Survivor recalls 1959 Houston school blast that killed 6 The bombing at Poe Elementary

50 years ago, sounds of play were silenced by a blast

Earl Fogler returns to the school where, as a second-grader playing outside during recess, he lost his leg to the Poe Elementary blast. Earl Fogler returns to the school where, as a second-grader playing outside during recess, he lost his leg to the Poe Elementary blast. Photo: Michael Paulsen, Chronicle Photo: Michael Paulsen, Chronicle Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Survivor recalls 1959 Houston school blast that killed 6 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

First came the explosion, ripping through the playground with a sound like every school locker on earth slamming shut at once. Then came the carnage — six people killed, half of them children, and almost a score injured. Finally, like a lingering aftershock, came sorrow, anger and the struggle to come to grips with an act senseless and evil.

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Poe Elementary School bombing, paradoxically one of the most horrendous events to mar the city's history and — except in the minds of its aging victims — one of the seemingly least remembered.

While schools have been named for Jennie Kolter and James Montgomery, a teacher and custodian killed in the blast, no monuments memorialize the other victims: students William Haws and John Fitch, and Dusty Orgeron, son of the bomber, Paul Orgeron.

“I think we just went on with life,” said Earl Fogler, 57, one of two Poe students to lose a limb in the blast. Now a prosthetics professional who has lobbied school district officials to erect a monument at Poe, Fogler recalled an innocent time.

“We had no psychologists,” he said, “no counseling, no lawsuits.”

The Poe bombing was not the first mass killing at an American school. That dubious distinction was claimed in 1927 by a Bath Township, Mich., campus bombed by a school board member disgruntled over taxes.

Poe Principal Claudia Gonzales planned a moment of silence today to honor the victims. The anniversary, she said, is a “reminder of how precious life is, especially our children's lives, and ... of teachers who go above and beyond the norm.”

The morning of the bombing began uneventfully.

Classes at Poe, a striking red brick edifice at Hazard and North Boulevard, had been in progress for a week. About 125 second-graders were at recess on the asphalt-covered playground at the building's rear.

About 10 a.m., Principal Mrs. R.E. Doty was confronted by a powerfully built, dark-haired man and his 7-year-old tow-headed son, both of whom carried suitcases. Orgeron, 49, had come to enroll the boy but could provide neither his address nor the youngster's birth certificate and records.

Genially rebuffed, Orgeron, an ex-convict who recently had become obsessed with God, pledged to return with the needed documents. Minutes later, though, he appeared on the playground, where he commanded teacher Patricia Johnson to “Call all your children up here!”

A note and a button

Johnson, who later told Time magazine that she intuited “something horribly obscene” was in the suitcase, backed away and sent a student to summon school officials.

Orgeron muttered something about power and God. Then he handed Johnson two notes, the first of which urged her to remain calm but warned, “In this suitcase you see in my hand is fill to the top with high explosive. I mean high high ... I do not believe I can kill and not kill what is around me, and I mean my son will go too. ... Please do not make me push this button that all I have to do ...”

A button was on the suitcase's bottom. Inside, authorities later surmised, were six sticks of dynamite.

Lowering the case to the ground, Orgeron balanced it on his shoe.

Minutes later Doty and custodian Montgomery arrived on the scene. Johnson shouted a warning. Montgomery lunged for the man. Orgeron jerked back his foot.

The air went ‘whoosh'

Within hours, the Houston Chronicle hit the street with an edition bearing a 2-inch, across-the-page headline: “POE SCHOOL BLAST SET OFF BY MAD BOMBER KILLS SIX.”

“I just heard a loud noise,” said Suzy Reierson, who was seated in a nearby third-grade classroom. “It was like the air went ‘whoosh.'” It just sucked the air away. It was like all the lockers had slammed at the same time. It was the highest loudness I had ever heard.”

Costa Kaldis, another third-grader, remembered that the concussion filled the classroom with chalk-dust knocked free of the blackboards. “It was just like smoke,” he said.

Fogler never heard the blast.

“My first recollection was waking up on the playground after it happened,” he said. “I was lying there, actually not hurting. I guess I was in shock. I got up and tried to walk, but it pretty much had blown my leg off. At that point, I figured something was amiss.”

‘It was chaos'

A 6-inch crater pocked the playground. The air reeked of smoke and charred flesh. Clothing was blown from some victims. Principal Doty lay among the injured with a broken leg. The bomber's hand, which provided fingerprints for his identification, was found in a bush.

“Families were running from the neighborhood to try and find their kids,” Reierson said. “They were frantic. People were screaming and crying. It was chaos.”

Paul Daffin, who was in a fifth-grade classroom when the bomb exploded, remembered little of the blast and its aftermath.

“I don't have a clear visual image in my mind of seeing the carnage,” he said. “I somewhat believe I have a psychological block.”

Reierson remembered all too well.

“I wanted to move out of the city,” she said. “I was 7, and I knew somebody was after us. I thought they would come to my house to find us.”

School officials also were concerned. After the blast, Superintendent John McFarland notified the district's 170 schools to bar strangers from campus.

Police responded to at least six bogus bomb threats in the days that followed.

Classes resumed the day after the bombing.

“I went back to school on crutches,” Fogler said. “My parents were very positive. I'm sure they were upset and bothered, but they recognized this was not the end of the world.

“Things could be much worse.”

allan.turner@chron.com