Arnie Bernstein
Arnie Bernstein's Bath Massacre: America's First School Bombing is about America's deadliest killing spree at a school.
From the author's Q & A with Randy Dotinga at the Christian Science Monitor:
Q: How was the reaction to this tragedy different than what we're seeing in Aurora?--Marshal Zeringue
A: While the people of Bath weren't any different than the people of our times, it was a different time, a different era. These days, we have better coping mechanisms. We have counselors and all kinds of different support systems.
Back then, they didn't talk about it, period. They were farmers, and they had to go back to work. Your cow couldn't take a day off for a tragedy.
And there wasn't a media frenzy like today. The media came in and left. Three days after it happened, Lindbergh took off and flew to Paris, and that part of it was over.
When I came in, it had been eight decades, and nobody had talked about it. It was just this scar on the land.
Q: Amazingly, you talked to survivors of the school bombing who are now in their 90s and 100s. What did they say?
A: One woman who's 99 now was telling me the most graphic details about how her seven-year-old brother was killed. I was worried about upsetting her and told her she didn't have to talk about all this. She said, "No, people have to know. I'm not going to be around forever. I want people to know what happened."
Q: What can we learn from Bath Township?
A: One lesson is that...[read on]
