Up North Progressive

Since posting this, another school shooting has happened in the United States. This time at Santa Fe High School in Texas. We don’t need thoughts and prayers, we need gun reform now! It’s not too soon to talk about it, for too many people it’s way too late!

It’s been absolutely amazing witnessing a group of high school students from Parkland, Florida, energize and mobilize the country to take on gun violence and gun reform. They haven’t stopped there, now they have a voter registration campaign so that candidates in favor of gun reform get elected this fall. They’ve inspired high school students all over the country, including the local school district the Up North Progressive lives in to get involved and create the change they want in their world.

It was especially impressive when the students included the victims and survivors of other school tragedies, such as Sandy Hook, Columbine and Virginia Tech. These are all recent history, however; school disasters have happened even earlier, and the worst in American history happened 91 years ago in Bath Township, Michigan.

On May 18, 1927, 45 people, 38 of them children, died when Bath Consolidated School exploded at 8:45 in the morning in the village of Bath, Michigan. It’s a series of tragic events most people today are not familiar. In 1927 it was inconceivable that a human being could do what School Board Treasurer Andrew Kehoe did.

Kehoe was a respected leader in the village of Bath. He owned one of the finest farms in the township. He served on the Bath Consolidated School District’s school board as Treasurer. He also temporarily served as a Township Trustee. Kehoe had an education in electrical engineering and his neighbors often called on him to help with fixing things on their farms. He also provided maintenance to the new school building, which meant he had access to every part of the school.

In 1922, the school board voted to consolidate the district into one building. As with any school improvement proposal, a vote to approve a bond went on the ballot. It passed, and the local citizens took on the responsibility of paying slightly higher taxes to build the new school building.

Andrew Kehoe, however, was not happy with paying more taxes. His anger at the school board prompted him to run for office. He became the treasurer and the community finally got to witness his wrath when he got into shouting matches with school superintendent Emory Huyck. He tried to keep Huyck from attending school board meetings, but the school board explained to him that the superintendent was required to be there. When things didn’t go his way, Kehoe would abruptly try to adjourn meetings. Most of all, he argued over every penny spent on running the school district.

There were other strange behaviors that alarmed the neighbors about Kehoe. He once worked a horse to death, showing no remorse at the loss of the animal. A neighbor had a dog that barked at Kehoe from across the road. Kehoe shot the dog because it was a “damned nuisance.” There was also the incident where Kehoe’s stepmother burned to death while trying to light a stove. It was ruled an accident, but there were rumors with his expertise in electrical engineering Kehoe could have rigged the stove to blow up.

By 1926, Andrew Kehoe had serious money troubles. He stopped paying the mortgage on his farm. His wife, Nellie Kehoe, suffered from Tuberculosis. Kehoe let his crops rot in the field.
Kehoe also bought large quantities of dynamite. Farmers in the 1920’s often used dynamite to clear fields for planting. It was easily obtainable from hardware stores and sporting goods stores. No license was required to handle, transport, or use it. Kehoe secretly used his access to the new school building as the custodian to rig a thousand pounds of explosives under the floorboards of the school in the months prior to the explosion.

On the morning of May 18, 2018, Students were in class, taking final exams, or listening to their second-grade teacher read a book during story time. 15 graduating seniors were at the church next door rehearsing for their commencement with Superintendent Huyck. At 8:45, a massive explosion leveled half of the school, trapping children and teachers inside. Half of the dynamite failed to detonate, and only one side of the building collapsed.

At around the same time, another explosion shook the tiny community at the Kehoe farm. House, barn and chicken coop all burned to the ground with livestock trapped inside. People looked for Nellie Kehoe, but it was days later before her charred remains were found outside.

Kehoe still wasn’t finished with Bath Township or the Bath Consolidated School. Just as people were rushing to the school building to help rescue their children, he pulled up to the curb in front of the school in his pickup truck and called Superintendent Huyck over. As soon as the man reached the truck, Kehoe fired a gun at more explosives rigged inside the vehicle. He killed himself, the superintendent, the village postmaster and an eight-year-old boy who survived the first explosion in the school.

When the surviving students returned to school in the autumn of 1927, there were no therapy dogs waiting for them. There was also no school. Classes were held in shops along Main Street until a new school could be built. The people of Bath buried their dead, mourned their loss, and went back to work as hard-working farm folks had to do during planting time. The senior class of 1927 didn’t have a graduating ceremony until 1977 when that graduating class invited the graduates of 1927 to participate in their ceremony. 9 of the 15 graduating seniors of the class of 1927 attended.

One reason why the Bath school tragedy didn’t make a lasting impact on the nation was that it had to share headlines with Charles Lindberg’s non-stop flight to Paris. Donations however poured in from all over the country, and a wealthy benefactor paid for a new school to be built. Another reason was that nothing like this had ever happened before. The people of Bath Township couldn’t explain what was wrong with Andrew Kehoe, or why he decided to take revenge by killing so many. People thought perhaps his money troubles and failing health of his wife were more than he could cope with. The KKK tried to persuade everyone the problem with Kehoe was he was a Catholic.

What we can look back and notice is that Andrew Kehoe was not a young troubled youth from a broken home without a father. He didn’t play violent video games, listen to music with graphic lyrics, or read and watch the sensationalized news. Bath Township didn’t even have electricity in 1927. He was a leader of his community; people looked up to him, despite his angry fits an odd habit of rigging things to explode.

Some readers may argue that Andrew Kehoe and Bath Township’s disaster have no lessons for those of us living 90 years in the future struggling to stop mass shootings with assault weapons. He used dynamite, and there’s nothing about dynamite in the 2nd amendment.

Of course, the 2nd amendment has nothing to do with dynamite. Dynamite wasn’t invented until 1869. Do you know what else didn’t exist at the time the 2nd amendment was added to the Constitution? Semi-automatic and automatic assault rifles, bump stocks, and high capacity magazines that allow shooters to cause massive casualties in a matter of seconds.

Dynamite is still used in the United States today. The difference in how it’s used now and how it was used in 1927 is licensing. Only people licensed to handle dynamite are allowed to sell it, transport it or use it. This is why Timothy McVeigh had to improvise a bomb using fertilizer in 1995. The ingredients he used are no longer readily available to the public now either. Yet when people demand that common sense gun reforms such as universal background checks, banning high-capacity magazines, required waiting periods, and closing gun show loopholes, the NRA whips their membership into a frenzy with “they’re coming for your guns!”

Andrew Kehoe’s remains are buried in an unmarked grave in St. John’s, Michigan. The last victim, Richard Fritz, received his headstone in 2014. Survivors still remember the horror of that day and the raw emotions that come back with each telling.

Andrew Kehoe didn’t have social media to vent about things that made him angry, but he did leave a message the day he killed himself and 46 others. He blamed society for his actions, a popular excuse people still want to make to take the heat off of unregulated gun ownership. They want to blame video games, music, the media, the mentally ill, but not access to the weapons that make school massacres and mass shootings possible, or the poverty and lack of access to health care that could help people before they resort to violence as a solution to their problems.

Real change the majority of Americans demand has short-term long-term goals. First, we have to elect people into office who will listen to the will of the people instead of corporate-funded lobbying groups that buy votes to maintain the status quo. Too many people who are eligible to vote don’t. That must change. Register to vote and promise to vote in this year’s election. Once we have people in office who will listen to us, we can begin the process of adopting common-sense gun reform, and provide access so to the help people need. Let’s all work for a future where school massacres are things that only happened in America’s past.