About 3:15 p.m. sixth-grader Helen Silick left Laura Bell's art class a few minutes early to meet her waiting mother. She and her younger sister, Marie, walked hand-in-hand down the long front hall of the school and into the foyer.
At that moment, in the basement-level shop class at the rear of the building, teacher Lemmie Butler reached for the electrical switch on a sander. He flipped the switch.
It sparked.
People up to 12 miles away described it as a tremendous, earth-shaking explosion. But for those at its center, it was strangely quiet.
"I heard nothing. I felt nothing. But suddenly I was up in the air looking across at that Tidewater office with its great big porch," Mrs. Silick said.
"I could see these men jumping off that porch. I'm up in the air. I know I'm up there. I'm watching looking at everything, and I can tell I'm falling.
"Then, all of a sudden, my head goes down and my feet up, my head down, feet up. I just keep turning. I felt nothing and I knew nothing."

In his English class, Bill Thompson was hearing current events reports about the war brewing in Europe, when the world suddenly turned a somersault. "I didn't hear a rumble or a noise. It was just that everything instantly went up and around and down. When I came to, I was in total darkness.
"They estimate that it was around 45 minutes to an hour before they got me out. Apparently I was unconscious most of that time, because the first thing I remember was hearing the commotion up above me - men hollering and digging. I could hear a lot of screams.
"I was trapped. A beam was across me and had my legs pinned. I was in a real squeezed position. I could move only one hand. I can remember pinching myself. I thought I was dreaming. My first thought after realizing it was not a dream was that we had been bombed because of the events over in Europe."

Ralph Carr, a Tidewater Oil employee, had stopped by the company office to arrange for a few days off. "I just came out of the office and was outside looking toward the school. It was like my eyes were fooling me. The school just raised up and hung in the air, but then after a split second it just fell flat."
He knew his daughter, 16-year-old Chloe Ann, was in the school.
"I went running down there as hard as I could go. I got to the room where my daughter was. For a little bit the dust was so thick from the explosion that you could barely see, but I crawled on in there."
He found Chloe Ann and her class, crushed in the rubble. "I could see the children sitting in slumped at her seat. They never did get up."

Mollie Ward, a fourth-grader, was sitting in a school bus in front of the school, waiting for the high school classes to dismiss.
"We were just sitting there waiting, and then it went up. It was just a gray cloud that went up and up and up. In my child's mind, I just never thought it was going to come down. Then the building collapsed. Big chunks of concrete went flying some of them across the highway," she said.
Even more indelible in her memory is the scene that followed. "It was something that will scar your mind. The cries. The screams. It wasn't long before you saw mothers on the street crying, stopping cars, saying, "Have you seen my child? Have you seen my child?"

"Everyone was just walking around like zombies," said Dorothy Box, who had been working as a student assistant in the library. "We all had a thick coat of mortar and plaster on us. I was bloody, but it was from someone up above me who had bled down on me. Parents kept coming up saying, "Have you seen my child?"

Esterlene Gauthreaux found her gravely injured son 9-year-old Eddie Herman, in the church basement in Overton. His skull was fractured. "A car salesman in town volunteered to drive us to the hospital in Tyler. All the way out of Overton, people were out along the street offering blankets," she said.
"We sat at his bedside for 24 hours, holding his hand, but he never regained consciousness," said his father, E. J. Gauthreaux. "I was holding his hand when he died."

Many parents traveled from town to town for more than 24 hours, searching for their children. "You just can't imagine what it was like. You didn't know whether to look at the school, at the hospitals or at morgues. They had morgues set up in so many places," said Joe Nelson, whose mother, two brothers and two sisters were in the school at the time of the explosion.
He soon found that his brothers and sisters were safe, but they could not find his mother - the oration teacher who had been coaching the students in the school auditorium.

"We just started looking everywhere for her, looking at bodies on the ground. Dad knew Mom had on a brand new pair of shoes, gunmetal in color, and that's what he was looking for. But he didn't realize that the explosion had blown the shoes off everybody. My brother was looking for her rings. You couldn't recognize anybody. They were just mashed to pieces."
Mrs. Nelson's body was ultimately found in a makeshift morgue at the American Legion Hall in Overton. "Dad had already passed her up, but my brother recognized her Baylor University ring," Nelson said.