Dynamite Killed 45 People in Bath, Mich., 60 Years Ago : School Board Member’s Deadly Revenge on Town’s Children Recalled

It was a day for softball and final tests and putting off school on “as pretty a day as you ever saw.” It was a day for murder on a scale still unparalleled in America outside of terrorism.

May 18, 1927--the day for Bath’s little children to die.

When the screams of the wounded had faded from the tree-lined streets of the proud farming community, 45 people--most of them elementary students caught in a carefully planned dynamite explosion at the Bath Consolidated School--lay dead or dying.

“I don’t remember hearing any noise, but I remember flying in the air and seeing things fly between me and the sun,” said AdaBelle McGonigal, then 11 and in the fifth grade. “But I don’t ever remember falling.”

AdaBelle’s ear was nearly torn off in the blast that killed 38 of her classmates. Seven adults also died, including the man who had placed hundreds of pounds of explosives in the subfloors, basements and crawl spaces of the school--school board member and treasurer Andrew Kehoe.

Although not ruling out accomplices, a coroner’s inquest later laid responsibility for the devastation on Kehoe. No accomplices were ever found.

AdaBelle, whose maiden name was Dolton, was, like most of Bath’s children, at the school for the last formal day of classes before summer break. Many had to take exams. Others--the lucky ones--did not.

For Kehoe, it was the perfect day to strike at a community that he felt had snubbed him. And there was no better target than the school, completed in 1922 to replace a number of local one-room schoolhouses.

The school came at a cost to the community. Kehoe was in danger of losing his 80-acre farm, partly because of the district’s taxes on his property.

Although Kehoe’s precise motive is lost to history, survivors agree that he sought revenge.

“The idea apparently was, if you wanted to hurt people, you couldn’t do any better than hurting their kids,” said Fordney Cushman, one of the many graying survivors who still live in the community.

A Ton of Explosives

Kehoe, according to locally published histories--including Grant Parker’s authoritative 1980 book, “Mayday”--may have started planting hundreds of pounds of dynamite under the cover of darkness as early as February. It was reported that he had a ton of explosives, which he as a farmer could buy relatively easily without drawing attention.

As a school official and an almost legendary school district Mr. Fixit--who always worked without pay--he had almost unlimited access to the building.

“We saw a lot of him down at the school,” said Chester McGonigal, a high school sophomore at the time of the explosion. “He was an electrical engineer, and there weren’t too many of them around in those days.”

Kehoe even greeted children at the door of the school on the day he blew it up. “He was fixing the door hinges,” said Wilma Cushman, then a fifth-grader who remembers seeing Kehoe as she got off the school bus.

“It was a beautiful May day, as pretty a day as you ever saw, and not a cloud in the sky,” said Chester, who was getting ready to go outside and play softball moments before the alarm clock detonator set off the blast.

Unknown to those buried in the rubble of the school’s north wing, Kehoe had also wired the buildings of his own farm--a showpiece in the area--with dynamite and set it afire with the help of gasoline.

The oily black plumes of smoke towering into the air from Kehoe’s farm for a time diverted would-be school rescuers, unaware of the greater tragedy unfolding in the tiny nearby community.

Fought Farm Fire

Fordney Cushman, who with his family lived near the Kehoe place, was among those drawn to Kehoe’s farm.

“We kept looking down the road and a big cloud of black smoke began to come up in the air, floated to the south,” Cushman recalled recently. “So Dad and I said, ‘We’ll get in the car and drive down there and see what’s on fire.’

“When we went over the hill, all of Kehoe’s buildings were on fire, all at the same time, all of the barns, black smoke.”

The Cushmans began helping other farmers battle the multiple blazes, some darting into the house to save furniture even as the charges to riddle the farm ticked toward explosion, timed to coincide with the blast at the school.

Kehoe, meanwhile, had left the farm on his way to town, ominously telling those he considered his friends to leave. The final act of his scheme was about to be played out.

Cushman climbed to the roof of a neighbor’s house, which he helped to douse with water in an attempt to save the building. He was nearly blown off by the force of the explosions from Kehoe’s farm, which tossed debris up to 200 feet in the air.

At the farm, reports trickled in about a disaster at the school. Cushman dismissed them, he said. “We just assumed that (with) all the smoke and everything, people had become confused.”

War Zone

Cushman, 15, eventually decided to drive into Bath to see for himself. What he saw was a spectacle few people witness outside of war.

By the time he arrived at the schoolhouse--no more than 25 minutes after the explosion there--townspeople had already begun the grim rescue work. Consumers Power Co. employees, who had been working to bring in the city’s first outside source of electricity, already had a utility pole in place to try to lift the school’s collapsed roof, which covered dozens of trapped victims.

Inside the school the scene was carnage. With one leg pinned under the fallen roof, Wilma Cushman (then Cressman) was free to look around her.

“I could see hands and feet and everything sticking down through the openings and people screaming,” she said. The woman, who luckily was on the second floor when the explosion occurred, described her childhood experience in dreamlike terms.

“I blew way up in the air; I went a long ways up and everyone said I was unconscious and didn’t know what was going on. But I did know what was going on,” she said. “It took a long time getting down and when we did get down everything started settling and settling down.”

Covered With Debris

When she landed, AdaBelle was covered with debris, including a steam radiator. A friend’s leg lay across her chest. The friend, whom AdaBelle recognized because of the dress she was wearing, would die.

“But I didn’t think about it at the time, you know,” she said quietly.

None of those inside the building at the time of the explosion remember hearing it. Chester, in the relatively undamaged high school section of the building, described a “whoof!” as the concussion hit, but no loud noise.

But more than four miles away, horses reared at the sound of the blast, and there were reports of the noise carrying as far as Mount Pleasant, more than 50 miles away.

Those already taken out of the structure were ghostly white, covered with the dust of crushed plaster. Four dead children had been lined up neatly on the sidewalk. Others would follow.

Cushman saw workers carry out Nina Matson, “a beautiful girl, blond, Scandinavian.” She was a young English teacher who, though badly injured, would survive.

Dazed, Cushman walked back to his car to get away from the scene. “The idea was to go back to (Kehoe’s) farmhouse and tell those people to quit fighting the fire and come down there” to the school.

After he was half a mile down the road, another explosion ripped through the town. Kehoe had somehow triggered a load of dynamite in his pickup truck, killing additional people, including himself and Bath School Supt. Emory Huyck, the embodiment of the hated school system.

Cushman later realized that he had been parked within 100 feet of Kehoe’s truck, well within the killing zone.

The explosion sent shards of metal scrap that Kehoe had packed into the truck slamming into flesh and nearby buildings. The resulting fireball ignited the canvas tops of cars parked along the street.

“I remember we all sat up, I remember that just as plain . . . “ said AdaBelle, who was lying on a cot with other children who had just been rescued from the nearby school building. “We sat right up and screamed and fire seemed to roll right down the street.”

Relief columns from nearby Lansing began arriving in the staggered community, along with hordes of onlookers and reporters. Stories carrying the unlikely Bath, Mich., dateline poured out of the village describing the “maniac bomber” and “demented farmer” who had bombed the school.

Lindbergh Flight

The world attention abruptly ceased May 20, when Charles Lindbergh began his historic solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean.

But Kehoe, although dead, still had surprises for the rescuers. Combing the wreckage, workers uncovered 504 pounds of dynamite that had not exploded. Rather than the approximately one-third of the school that was demolished, Kehoe’s plan had been to destroy the entire building.

Cushman, now a retired insurance inspector, speculated that it was only an elementary wiring mistake that failed to push the current down the long runs the electricity had to make from the primitive power source and clock timer. Kehoe rigged his two batteries in parallel, rather than in series, which would have doubled the voltage, Cushman said.

“That’s probably all that saved anybody, probably all that saved the town,” Cushman said. The next summer, workers rebuilding the structure pulled 208 more sticks of dynamite from the building, he said.

Financial Records

It was an odd mistake for a man who had become known during his years in Bath as a perfectionist. On the morning of the disaster, for example, Kehoe had mailed a box containing his painstakingly kept school financial records to Clyde Smith, who provided the bond covering Kehoe’s work as treasurer.

Although he must have known his own death was imminent, Kehoe enclosed a note laboriously explaining the only discrepancy he knew of in the books: 22 cents.

Kehoe was a man of bizarre contrasts, capable of touching kindness as well as monumental cruelty.

He would pick up neighbors on the road on a cold winter day and tell them that he was going in their direction anyway, although he was actually going miles out of his way. The story is also told of a consuming temper that led him one day to club a horse to death.

On another day, Cushman showed up at Kehoe’s door, begging to see a powerful new radio Kehoe had built. Cushman understood that, if the earphones used to hear the instrument were put in a bowl, a primitive loudspeaker could result.

‘Just as Nice’

Kehoe and his wife “got the bowls and everything else and were just as nice to me as anybody,” Cushman marveled, then sighed. “He was already planning to kill me, you see.”

What sparked Kehoe’s final descent into homicidal madness is a matter of speculation. Chosen in a caucus-type election in 1924 for a seat on the school board, the anti-tax candidate scored a series of political successes.

Later, he was also appointed township clerk and served as an officer of the local threshing association. He was becoming a very big fish in the local pond. “He was a man in a crowd that you might notice because the first thing, you’d say, ‘There’s a gentleman,’ ” Cushman said.

But Parker’s book, “Mayday,” suggested that local people--once enamored of Kehoe’s intelligence and polish--found his constant carping tiresome.

By 1926, he had lost his party’s nomination for a term as township clerk and had begun suffering defeats on the school board. Kehoe’s wife also was increasingly ill with agonizing headaches, and his creditors--his wife’s family--were moving to foreclose on the farm.

From a position of honor and respect, Kehoe’s world began to crumble.

But for the desperate rescuers in Bath on that day in May, finding psychological motivations for the disaster was far in the future. Streams of ambulances and rescue workers attempted to provide relief to the town, sometimes falling over themselves to provide help.

Faced with offers of help from various charities, Wilma Cushman’s mother attempted to turn down the aid.

“But they’d leave us food and they’d leave us bedding,” she said. “She’d pile it up and, when the next group came along, she’d say, ‘You might as well take this stuff, we don’t need it. Give it to someone who really needs it.’ ”

By Sunday, all the two-track dirt roads in the area seemed to lead to Bath. Traffic was backed up for five miles with spectators.

Despite the crowds that milled through the area and Kehoe’s farm, it was the next day before authorities discovered the body of Kehoe’s wife. So badly burned that it was hardly recognizable as a human corpse, the body was found in a hog chute where Kehoe had dumped it. Neighbors hoped that she had died before the fire started.

And then there were the funerals.

“I was pallbearer for four funerals in three days, and I was only 15 years old,” Cushman said. “You couldn’t get enough pallbearers. You’d go down to the cemetery and there would be five or six funerals going on at the same time, people all over the place.

“Terrible time.”

For months afterward, the surviving children of Bath struggled to find their own peace. For their parents, the emotional battle probably took longer.

AdaBelle McGonigal’s journey took her to nearby Flint to “visit school” with a cousin. She came home complaining of a headache and running a fever.

It was years later before she realized the source of her discomfort.

“Now when I look back on it, I sat there all day just thinking something was going to happen,” she said. “And I know it was nerves.”

“You get to talking about it. . . . You get the feeling you’re back there again,” Cushman said. “The way I got away with it, when I heard one of my friends was killed, I had a little thing I said to myself: I said, ‘It’s a good thing we didn’t know each other any better.’ ”

Racket Clears Storefront

Other survivors joke about the time when they were in temporary school quarters in a downtown storefront. Local boys putting up a radio antenna jumped onto the metal roof of the building, creating a huge racket inside the building.

“We was out in the street just that quick,” Chester McGonigal recalled, snapping his fingers. “Everybody. Gone.”

Today in Bath, the two cemeteries are among the most tangible reminders of the small town’s agony. They are just out of sight of the old school’s cupola, the only thing left of the blasted building.

The gravestones are simple, with only the clusters of dates giving any indication of the disaster: “Harold LeMoyne--July 3, 1918-May 18, 1927.” . . . “Ralph A. Cushman--1919-1927.” . . . “Katherine O. Foote--1916-1927.” . . .

The only sounds are those of footsteps moving slowly among the markers. The maple trees are fully clothed in new growth, just as they were on the day Bath’s children died.