Elementary Hyde Park School

Admin | November 24, 2011 | Comments Off

Elementary Hyde Park School

Elementary Hyde Park School

The ill-fated school replaced a four-room, four-teacher school house and featured a campus of detached buildings on several acres, with state-of-the-art facilities. Its lighted football stadium, first in the state, introduced Friday Night Lights to Texas.

The school was the pride of New London, Texas, on a campus built with royalties from the oil boom in Kilgore and environs in the 1930s. That luster was blown away on March 18, 1937, at three in the afternoon, when a horrendous natural gas explosion demolished the school and wiped out nearly a generation of the town’s children.

Some Students Were Lucky on That Fateful Day

During school hours, approximately 740 students and teachers occupied the "E" shaped main building, comprised of the junior-senior high school in the large section and elementary grades in the wings.

When the blast occurred, most of the grammar school had just been dismissed and were heading home, while about 540 high school and junior high students and teachers remained. Those star-crossed students were due to leave in seven minutes, but then the explosion occurred and they never got the chance.

Some luckier ones were away. According to survivors' emails posted to "Robert Hilliard's Website of the World," the football team had just finished practice and were on their way to the dressing rooms, when the coach sent Raymond Vickers back to the field for the equipment, out of intense blast range; others went to a sports competition; and 13-year old Scotty Vickers, Raymond's brother, played hooky that fateful day.

Eyewitnesses Watched in Horror

The blast was so powerful a two-ton slab of hurtling concrete mashed a pickup truck parked 200 feet away like a peanut shell. Fifty cars were smashed in the parking lot, by flying cement, bricks and other debris.

Eye witnesses said the explosion caused the walls to bulge and roof to rise several feet, before collapsing like a leaden circus tent through the floor to the basement, crushing everyone and everything as it plummeted. Then the tottering walls of the main section caved in to complete the horror.