Posted on 05/18/2007 1:33:37 PM PDT by Borges
BATH — Josephine Cushman Vail will lay red tulips on the grave of her little brother today, as she has nearly every year since 1927.
Ralph Cushman, then 7, died 80 years ago today, along with 44 other people in what stood for more than 60 years as the largest mass murder in the United States.
Vail, 93, said she could just as easily have died with her brother when a disgruntled school board member dynamited the Bath Consolidated School in the quiet, close-knit community 13 miles northeast of Lansing.
Vail, then 13, was excused from taking final exams that day because she had good grades. She walked to school with Ralph, a shy boy, and offered to sit with him in his class.
"He told me the other kids would tease him if I did, so I left," Vail said. "If he hadn't told me not to stay, I wouldn't be here today."
Vail was picking wildflowers with a friend when she heard the school blow up. She arrived just in time to see Andrew Kehoe, the man responsible, blow up his pickup, killing himself, the school superintendent, the Bath postmaster and two others.
Bomber's motive was revenge
Kehoe, upset with high taxes, a pending foreclosure on his farm and his dislike of the school superintendent, decided to exact revenge on the people of Bath.
In all, 38 children and seven adults, including two teachers and Kehoe's wife, died.
"It was 80 years ago, but it might just as well have been yesterday," said Vail, a lifetime Bath resident. "I've learned to deal with it, but I still think about it."
Willis Cressman, now 95, of DeWitt was inside the school when the blast went off.
"I was in the assembly room, right close to the part that blew up," he said. "I wasn't hurt, but I had to jump off a roof to get out, and the next day I could hardly stand."
Unlike Vail, Cressman, who later served as a medic in World War II in Italy, said he seldom thinks about the school bombing any more.
"But when I heard about the murders at Virginia Tech earlier this year, it made me think of Bath," Cressman said.
Loretta Hart Wilcox, now of Vernon, was born 12 years after the school bombing, but learned about it from her father, who helped with rescue efforts.
"He was bending over picking up a pole to help prop up the roof when the truck blew up," she said. "A door skimmed right across his back. If he had been standing up ...
"It was something so traumatic and unexpected," Wilcox said. "This was a small, close farming community. Nobody could imagine such a
horrific thing as that happening here.
"My father never forgot. I remember he would have tears in his eyes most of the day every May 18th."
For many years, Bath people kept conversations about the bombing within their families. Only recently have some opened up to outsiders.
"Unfortunately in recent years, more terrible things like this have happened," Wilcox said. "I think that makes people more willing to talk."
But few remain who remember the Bath tragedy, to give context to events such as the Oklahoma City bombing or the Columbine school shootings. And many newer Bath-area residents don't know about the tragedy at all.
In its day, however, the bombing was big enough news that it shared the front page of the New York Times with a story about Charles Lindbergh's first transatlantic flight.
Memorials honor victims
The massacre is memorialized in a display case in the Bath Schools Museum in the middle school. There also is a statue, "Girl with a Cat," paid for with pennies from schoolchildren across the state.
A plaque containing the names of those who died, a cupola that stood atop the school and a state historical marker, all located in a park on the former school site, also ensure the event won't be forgotten.
Bath Middle School students also are taught about the bombings.
"We do reports on it all the time,' said Branden Pulver, 14, an eighth-grader. "I first learned about it when I was in the sixth grade. They probably don't want kids younger than that to know about it."
Chicago author Arnie Bernstein stumbled on information about the Bath school bombings on the Internet.
"The deeper I got into it, the more fascinated I became," said Bernstein, who is working on a book about the Bath school disaster due out in late 2008 or early 2009. "I couldn't believe this story hadn't been told outside of Michigan."
Bernstein visited Bath and talked to people, including some of the survivors.
"When I got to Pleasant Hill Cemetery and saw names of victims on the stones, this stopped being a story and became something I had to do," he said.
"This event is like a raw nerve in the community," Bern-stein said. "For many, it's like it happened yesterday. Although it's healing, it's still a deep wound. A town that did not have the strength of character of these people probably would not have survived.
"I think it offers lessons to those dealing with what happened at Columbine and Virginia Tech."
Some pictures here: http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/history/bath/index_1.html
I’d never heard of this event. Thanks for posting it.
-----hogwash-
Just goes to show...Evil has always been with us, and it always will.
-——hogwash-
agreed.....bernsteins actual agenda is revealed in the final sentence of the article.
I read about this online.
Perp actually planted a series of bombs - some to go off while first reponders were on the scene.
Truly evil man!!!
Scary to think someone would blowup a school with children to avenge taxes he thought was too high. Sick ba$tard.
The bastard pulled off a one-man Beslan.
How much hatred can one man harbor.
Mrs VS
Hi,
I’m late to this party (finishing my book on the bombing) but I don’t understand what you mean by my “actual agenda is revealed in the final sentence of the article.” Please explain!
I’ve read up on this quite a bit, especially the account at crimelibrary.com. It it truly a window into the heart of pure evil. Kehoe must have been possessed of the devil himself to be as cold, cruel and calculating as he was.
I hope he’s enjoying his rewards in the deepest bowels of hell for what he did to those poor kids and that town.
“This event is like a raw nerve in the community,” Bern-stein said. “For many, it’s like it happened yesterday. Although it’s healing, it’s still a deep wound. A town that did not have the strength of character of these people probably would not have survived.
“I think it offers lessons to those dealing with what happened at Columbine and Virginia Tech.”
888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888
Sure. Your final line makes you look exactly like members of the sect that celebrates and pimps victimhood as a fetish. Benign enough to society in general, but the virulent form of it comes in legislation that serves the freedom-sufficating leftie causes thru feelgoodism.
Don’t PM me again until you have appeared on oprah at least twice.
Not content to spend months wiring the schoolhouse with bombs that would go off during classes (and have maximum effect), he also tied all his animals together in the barn, wired them and the barn with explosives, and set fire to it, so that they could not escape and all died horribly. He also murdered his own wife and cut her up into several pieces, probably the night before. Kehoe remains the worst mass murderer in American History. Very disturbing that there are apparently some people today that see this guy as some sort of anti-government hero.
Nope, I wasn’t celebrating and pimping victimhood as a fetish. But these people survived something horrible as a community, bolstered by their deep sense of community and faith in G-d. And yes, that does offer lessons in how to cope through senseless tragedies like these terrible school shootings. And knowing someone who recently lost friends in the Northern Illinois University shooting, I fully believe that the people of Bath have shown how to cope and survive with such horror.
If you think what I said is a call for legislation via feelgoodism, you’re sadly mistaken. It is strength of character that the people of Bath showed. No call for needless and pointless laws; how can you make strength of character a point of law? That comes from within not via laws. That has nothing to do with my politics or beliefs; I don’t know how you interpreted all that out of my quote.
If you can get me on Oprah, I’d be eternally grateful by the way, since it would do wonders for book sales!
“Nope, I wasn’t celebrating and pimping victimhood............If you can get me on Oprah, I’d be eternally grateful by the way, since it would do wonders for book sales!”
Your dodging and dancing around it underwhelms me.
I thought I made myself clear. I don’t dodge and dance when it comes to the people of Bath, for whom I have unending admiration.
And the Oprah comment was a joke; I can’t stand her or her touchy-feely throw money at a problem philosophy. I think she’s exploited a lot of people under false pretenses to make her gazillions
“I thought I made myself clear.”
You have. Repeatedly.
I understand you. Stop digging.
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