Prologue -- "My boys and girls" -- Like somebody had lifted the lid off a kettle -- Photographs -- The long silence -- Speaking their names -- Epilogue -- Author's notes and acknowledgments -- Their names
Summary
On March 18, 1937, a spark ignited a vast pool of natural gas that had collected beneath the school building in New London, a tiny community in East Texas. The resulting explosion leveled the four-year-old structure and resulted in a death toll of more than three hundred-most of the children. To this day, it is the worst school disaster in the history of the United States. The tragedy and its aftermath were the first big stories covered by Walter Cronkite, then a young wire service reporter stationed in Dallas. He would later say that no war story he ever covered--during World War II or Vietnam--was as heart-wrenching
