Free Bath Massacre: America's First School Bombing by Arnie Bernstein Page A

the Fire Marshall Division of the Michigan Department of Public Safety, got word of an explosion in Bath. He headed to the scene. 85
     
    As he woke, Raymond Eschtruth realized someone was carrying him. The stranger brought the boy across the lawn and placed him on the sidewalk with some other children.
    Raymond’s mind was in a fog. He felt no pain, though he was amazed at all the dust covering his body. His eyes and ears were filled with plaster and blood.
    Someone came up to him, a neighbor, and sat down. Her brother, one of Raymond’s classmates, was dead, she told him.
    It was all so confusing. Raymond didn’t know what to think. 86
     
    Frank Smith’s house, located across the street from the school, was one of many homes serving as a temporary triage center. Wounded children were being brought there, then loaded into automobiles for transport to hospitals in Lansing. Rows of hastily installed cots filled the living room; other wounded children were tucked into the Smiths’ bed.
    Superintendent Huyck, fresh from the telephone exchange, looked over the situation. With Smith’s wife Leone at his side, he paused at the makeshift bedside of one little girl.
    “I think she is dying,” he said. Leone Smith thought so, too.
    Huyck asked Mrs. Smith if she could accommodate more children. She told him yes; as she went upstairs to open more rooms for the wounded, Huyck quickly went back to the killing zone to see what else he could do.
    Minutes later, as Leone came back downstairs, the house was rocked by another explosion. 87

    Flames licked the Kehoe house and barn, rapidly consuming the structures. Periodically there was a loud
bang from
inside, as though someone had randomly fired a gun.
    Driving east, Chief Lane saw a farm with buildings ablaze; he drove by the inferno but didn’t stop. The school disaster took precedence over a house fire. 88

    Leona Weldon, a secretary in the Lansing office of the American Red Cross, wasn’t a field worker, but she knew how to pull people together. She started when a staff member at the Social Service Bureau, located just across the hall, notified the Red Cross of the explosion. Thrust into a crucible, Weldon kept her cool. She started making calls. Organization of a relief effort was under way. 89
     
    Dart Lang and John Snively, Consumers Power employees, headed toward the schoolhouse, ready to help. John Curtis, a fellow Consumers Power worker who had already been at the scene, stopped the men. “If you haven’t got a strong heart,” he warned Lang, “you’d better not go up.”
    “Somebody better go up,” Lang replied.
    Lang suddenly heard a car behind him. The machine was clearly going pretty fast and wasn’t going to let anything get in its way.
    “Hot rail!” Lang yelled to Snively. The two men dove into a nearby ditch.
    The automobile, which Lang could see was a Ford pickup, drove on. “What is the matter with that man?” said Lang. “Is he crazy?”
    He watched as the machine swerved to the right, in front of the wreckage of Bath Consolidated School. 90
     
    Jay Pope looked over the smashed school roof. Perhaps, he said to his son-in-law, Lawrence Hart, we can pry the roof up with a telephone pole. Hart agreed. He headed toward the road, where he ran into Frank Smith.
    “Let’s get a telephone pole,” said Hart.
    The two needed a car big enough to carry a pole. Hart’s truck was at the grain elevator in town, too far to run for the moment. In the crowd, Hart saw Huyck’s wife Ethel. The Huycks owned a four-door Ford sedan, a machine big enough to transport a telephone pole and then some.
    Ethel Huyck told Hart and Smith they could use her car but her husband had the keys. Could the superintendent be found amid the confusion?
    “Maybe I can start the car with my jackknife,” Hart said.
    He got under the dashboard and fiddled at the ignition with his knife blade. A spark lit up, kicking off the machine’s engine.
    Hart and Smith drove three blocks to a