64: The Bath School Disaster (Part 2)

An Old Timey Podcast

True Crime, History, Comedy

4.9 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 23 July 2025

⏱️ 94 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

To this day, the Bath School Disaster of 1927 remains the deadliest mass murder in a school in American history, yet it isn’t often discussed.

In this episode, Norm covers May 18, 1927, when school board member Andrew Kehoe set off a series of explosions that killed 38 children, 6 adults, and injured at least 58 others. That act of domestic terrorism forever changed the small community of Bath, Michigan.

Remember, kids, history hoes always cite their sources! For this episode, Norm pulled from:
Bath School Museum. “Bath School Museum.” https://bathschoolmuseum.org/.
Bernstein, Arnie. Bath Massacre: America’s First School Bombing. The University of Michigan Press, 2009.
“Merrian Josephine Cushman Vail (1913-2013) - Find...” Accessed July 17, 2025. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/6056318/merrian_josephine-vail.
Parker, Grant. Mayday. Liberty Press, 1980.
Schechter, Harold. Maniac: The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Mass Killer. Little A, 2021.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hear ye, hear ye. You are listening to an old-timey podcast. I'm Norman Caruso.
0:06.0	And I'm Kristen Caruso.
0:08.0	And on this episode, it's part two and the finale of my series on the Baff School Disaster.
0:13.0	Okay. I don't know how to start this, because I like for us to start these episodes kind of light and happy
0:22.4	but this one's going to be a rough one it will be rough should we save the light stuff for later
0:29.3	what light stuff I don't have light stuff do you have light stuff I do have one important piece
0:34.0	of information I'd like to share with our history host give Give us something light before we get into the horrible stuff.
0:40.4	Folks, if you're on the $10 tier, you've probably already noticed that...
0:45.3	Why are you so serious with this light piece of information?
0:48.9	Baby Caterpillar, aka my little mustache is gone.
0:53.7	I have shaved my mustache that I was so proud of in part one of this series.
0:58.8	You didn't seem proud at all.
1:00.1	You seemed to have no confidence in it.
1:03.3	I guess I don't recall.
1:05.2	But let me tell you what happened.
1:08.1	Your father, Kristen, my father-in-law, got on the World Wide Web and made
1:14.2	fun of me, okay? It did. And there were many comments. One of them, the funniest, was he looks
1:22.6	like my 13-year-old son. Yeah, to be clear, my dad took a screenshot of our podcast recording and was like, hey,
1:31.3	anyone who's not at the $10 level on Patreon and can't see the video, let me help you out
1:36.3	and show you how bad Norm's mustache is.
1:40.6	In all seriousness, I had actually shaved it before he posted that.
1:44.9	We went out to eat last week, and the waiter just had a phenomenal mustache.
	...

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