Hazel Weatherby, one of two teachers who perished in the Bath School Bombing. Please notice the poor quality of the image. This shows how we keep recycling the facts and images easily available without diving deeply in the Bath School Massacre. Although the papers mention her a million times, Weatherby suffers from erasure.
This might be the original, which has endlessly been copied. The photo belongs to the Bath School Museum. Once a year, members of the Bath Massacre Community gather at the museum around the May 18. Picture is embossed with the photographers name, who had a studio on Main Street in Mount Pleasant a short walk from Central Michigan Normal College. It might have been an application photograph. Let's bring Hazel Weatherby into better focus.
This is Hazel with her sister and brother. The woman on the left is probably the mother, the wife of Frank Weatherby, Clara K. Swanson Weatherby.
Here we see Hazel Weatherby at age 15, again spending time with her siblings.
This is probably the Weatherby School, a single room school house on the Weatherby family farm. It was built by the Weatherby family. Hazel Weatherby finished her high school education at the Lakeview High School, probably boarding with a local family.
Why a picture of the Broadway Theater in downtown Mt Pleasant? The teachers college that became Central Michigan University stands on the south of Mt. Pleasant. Hazel Weatherby lived with Bernice Sterling in the Sterling home. Sterling's father, an insurance executive for a farming insurance company, had an office near the theater. Weatherby extended her studies by a year. Did Sterling & Weatherby see films in this theater? How to prove. Who would doubt?
The Bath School pictured before the massacre. Sterling and Weatherby were hired together. One source places them as roommates in a boarding house. Sterling and Weatherby both made arrangements with Schoolboard treasurer Andrew Kehoe to picnic on his property. Kehoe told Sterling, in effect, better picnic earlier that later.
Not all of the children in Weatherby's class room died in the blast that took the teacher's life. Raymond W. Eschtruth, nine years old on the day, gave the museum this testimony. Weatherby was reading aloud to her children when the blast destroyed the room.
Only a portion of the explosives loaded and wired by Andrew Kehoe went off that morning. He had planned a more complete demolition. Kehoe knew electrical wiring, so the school board empowered him to handle physical plant issues, giving him full and private access to the building,
This is not Andrew Kehoe's Model T truck, which he drove into town, luring three men near him before he activated pyrotol with a rifle shot. Emory Hyuck, superintendent of schools, died in the blast. This Model T shows the power of the blast, which also took out the stained glass windows at the adjacent Methodist church.
Frank Weatherby identified his daughter's remains and signed her death certificate. According to the Lakeview Paper, he drove her to Howard City for funeral preparations. This drive becomes part of the play, "Driving Daughters".
She sleeps forever in the rows of Amble. I brought the flowers to her stone on May 19, 2017. This year, Sue Bradford, director of Driving Daughters, visited with cuttings from a friend's lilac bushes. I came up in Byron, Michigan, and often drove into Bath on Bath Road. The Bath Bees often faced off with the Byron Eagles on the football field. I once cried out at a game as I sat in the band bleachers, "Send Bath to the Showers!" However, I didn't become engaged in the Bath story until a second grade teacher I liked sent me a picture of this stone, her head upon it as if it were a pillow.
This passes often as the only picture available of Andrew Kehoe, taken in 1920. He enjoys a quiet evening with his wife, Nellie. Kehoe studied at the college that became Michigan State University, focusing on electricity. He didn't graduate but he became known for his tinkering. Surely the school has a photograph in its archives? In 1911, Andrew Kehoe was living with his father and his step-mother at age 39. Kehoe is probably 48 in this picture.
This is the 1911 death certificate of Frances Kehoe. The writer attributed her death to "Burning from a gasoline stove".
Douglas Haney, who has a manuscript entitled the Angels of May, accuses Andrew Kehoe of causing the stove to burn his step-mother to death. Follow the article for more detail.
Note the eighty acres with a creek owned by L Price, same last name as Nellie Price. Why did Kehoe load the school basement with pyrotol and wire it to explode in the morning of May 18, 1927? Kehoe was stressed by illness in the family. His wife Nellie had contracted tuberculosis. Her doctors had placed her in a hospital in Lansing. Kehoe was blaming high school taxes for the impending foreclosure on his land. Kehoe had lost a recent election. Kehoe disliked the spending of Superintendent Emory Hyuck. Let's at least look at the loss of farm theory.
- Kehoe's mortgage was held by his wife's family. Surely a workout could be arranged?
- Nellie Price's family came from automotive wealth.
The land that once belonged to Andrew and Nellie Kehoe has now become a field for corn and wheat. Kehoe's body was found and buried in an unmarked grave in a cemetery, north of Bath in the town of St. John.
The Methodist Church protected the seniors, who were rehearsing together in the small church. The stained glass windows shattered with the force of the blast. The widow of Emory Hyuck donated replacement windows and placed this marker upon a post outside the sanctuary.
Why this picture of the dance pavilion on Park Lake, a beautifully clean lake with an easy drive of downtown Bath. Notice that the top and bottom swimsuit has yet to go the way of the past. The twenties were known as a time of social and sexual experimentation. Consider the following ideas.
Hazel Weatherby and Bernice Sterling met and became exceedingly close. Weatherby lived with Sterling at Sterling's family home in Mount Pleasant, north of the fledgling teachers college.
Weatherby decided to extend her studies, staying a second year to earn an enhanced teaching degree.
Sterling got Weatherby her job. The two moved into a boarding house together.
If Weatherby or Sterling were dating, I've read nothing about it. Teachers were allowed to marry at the Bath School, but this was a new development. One room school teachers often resigned after marrying. How could a married teacher give students proper and full attention? Yes, but it's pretty well known that school board members and senior staff shopped for wives through the interview process. Applications often required pictures.
I have found no indication that Sterling, who retired from the Ann Arbor schools, ever married. She retired under her maiden name. I wish I would have saved that notice.
Could it be that Kehoe hired the teachers and then was rebuffed? He was known for walking the school corridors to deliver checks in person. With his wife admitted long term into a Lansing hospital with tuberculosis, Andrew Kehoe was virtually single.
Were Weatherby and Sterling that close? How close could two female teachers be in 1927? Nothing I have seen suggests that the correspondence of the two has seen the light of day.
Bath might look like a boring village, but I found it sexy. A beautiful fresh water lake on the edge of town had a delightful beach. I took a swim as part of my research. Lansing, then as now the capitol of Michigan, would make a great getaway in a Model T.
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