Bath Massacre: America's First School Bombing (8 page)

With a small regional school board, it was inevitable that many members would be friends or relatives of people living in the district. Conflicts of interest, such as giving bus contracts to relatives or hiring friends of friends, were usually overlooked. The school board also preferred to hold its meetings in private rather than opening the proceedings to the public.
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Most important, keeping a good school in line with modern educational standards required a constant flow of money. The funding came, of course, from local taxes.

In one respect, the money certainly was well spent. Huyck pushed hard to earn the school that holy grail of education: accreditation. Accreditation would prove that the Bath Consolidated School was serious about the future of its students. Essentially educational accreditation is a quality certification granted by a third party, an assurance that the school has set rigorous goals to achieve excellence. In the case of the Bath Consolidated School, the accrediting agency was the University of Michigan. The criteria were basic: specific educational backgrounds were required for all teachers, classes must meet Michigan state regulations, and members of the faculty and administration must adhere to proper standards of conduct for people of their profession. Huyck proved himself worthy of the task, and accreditation was granted in May 1925, not quite three years after the school opened. With accreditation came financial resources in the form of federal and state Home Economic Aid and other government grants.
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In the wake of the Great War, a recession stalked the global economy. The United States also experienced a downturn, though not to the extent suffered by its European counterparts.

This was of little comfort to farmers struggling to make ends meet,
particularly with increased property assessments to pay for the consolidated school. Discontent percolated in several quarters, leading to considerable discussion about how the Bath School Board was handling its financial concerns. In this respect, Kehoe most assuredly was his father’s son. Like Philip Kehoe before him, Andrew was vocal in his discontent over tax oversight. And he was ready to back up his words with action.
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The school board treasurer, Enos Peacock, came up for reelection. The Peacock name was well known throughout the community: Enos’s forebears had built the one-room Peacock School. Although Peacock had always been considered an excellent steward of the people’s money, Kehoe led a coalition demanding new leadership rather than the “old boy’s network” that seemed to permeate the board.

The election was held on July 14. Six men, including Kehoe and Peacock, were running for the trustee position. A winner would be decided when one man received a majority of all votes cast; with six candidates on the ballot, this was no easy task. Yet Kehoe was the top vote getter on the first poll. He held on to the lead through each vote, finally winning a board position on the sixth canvass.

His was a three-year position due to expire in July 1927.
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Kehoe was sworn in a week later as one of two new board members. Perhaps in a nod to his fiscal prudence, Kehoe’s fellow trustees elected him treasurer. School board meetings were inevitably long, as members wrestled over standard educational and administrative issues. But Kehoe’s presence brought a new element to the proceedings.

Superintendent Hyuck always attended board meetings; most board members felt it was good protocol for a responsible school administrator.

Kehoe saw Huyck’s presence in a different light. To him, it seemed like a control factor. The administrator/teacher should do his job and let the board handle the rest. Kehoe was elected to serve the people’s interests and was determined to fulfill that responsibility. He demanded that Huyck be banned from board meetings. This flew in the face of other trustees’ preferences to say nothing of Michigan law. Kehoe was told that in order to receive state funding the superintendent’s presence was required during the official assemblies of any board of education.
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Despite the superintendent’s popularity in the community, both professionally and socially, Huyck remained the subject of Kehoe’s scorn.

Kehoe and Huyck openly loathed one another. It was a strange relationship,
one that escalated over time. It was as though Kehoe had tagged Huyck as someone beyond a mere adversary. No, Huyck was a person who had to learn his place and role in the community, and Kehoe was the man who knew just how to make that happen. Huyck, on the other hand, wanted what was best for his students and would do what he had to to ensure their academic success.

Their animosity increased when it came to Huyck’s salary. In what must have been a personal victory to Kehoe, the superintendent’s vacation was cut to one week a year and his annual pay increase reduced to one hundred dollars instead of the customary two hundred. Next Kehoe challenged the patronage system of school business. Bus service was routinely contracted to Ward Kyes, who happened to be son of board member Melville Kyes. It didn’t matter that Ward’s bids were higher than other potential contractors: Ward was Mel’s son, and that’s how business was done. Kehoe fought like hell to stop the practice, but his challenge was easily defeated. Some things just weren’t tinkered with.
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Despite his cantankerous approach to board politics (when things didn’t go his way, he often motioned for meetings to be adjourned),
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Kehoe’s sense of fiscal responsibility did earn him begrudging respect in some quarters and praise in others. As treasurer his books were always—
always
—balanced to the penny. This reputation for meticulous accounting came into play when Maude Detluff, the township clerk and wife of the blacksmith/auto repairman (and fellow school board member) Albert Detluff, unexpectedly passed away in April 1925. Local Republican Party officials asked Kehoe if he would be interested in completing the last year of Maude Detluff’s term, a part-time position with some remuneration. A stepping-stone to something bigger, it seemed. With his place on the school board and now as township clerk, Kehoe had the potential to make a personal impact on the community. He took the offer.
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His power didn’t last long. A year later, in the next general election, party officials picked another candidate for township clerk. Despite his talent for balancing ledgers, Kehoe’s confrontational reputation on the school board ultimately did him in.
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Although it was obvious his presence was no longer required, Kehoe and his wife sat quietly throughout the nominating process for clerk held at the Community Hall. He said not a word throughout the proceedings, giving no indication of how he felt.

He would make one last try at public office. Three years later, in spring 1927, Kehoe would be nominated for the position of county justice of the peace. Again he would be soundly defeated; again he and Nellie
would be present at the town meeting where the voting was held, and once more they would make no fuss after the loss.
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In these defeats, it seemed, Kehoe simply turned his emotions and thoughts inward.
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On July 3, 1776, as his dream of an independent government free from British rule was finally coming to fruition, John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail with some thoughts on how future generations should celebrate America’s birth. Independence Day, Adams said, must be “solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”
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On July 4, 1924, blasts echoed throughout the farmlands surrounding the Kehoe place. These were no ordinary stump-blasting explosions; any passing fool might have though the Great War was being reenacted on Kehoe’s property.

The ruckus put a scare into Sydney and Charlotte Howell. When they asked Nellie Kehoe about her husband’s unconventional fireworks, she jokingly calmed their fears.

“The little boy is having some fun,” she said.
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David Harte needed to borrow a seat for his old wagon and figured he’d get one from his neighbor. He went across the road to where Kehoe was working his fields, driving his horses into a froth as they dragged a manure spreader. The animals pulled mightily but not hard enough for their master. Onward, onward, Kehoe pushed them, past their breaking point. Sometime that night, one of the horses gave up the ghost.

The next day a truck from the local rendering works picked up the remains. When Harte came by to fetch the wagon seat, he mentioned it to Kehoe. “I see you had bad luck with your horse,” he said.

“Yes, damn him,” Kehoe snapped back. “He ought to have been killed years ago. He didn’t pull and we had a mixup and when I got through with him he was dead.”
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First the Harte dog, now his own horse. It seemed Kehoe had a nasty disposition with animals.

A school requires consistent and broad-thinking changes. Huyck wanted investments for the educational future; Kehoe saw mounting expenses at the burden of the taxpayer. Every meeting Huyck had with the accreditation body meant more spending. Decisions on what was needed were made hand-in-hand between the University of Michigan’s accreditation representatives and Huyck, with the findings then presented to the board. Although his fellow trustees believed this was efficient, Kehoe only saw an out of control superintendent fighting for complete command of public spending.

Kehoe didn’t understand why the accreditation committee wouldn’t meet with the board; after all, who was paying for all these items? Huyck, he believed, was using taxpayer money as though it were a blank check.
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In the fall of 1926, Huyck’s salary was raised another hundred dollars despite Kehoe’s objections. Purchase items grew, and expenses rose. The students needed new books. Encyclopedia sets were required for the library. The girls’ home economics classes and the boys’ shop classes must have updated resources. Classrooms simply had to have pictures on the wall to enhance learning. At one point a fireproof safe made it to the purchase list. Another must-need item was basic playground equipment.
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Kehoe smoldered. Huyck remained cool. They were opponents tied together by the Bath Consolidated School. Whenever Kehoe and Huyck were in the same room, a certain tension existed. It crackled like static electricity.

Despite Kehoe’s objections, Ward Kyes continued as one of Bath Consolidated’s bus drivers. Every morning Ward picked up the children on his route and brought them home in the afternoon. Riding with Ward Kyes was as much a part of school as enrolling first graders in Miss Sterling’s class; it was how things were done at Bath Consolidated.

Ward knew Kehoe didn’t like him driving the bus, but he never held it against the man. In fact, he thought the cantankerous trustee was awfully smart. Whenever Ward attended school board meetings (and he did so to drive his father—board member Mel Kyes, who was blind in one eye—to school and back), he knew he could count on one thing: the ongoing agitation between Kehoe and Huyck. The bad blood between the two was like the joke about the elephant in the room: everyone knew it was there, but no one liked to talk about it.