Pow! Crash! Smack! Big Explosion...

Let's go back to Pine Bluff, Arkansas a couple of years before The Wedding. Ummm, maybe three years before The Wedding, when I was seven years old.

Mama, Aunt Berl, Jim and I lived in the big old duplex on Second Street. See the recent picture of the house on "Homesickness..." in May. At that time, the house looked a bit different than in this picture that we took while passing through Pine Bluff on a vacation trip last winter. In the '50's this house had many windows in the two front rooms, instead of solid plywood on each side. When we took this picture, it appeared the house was under reconstruction or remodeling.

When we lived there in the early '50's, the house had a lot of character. It had high ceilings, built in bookshelves, many windows and many nooks and crannies, such as the slanted linen closet under the back stairs that led up to the attic. (Remember? The attic where the Rats lived?) The inside walls were covered by thick plaster. In the living room ceiling were criss-crossing giant beams, painted black, while the plaster that showed between them was painted white.

Aunt Berl and I slept in the front room, the room nearest to me in the picture. Aunt Berl worked at the cotton mill, too, and since she worked on a swing shift, I always went to bed alone, and she came home around midnight, by which time I was fast asleep.

Between that front room and the "bedroom" where Mama and my brother Jim slept, was the living room with the high ceiling and black beams. Their bedroom was right in the middle of the house.

The house was a duplex and while we lived in one side for a number of years, the other side changed tenants several times. The outgoing tenants would turn off the gas at their meter (we had a separate one) and then disconnect their gas appliances, recap the gas pipe which was sticking up through a hole in the floor, and move their heaters and stove out. After that tenant had moved everything away, their side of the duplex would be rented out to another family. The new family would move in their stove and heaters, and while the gas was still off they would connect the appliances to the gas lines by un-screwing the caps on the gas lines and fastening on their appliances, turn the gas on at the meter, and "light" the appliances to see if the gas was on and the appliances were working properly. Most people knew how to do this and didn't have to have an official "gas man" to come and inspect it.

One night we were all asleep in our side of the house except Aunt Berl who wasn't home from work yet. I think it was probably about ten or eleven o'clock. Tenants on the other side of the house had recently moved out and another set of tenants were moving in. Suddenly... BAM! CRASH! There was a deafening explosion. I was thrown out of bed onto the floor, and immediately, it seemed, Mama and Jim were running through the living room in their pajamas, calling me, "C'mon, Jean! Hurry! Let's get out of here..."

I jumped up and went outside with them. I remember it had been raining and the grass in the front yard was wet. I felt it cold on my bare feet. People were running around, hollering, screaming, talking excitedly. People began gathering from all up and down the street. I was shivering and crying because I was cold and confused and no one was paying any attention to me or telling me what had happened. We heard sirens coming closer and closer and soon the firetruck was there, though I didn't see any fire.

Neighbors that we knew down the street came and took me down to their house and dried me off and wrapped me in a blanket and lent me socks and shoes of their child. They just ignored all the activity and noise down at our house and took care of me for quite a while. When Aunt Berl arrived home from work at the cotton mill about midnight, she came and got me.

It was only then that I learned what had happened: The outgoing tenants had turned off the gas and removed their appliances. They finished moving and returned to clean out the house. At that time they capped the gas lines and left. They didn't realize that one of the gas lines had slipped down, uncapped, below the floor. Probably the person capping those lines was someone who had not known (or at least remembered) that there was a heater in the middle room.

So when the new tenants moved in, since the weather was cold, they had first brought in their stove and heaters and hooked them up and turned the gas back on. Pretty soon they were smelling gas. This family had no children, but there were several grownups, and one of the women decided to find where that gas smell was coming from. She lit a match and started "testing" everywhere to find where the gas was coming from. Eventually, she noticed the hole in the floor and knelt down in front of it. She lit another match and stuck it down in the hole.

She did not know or realize that the gas pipe that had been supplying gas to a heater in that room had fallen down on the ground and had been spewing gas all under the house for a while before she put the lighted match in the hole. The space under the whole house was completely filled with natural gas. The explosion that ensued was huge! It lifted the house off the brick foundation, blowing the bricks outward in certain places, and throwing me out of bed in the process. It cracked the inch-thick plaster all over the house, dislodging gigantic chunks of plaster in the middle rooms. It blew up floor boards in the back porch. The woman who stuck the lighted match in the hole was not hurt, but her bangs were singed slightly.


It took hours for the firemen to be sure the house was safe for us all to return and go to sleep. Of course, the first thing done was to shut off the gas and electricity. The firemen stayed around a long time, though, to be sure every connection was not leaking any gas. They had to crawl under that great big house, all over the area it covered.

I remember wondering how the rats fared in that explosion. What do you think?