Texas A&M University Press
My Boys and Girls Are in There: The 1937 New London School Explosion
Key Metrics
- Ron Rozelle
- Texas A&M University Press
- Paperback
- 9781648432101
- -
- -
- Biography & Autobiography > General
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
On March 18, 1937, a spark ignited a vast pool of natural gas that had collected beneath the school building in New London, a tiny community in East Texas. The resulting explosion leveled the four-year-old structure and resulted in a death toll of more than three hundred--most of them children. To this day, it is the worst school disaster in the history of the United States. The tragedy and its aftermath were the first big stories covered by Walter Cronkite, then a young wire service reporter stationed in Dallas. He would later say that no war story he ever covered--during World War II or Vietnam--was as heart-wrenching.
In the weeks following the tragedy, a fact-finding committee sought to determine who was to blame. It soon became apparent that the New London school district had, along with almost all local businesses and residents, tapped into pipelines carrying unrefined gas from the plentiful oil fields of the area. It was technically illegal, but natural gas was in abundance in the Oil Patch. The jerry-rigged conduits leaked the odorless green gas that would destroy the school.
A long-term effect of the disaster was the shared guilt experienced--for the rest of their lives--by most of the survivors. There is, perhaps, no better example than Bill Thompson, who was in his fifth grade English class and in the mood to flirt with Billie Sue Hall, who was sitting two seats away. Thompson asked another girl to trade seats with him. She agreed--and was killed in the explosion, while Thompson and Hall both survived and lived long lives, never quite coming to terms with their good fortune.
My Boys and Girls Are in There: The 1937 New London School Explosion is a meticulous, candid account by veteran educator and experienced author Ron Rozelle. Unfolding with the narrative pace of a novel, the story woven by Rozelle--beginning with the title--combines the anguished words of eyewitnesses with telling details from the historical and legal record. Released to coincide with the seventy-fifth anniversary of the New London School disaster, My Boys and Girls Are in There paints an intensely human portrait of this horrific event.
Author Bio
I’m the author of Into That Good Night, a memoir, The Windows of Heaven, a novel of the 1900 Galveston storm, A Place Apart, a novel set in modern day Ohio, Warden: Death and Life in the Texas Prison System (coauthored with Jim Willett) and Description & Setting: Techniques and Exercises for Crafting a Believable World of People, Places, and Events, a volume in the Writer’s Digest Write Great Fiction series.
My memoir, Into That Good Night, was the first non-agented property published by New York’s venerable Farrar, Straus, & Giroux in over five years, was a national short list finalist for the P.E.N. Prize and the Texas Institute of Letters Carr P. Collins Award and was selected as the second best work of nonfiction in the nation for the year 1998 by the San Antonio Express-News. I’ve taught writing workshops at numerous conferences and universities, and was twice the memoir teacher at the Newman National Writer’s Conference at Mississippi College.
Touching Winter, my novel made up of a quartet of stories, was published in October, 2005, by TCU Press and was a short list finalist for The Texas Institute of Letters Best Fiction of the Year Prize. My Boys and Girls are in There: The 1937 New London School Disaster (Texas A&M University Press) was the recipient of the Calvert Prize, was pronounced the “sleeper hit” of the 2012 Texas Book Festival, and was a short list finalist for the Best Nonfiction Award given by the Writers’ League of Texas.
Sundays with Ron Rozelle (I hate that title; it sounds like a devotional), a collection of some of my newspaper columns, was published by TCU Press. My most recent book is Exiled: The Last Days of Sam Houston, published by Texas A&M University Press. My next book, a novel titled Leaving the Country of Sin, will be published in mid March.
I was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2007 and am a proud graduate of Sam Houston State University, class of 1977.
My wife Karen, a retired third grade teacher, and I are spoiling grandparents and recently retired empty nesters with the exception of an elderly opinionated cat.
Source: ronrozellewordsmith.wordpress.com
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