Bath Massacre: America's First School Bombing (33 page)

Fig. 16. Pauline Johns, age eleven. Her arm was broken in two places and the muscles torn. She was in the hospital for eight weeks. Her younger sister, Doris, was killed.
(Courtesy of the Bath School Museum.)

Throughout the summer, a steady flow of outsiders filed past the ruined school and farm. They took loose bricks with them or scooped up small chunks of dirt from the Kehoe farm as souvenirs—of sorts—to remember their visits.

Monty Ellsworth was in prime position to benefit from the tourist trade. Living about a quarter of a mile from the Kehoe farm showed him that people wanted to take home a piece of Bath, some kind of keepsake or memento to mark their visits. There had to be something more tasteful than clods of dirt.

Fig. 17. “Tourists” combing through the destroyed Kehoe farm.
(Photograph by Fred A. Stevens.)

Ellsworth’s answer was a book that could be sold to passersby. “I have tried to tell every detail of the disaster that would be of interest to the reader,” he wrote in the preface. “Everything in this book is the truth to the best of my ability.”
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The book was rife with errors, most notably stating that Kehoe was fourteen rather than forty when the family stove blasted his stepmother. Ellsworth was not a natural born writer, yet for the most part the booklet, titled simply
The Bath School Disaster
and bound in a plain brown cover, was composed with an understated eloquence. Ellsworth provided some background on the school, a sketchy biography of Kehoe, and a fairly accurate account of how the morning of May 18 unfolded. From friends in town, Ellsworth gathered photographs and biographical information on the victims and added small paragraphs with brief histories—including burial sites—of each person killed. He also reported on individual recoveries of the wounded. The book included a list of dead and wounded, organizations that provided aid, memorial poems, an eyewitness account written by a fifteen-year-old survivor, Martha Hintz, and a comprehensive index. Ellsworth paid for the booklet with personal funds and hired local boys to sell his work to the tourists. It was an easy product to move. The boys ran back and forth
between Kehoe’s farm and the schoolhouse peddling their wares, dropped the money off at Ellsworth’s, collected their salaries, got more books, and went back to selling.
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Doctors at the Saint Lawrence Hospital thought they were going to lose Beatrice Gibbs. The fourth grader was in terrible shape when she was brought in on May 18: both legs broken in two places with the right one badly sliced open, left arm with a shattered elbow and a bad break just above, another laceration on the back of her head, and cuts and bruises everywhere. Physicians rethought her treatment; standard care was not an option. The surface wounds must be carefully monitored, thus there could be no wrapping of Beatrice’s broken bones in plaster casts. Instead she was nestled inside a complicated frame bed, her body suspended from ropes and held in place with thirty-five-pound lead weights. This took the pressure off her gashes while holding Beatrice’s bones in place.

One day passed, then another. Beatrice hovered between life and death. On the fifth day, she came around. With so many children dead, Beatrice’s battle back toward recovery was a welcome miracle. Gradually the weights were reduced and her bones and skin knitted back together. Eventually her doctors brought the balancing weights down to five pounds. What they could not do was alleviate Beatrice’s crushing pain, an unending torture from within.

More surgery was required on August 22 to remove a splinter from her hip. Beatrice was too far gone, though; she died the next day. With her passing, the death toll from Kehoe’s bombing numbered forty-five: thirty-eight children and five adults plus Andrew and Nellie Kehoe.
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Dean Sweet came home with strict orders not to move. Any strenuous activity—such as walking—could whip his heart into a frenzy. Doctors privately told his parents not to expect their son to live past his fifteenth birthday.

He longed to be outside. Dean wanted fresh air, to run and play like any other kid. Instead he was confined to the house, forced to sit day after day in a chair. Ava was by his side as Dean’s activities turned girlish, threading beads and learning the art of crochet.

It was more than one boy could take. Rebellion had to come, even if it meant death.

As soon as he had a chance Dean sneaked outside, headed straight for
the fields next to the house, and went for a walk. The fresh air felt good in his lungs, the sun warm on his skin, the earth firm beneath his feet.

When Willard Sweet saw his son outside, he panicked. “Dean,” he pleaded, “please go back inside.”

“No,” Dean said. He’d had his taste of freedom. No one and no thing could bring him back into the house.

In 2001, when he was in his late eighties, Dean told a reporter that this moment of stubborn defiance forever crystallized in his mind as the day he finally started getting better.
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Galen Harte’s mother couldn’t bear to look at her son’s pony; it was a constant reminder of the child she had lost in the explosion. Rather than keep the animal, she gave it to Carlton Hollister, Galen’s best friend, asking him to watch the Shetland for a while.

Carlton stayed close to the pony throughout the summer. Galen’s memory was close in mind every time Carlton saddled up for a ride. Taking care of his friend’s beloved pony was both a privilege and a blessing, Carlton realized.

Still, he was filled with a youngster’s wise sense of irony every time he sat in Galen’s saddle. Because the boys had switched classrooms by chance on May 18, Carlton was alive and his friend was dead.
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Throughout the summer, Josephine Cushman cried. She cried to herself, she cried with friends, she cried with family. Her mother cried, too. Nellie Cushman would look at her daughter, unable to say anything but, “Oh, Josephine,” then leave the room.

Any physical link to Ralph was painful. Nellie finally took all of his clothes and gave them to a family in need. There was one condition to this gift. Nellie didn’t want any of the children receiving Ralph’s things to wear them in front of Josephine.

But this, of course, was impossible. One day, as Josephine walked to town, she saw a boy wearing a tan shirt and tan pants. They looked familiar.

She realized the child was wearing Ralph’s clothes.

It was a shock to the system. Josephine swallowed hard and kept walking. She didn’t say a word to her parents, just as she didn’t tell them about her back pains when Ralph’s body was identified.

Her mother had tried to protect her by giving away Ralph’s clothes, Josephine realized. And by not letting on about her encounter that day, she felt that she was protecting her parents as well.
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It should have been a nice day, a great day, when the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus came to Lansing that summer. Lee Mast and his parents anticipated a day of clowns, wild animals, sideshows, and high-wire acts.

Instead the day took a bad turn. Winds blew into town, attacked the big top, and set its canvas flapping like a giant sail. Roustabouts furiously hammered down ropes, reinforcing the stakes that held the enormous tent.

There wasn’t a spectator who wasn’t scared during the fifteen minutes it took to stabilize the tent. Lee’s fear felt different, though, he later said. After what he had been through in May, the loud flapping noises and surrounding human anxiety amplified the feelings induced by the nightmares he’d been having for a few weeks.
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Forced to lie in bed, Earl Proctor watched in anger as other children ran by his house. It seemed his boyhood had been stolen from him, just as his father had been three years earlier when he was killed in a car wreck. Pain and fear weighed heavily on Earl. He was terrified that he would be crippled for life.

On the day he went to be fitted for leg braces, he was slapped with new anxieties. The salesman looked over Earl and his widowed mother. In a harsh tone the clerk barked out, “Who’s going to pay for them?”
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A six-year-old boy can comprehend the notion of death; understanding a loved one’s passing is something else entirely. Billy Hall knew his older brother and sister, George and Willa, were gone, as he confided to his uncle, Andrew Green.

“Now I can have George’s coveralls and tricycle because he ain’t coming home any more,” Billy told Uncle Andy. “My mother told me he wasn’t.”
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Measured in numbers, the loss of human lives—particularly those of children—is a stark equation of death. The fourth grade lost eight students killed and eleven injured out of twenty-one total. The fifth grade lost five students and eight injured out of twenty-four total. Twenty-eight children were enrolled in the sixth grade; twelve were killed and eleven injured. The highest death toll was in the school’s third grade: ten of the sixteen students had died and three had been injured.
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After the Columbine and Virginia Tech shootings in 1999 and 2007, respectively, shooting victims, families, other students, and school faculty and staff members were offered counseling, understandably and with compassion. They had lived through an inexplicable hell. Psychological help was a merciful balm.

On May 19, 1927, in Bath, people simply went back to work. Many of them had no choice. Crops needed tending; cows must be milked; other animals required daily care. Farm life does not allow for a day off regardless of the circumstances. Solace is found in quiet moments working the fields or at church on Sunday mornings.

Though all the victims were pulled from the ruins of the north wing, the debris remained. Throughout the summer volunteers worked hard removing rubble. Children pitched in, pulling nails out of broken timbers. Curious visitors, on day trips to see the remains, carted away bricks and other relics.

Many families stayed in Bath. It was their home. Others could not live with the memories lingering throughout the town. The glimpse of a child, a former playmate of a murdered son or daughter, was too much to bear. Wagons and trucks laden with furniture and families leaving town were common sights, though rarely discussed. One survivor observed that Bath “was almost a ghost town for many years.”
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