Area man remembers New London explosion
Eighty years ago, a gas-induced blast destroyed a Texas school, killing 293 people and forever changing the way natural gas was processed
REDWATER, Texas—Although it’s been 80 years, Billy
Webb can still remember what seemed like a bomb explosion as he walked home from school the pleasant late-winter afternoon of March 18, 1937.
“I was just 8 years old when this happened,” Webb said, referring to the powerful natural gas-induced blast that demolished the entire New London Public School, taking the lives of at least 269 children and 24 adults. “I was several hundred yards away from school when it blew up just as I was walking away from it.”
At the time, the school housed students ranging from the fifth to the 11th grades. But Webb, a second-grader at the time, attended school in a building separate from the ill-fated new structure, which had just been built and opened the year before.
“I was walking home from school that day when I heard this explosion that sounded like the type of boom that is caused by
a military bomb,” Webb, now 88, said. “I turned around and all I could see was this large, rising pillar of gray smoke filled with papers fluttering down through it. The whole building was severely damaged. Some walls were still left standing, but the whole structure was ruined.”
The explosion occurred about 3:05 p.m., shortly before classes were to be dismissed and before a Parent-Teacher Association meeting had wrapped up in a separate gymnasium near the school.
Upon witnessing this horrifying sight, Webb took off running toward his home but wound up going to a neighbor’s home, a prearranged destination.
“Earlier that morning, my parents told me to go to our neighbor’s house until mom got back home from that PTA meeting,” Webb said.
In an odd twist of fate, scheduling rearrangements saved Webb’s mother from the fatal blast, but not his sister, 12-year-old Mary Jo Webb, a sixth-grader.
“As it turned out that day, the PTA meeting, which was normally in the auditorium, had to be moved to the gymnasium, which was in another building,” Webb said. “The reason the meeting had to be moved was on account of the sixthgrade class needing to rehearse a play inside the auditorium. My sister was in that play and in the auditorium, rehearsing that day.”
Webb would later learn that his only sister and only sibling was among the 54 sixth-grade girls who died in that fiery eruption.
But when he reached his neighbor’s house, Webb knew nothing of his sister’s situation or whereabouts.
The neighbor “had small children to take care of and she wouldn’t leave, so I stayed there until mom got there,” he said. “Mom was crying, she was scared, she was nervous and she was very distraught because she had no idea what happened to Mary Jo.”
Webb said through the rest of that fateful evening, most of the community’s men, including his father, sifted through the rubble trying to find and identify the deceased—as well as anyone who might still be alive and trapped under the debris.
“My dad and the rest of the community’s men stayed at the scene for hours going through the debris,” Webb said. “Dad eventually came back home later that night. I was very upset, mom was still very upset and dad was totally upset just like mom because we were all a very close-knit family.”
Over the next three days or so, a mortality accounting took place as the fatalities poured into small-town funeral homes surrounding the New London community, Webb said. The community still exists and is located about 20 miles west of Tyler, Texas.
“My sister was taken to a funeral home in Longview (Texas),” he said. “There, Dad went to identify a piece of cloth, which my mom knew was a part of my sister’s dress.”
The Webb family had a funeral for Mary Jo before she received final burial in Center Ridge Cemetery just south of Maud, Texas.
Shortly after the blast, a court of inquiry judged the explosion to have been caused by raw natural gas, which had collected in open areas beneath the school building. The court further determined that the natural gas may have even seeped within building’s basement walls and that a spark from something in the basement shop class area, such as a chain light switch, might have triggered the explosion.
Weeks after the court’s findings, the Texas Legislature approved a measure that allowed for malodorant to be added to natural gas, making it detectable by scent and alerting people to its presence. The New London School explosion thus led to a new way of processing and dispensing natural gas in the United States.
As for Webb and his parents in the weeks following the explosion, his father, who was working in the booming East Texas oil industry, received a transfer to Talco, Texas, from the oil refining company employing him. The family then received transfer to Hawkins in Wood County, Texas, before going back to Talco and eventually to an area near Sulphur Springs.
Webb himself went on to earn a college degree in 1950 from East Texas State University in Commerce, Texas, after graduating high school in 1946. He then joined the U.S. Air Force, serving between 1950 and 1954, after which he took a career job with the Humble Oil Co. until retiring in 1986. He then moved to Redwater, where he’s lived ever since.
As for the New London School building, the entire structure was bulldozed. Today, a monument to the tragedy’s victims stands in the middle of Texas State Highway 42 in New London.
Webb said he’s been back to visit the site many times as the years passed (most recently a month or two ago), not only in memory of his sister but also to bring awareness to faulty building construction.
“It’s bad construction that allows natural gas to get inside the crawl spaces of any building,” he said. “I think about these mistakes that were made when that school building was still under construction. Sometimes I still get bitter about it.”