SCHOOL BOMBING...A DIFFERENT TWIST

It was about this time of year, late August 1950.  My family, the four of us, were hot, tired and stuffed in the non-air-conditioned cab of the 1949 Chevy farm truck on our way back from a horse show on a Sunday afternoon when a neighbor stopped us on the road, leaned out of his car window and told us the “school blew up.”  The “school” was the one my grandfather, my father and my brother had attended and the one that I was scheduled to go to, Nance County District 12, “Big Cut.” And I was going to start school the very next day.

The school had been remodeled during the summer, the barn that provided shelter for students’ horses was torn down and a new propane-fired furnace and water heater were installed supplied by a large tank located a few yards away from the building. It was a one-room school house and the new appliances, along with indoor plumbing, were located in a new basement that was a major part of the remodel.  The propane was carried to the basement using soft copper pipe.  Ah-ha!  We have discovered a problem.  Soft copper is not approved for that application by building codes, for good reason.

There was a leak, propane being heavier than air pooled in the new basement and when the pump for the water well kicked on, the spark ignited the propane. There was an explosion and fire, but it did not burn the building down, just blew the ends out, charred the whole interior and caused the building to have a unique smell that never went away. It was eventually destroyed, ironically enough, by an arson fire when my niece and nephew were students there many years later.

The talk of the neighborhood was, naturally, how the accident might have happened 24 hours later and the kids would have been wiped out or maimed.  The location of the tank was also questioned, but was not a true issue.  As it was, we were shuffled off to start our school year at an abandoned house nearby.  During those years, it was poor and dry and abandoned houses were plentiful as families picked up and moved to California.

Horse shows were pretty common.  We already had the horses, it was entertainment and it was cheap.  Besides, you could be home in time to do the milking in the late afternoon, so it all worked out.  The “cheap” part was a significant motivation—we weren’t exactly poor, but one of the memories of my childhood is that there wasn’t much money.

When Nebraska was surveyed and laid out, the land was divided into “sections,” (squares with one-mile sides, 640 acres).  The sections were usually divided by roads and several sections would then comprise a township.  The next larger entity would be the county.  Nebraska has 93, Iowa 99, for instance.  Unlike the states in the East, the Midwest is characterized by these grids aligned to the cardinal compass points.  Factoid: Delaware has 3 counties and as far as I can tell, no roads that are straight.  The streets in Omaha are an illustration of this process as the major streets are one mile apart so that 60^th Street was a “mile road” at one time, 72^nd Street is the next and so on. Notice they are 12 streets apart each block 1/12 of a mile.

The townships had several acres set aside for schools and “Big Cut” was situated on one of those reserves across the road from the corner of our farm.  To my knowledge, none of those one-room schools survive with the possible exception of a few in the Sandhills.

My first back-to-school event would forever have an unusual twist.