Gone at 3-17 by David M Brown & Michael Wereschagin

Author:David M Brown & Michael Wereschagin [Brown, David M & Wereschagin, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612341538
Publisher: Potomac Books
Published: 2012-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

Hazel Shaw soon learned hope was fading that her brother Sambo had survived the blast. She knew where his classroom was located—a part of the school crushed into a deep pile of debris. She also discovered that two of her cousins—Dorothy Oleta Shaw and Marvin Shaw—had perished.

Her father was alive, although deeply shaken. He was wandering through the ruins, almost incoherent, somewhere among more than two thousand volunteers in the rescue and recovery operation, she was told. Her mother, Leila, was holding up, although she had witnessed the explosion from her kitchen window, standing at the sink washing dishes, and felt ill with despair.

Hazel set out to find her father, knowing that he needed the strength and support of loved ones. Many people knew Chesley Shaw only from a distance, as a headmaster early in his career, principal of the Minden School, and superintendent at New London. He was set in his ways about some things—frustratingly headstrong. He was strict about rules of conduct he considered essential, not only as an educator but as a civilized human being. And sometimes he could be cantankerous. But he had a tender and sensitive side to his personality—an emotional vulnerability—that only those closest to the superintendent, such as his daughters, really understood.

He had inspired Hazel and Helen to follow his example and devote their lives to teaching children. It was a cause Chesley Shaw had remained faithful to all of his life, although his administrative duties as superintendent of a large school district had elevated him to a position outside of the classroom. He still loved nothing better than taking a field trip with students, especially the little ones in the grammar school.

Once he was finally making enough money to afford an extravagance, Chesley arranged his own version of a grand field trip, taking his two daughters on a cross-county odyssey to visit the Chicago World’s Fair in the summer of 1933. Along the way, they stopped at historical landmarks, including Civil War battlefields; they drove hundreds of miles out of the way to reach the greatest battlefield in American history, Gettysburg. Chesley walked for hours with his daughters in tow across the Pennsylvania fields and hills where the armies of the North and South clashed in the first three days of July 1863, only a decade before Chesley was born, to determine the outcome of the war. His eyes brimmed with tears as he reminded Hazel and Helen of the blood spilled by those who gave their lives—more than seven thousand Yankees and Confederates, all Americans—to settle the grave issue of slavery and ultimately forge a stronger nation.

And then they headed back west toward Chicago, with Chesley driving the automobile at a pace so slow he was pulled over by a Pennsylvania state trooper. The officer didn’t give Chesley a ticket but wounded his dignity with a lecture on the hazards of creeping along a modern highway no faster than a mule-drawn wagon. If he was going to drive like that, he needed to pull over and let faster traffic pass, the trooper scolded.

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