost

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *