Bath Massacre: America's First School Bombing

Ten - Requiems

Chapter 10 REQUIEMS So many dead. So much suffering. So many unrequited appeals to God. In hopes of providing answers, an anonymous individual donated redcovered Bibles to the parents of each dead child.1 The funerals were next. An initial plan was made to hold a communal funeral service for the children. “[B]ent parents and forlorn relatives will wrap themselves in reticent black, and follow some 50 small caskets to the graveyard for the commencement of eternity for the school children and for the commencement of an era of bleak memories for the village,” wrote Ted Christie, a “staff correspondent” for the Lansing State Journal.2 But realistically a mass funeral just wasn’t practical. There simply were too many details in preparing the dead for burial to coordinate something of this magnitude. Furthermore, many of the families wanted privacy in their mourning. The large number of dead required an unusual amount of undertakers . The local funeral parlor in Bath couldn’t handle all the work. Each body required care with an attention to detail that demanded time, patience , and empathy, something that needed to be done quickly but not at the expense of sensitivity. 127 The over›ow of bodies went to funeral homes in Saint Johns, Laingsburg , and other nearby hamlets. William DeVinney, a sexton overseeing the burials at Pleasant Hill Cemetery, required extra grave diggers; one crew wasn’t enough to excavate the ground for seventeen graves in time for all the funerals to be held there.3 Pallbearers were also in short supply. Neighbors volunteered their services in the grim task. Over the next three days Fordney Hart served at four funerals. “You try to get pole barers [sic] for forty-‹ve people in a community that size and you have a problem,” he later said. “You can’t use any parents; you can’t use any brothers and sisters. Some of the brothers and sisters were in the hospital anyhow.”4 The Reverend Scott McDonald, normally a stoic presence at such somber occasions, didn’t preside at most of the funeral services, but that was understandable. He, too, had lost a child in the bombing, his eldest daughter, eight-year-old Thelma. But McDonald did his best to ful‹ll his duties as the town’s pastor, consoling grieving parents just as they consoled him. His daughter was among the ‹rst children buried, just two days after the explosion. The McDonald home was strewn with wild›owers, a tribute picked from the woods and brought to the house by Thelma’s surviving classmates.5 One person standing near McDonald saw the reverend holding his hands behind his back, digging his ‹ngernails deep into his wrists. It was as if McDonald needed some kind of physical pain to counter the wounds inside.6 Another child’s funeral hit a personal note at the Lansing State Journal . “Perhaps the hardest news story that [our] correspondent at Bath, Mrs. Le Vere [Florence] Harte, ever telephoned to this of‹ce, was transmitted Friday morning. It was related to the funeral arrangements for her own son, Robert, killed in the consolidated school blast.” The article soberly gave the details, noting that “the of‹ciating minister, Rev. S. B. McDonald, of Bath, will have full appreciation of the loss to the Hartes for the reason that he buried his own eldest daughter, Thelma, 8 years old, Friday morning at 10 o’clock.”7 Funerals were done in shifts, as though to accommodate mourners so they could support one another. A family would bury its child in the morning, then attend another child’s funeral in the afternoon. 128 BATH MASSACRE It was a busy schedule. Most services were conducted in the home, as was the custom, though other memorials were held in either churches or funeral parlors in nearby towns. Friday Thelma McDonald, ten o’clock Emerson Medcoff, ten o’clock Elizabeth Witchell, ten o’clock Arnold Baurele, two o’clock Russell Chapman, 2:30 Earl Ewing, two o’clock Galen Hart, two o’clock Elise Robb, two o’clock Cleo Clayton, three o’clock Forrest Robert Cochran, time unknown Emory Huyck, superintendent, time unknown Saturday Marjory Fritz, ten o’clock Doris Johns, ten o’clock Robert Hart, two o’clock Clarence McFarren, ten o’clock Pauline Shirts, ten o’clock Catherine Foote, 10:30 Blanche Hart, teacher, eleven o’clock Ralph Cushman, one o’clock Floyd Burnett...