Bobby JohnsonA Texas Tragedy: The New London School Explosion

Very good book. It gave a good view of how the explosion happened and how people's reaction was.

This is a truly interesting story of a true disaster in our history. Reading this was a pleasure and made me understand what really happened.

The book was interesting. I have been in several tragedies myself over seventy years of life.My home town blew up in 1947 and we lost over 500 people that day. Some were children. I was born and raised on the Gulf Coast of Texas. Texas City, TXI feel so very sorry for the parents who suffered the loss of their children.I had never seen or read anything about the New London School explosion.

I didn't know it was a play. It did give some good information but I never would have bought it if I had known it was a play. You have to pay the author to be able to perform it.

Such a tragedy.

Bobby H. Johnson has brought the characters to life in his two-act play about the school explosion in New London, Texas in 1937. The play was first preformed at the Lamp-Lite Playhouse in Nacogdoches, Tx. in 2005. The first part of his book is the historical background of the explosion and a student-teacher guide. Then, the two-act play follows beginning with an overview.Dr. Johnson let us see the emotional side of the people involved in this tragedy, as well as the historical aspect of the tragedy. I got weepy throughout the book. Sixteen year old Mary Massey did not die in the explosion, but her sweetheart, sixteen, John Pilgrim died. From his many interviews and detailed research, he took us into the lives of many people in the town, students and school staff, from the preacher, to first responders, to those who witnessed the event, and to those who got ready to go to school and would not come home ever again. It was sad to hear about the many funerals and seeing pictures of the cemetery.There are several pictures in the book, which include that tragic day, The New London Monument displayed in front of the re-built school and a Historical Marker at the Pleasant Hill Cemetery. When my mother-in-law picked up the book and looked through it, she commented on one of the pictures, "That picture is just what I remember seeing when I was six years old." It is a picture of the school totally destroyed. She lived in Douglass in 1937 and went with her parents to New London the day after the explosion and saw the destruction.Dr. Johnson is a true East Texas historian and journalist. He ends his play with the cast singing a hymn, "In the Morning of Joy -- When the angel of death Shall no longer destroy, And the dead shall awaken In the morning of Joy." This book is a tribute to those three hundred plus children and others who died that day, March 18, 1937.

good narrative of the Texas school disaster

It's a play! Super disappointed!