When I was 2 years old,my High school burned..Rumors was a upset student who had gotten bad grades,rigged a bomb to school office phone and called it..below is a news article telling true story... When we look at the wrong in the world today..it isnt that much different then 50 years ago..here is the story... There would be a surprising answer, but it would take months to get to the bottom of this puzzling blaze, and later another one. It was Nov. 6, 1967. A boosters meeting had ended when the janitor thought he smelled smoke. Walking down the hail, he discovered the smoke was coming from the library and there were flames. About the same time, James Hagar, a DuPont senior and yearbook sports editor, was being given a ride home by Rusty Inman. The two had just gotten off work at the Kroger store in the Madison Shopping Center. It was a lit- tie warmer night than usual and both had their windows open. ‘I smelled the odor of that pine wood burning,” Hagar recalled recently. “I didn’t see any flames or smoke at that time, but I knew exactly what it was.” About two weeks earlier, DuPont Principal Buford Jewel! had warned students at an assembly meeting of the danger of fire at the school. A problem, Jewell told the students, seemed to be an oil substance that was highly flammable and used to clean the school’s pine wood floors. Inman drove about a half-block before he could turn around and head back to the school. Once there, Hagar smashed a window and crawled inside. Hagar said he could hear the wood falling and the flames roaring as he grabbed handfuls of the yearbook material. Meanwhile, Inman ran to a nearby home to call the fire department, then he remained outside the building while Hagar searched for photographs and stories to be used in the yearbook. Six times Hagar entered the burning school building retrieving the mat and handing it to his companion who took it across a parking lot to safety. Police finally put a halt to Hagar’s death- defying actions. Ironically, Hagar didn’t learn until later that the yearbook had already been printed The building was well engulfed inflames by the time the Old Hickory fire men arrived on the scene. The cause of the fire at that time was unknown. A fire official said the building was “so destroyed there is no evidence to investigate.” The loss was estimated at $2 million. Today, 47 years later, only memories remain for former students. It happened on Vickie Crosby’s 17th birthday. She received a call in the middle of the night and rushed to the school. “Everybody was in shock,” she remembered. “We just couldn’t believe it.” Crosby thought it might have been started by a cigarette. One student at the time shrugged off the fire: “This is the first time the whole year I have done my Latin homework and look what happened.” Doug Eza, the senior class president, retired as a high school principal in Athens, Ga. He also received one of those frantic early morning phone calls and rushed to the school. “I stood there dumbfounded,” he recalled. “I didn’t believe this was happening.” Another heartbroken student was Windy Wilson Tune, the class historian. “I was devastated,” she said. ‘It was the end of the world for me.” She started a campaign: ‘The Building is Down, But Our Spirit Is Up.” “I really didn’t appreciate the school until I watched it burn last night,” said another student. (Strangely, not far away and two nights later, the private Madison academy was destroyed by fire. There appeared to be no connection.) Although the DuPont school building was destroyed, the school’s unattached gymnasium survived the disaster. A few days after the blaze, assembly was held and students were told the school would “rise from its ashes.” School officials had no choice. The high school classes were moved about a half-mile away to the junior high where half-day classes were held, the junior high students in the morning and the high school students in the afternoon. That arrangement continued until March 20, 1968, when fire destroyed the junior high school. A broken basement window seemed to indicate that someone had entered the school and set it afire. Again, there was no evidence left behind and -no clues as to the identity of whom. that person might have been, If Indeed the two fires were purposely set. That loss was estimated at $1 million. The DuPont students, both high school and junior high, had to find a new home. This time it was a makeshift arrangement at Madison High School. DuPont High School was built in 1931 as an elementary school and was converted to the high school just months before the fire. There were only 540 students in the high school and 736 in the junior high. The unsolved blazes had investigators baffled and there was no headway being made. But they got their break on April 1, 1968 when officers received a call that a youth was trying to sell a movie projector to the Tennessee Visual Education Service in lower Broadway in downtown Nashville. Kenneth Wayne Baker, 17, a senior at DuPont High School, was initially charged with trying to sell the projector with a fake bill of sale to prove his ownership. It didn’t take detectives long to add the charges of two counts of arson and another charge of burglary. “Oh my God, he’s just a boy, some mother’s boy,” remarked Dr. John Harris, Metro schools director. Baker was a member of the school’s audio visual club. The teenager was described by one school mate as a loner, but another classmate says that’s incorrect. “Ken was in our class,” Hagar said. “He didn’t have a lot of friends, but he wasn’t a loner.” He initially denied igniting the high school but later relented, saying, “You’d find out sooner or later anyway.” So why would a student want to burn down his two schools? Officers said the teenager gave two signed statements and an assortment of reasons for setting the fires, all of which he later denied. His array of excuses had officers shaking their heads in disbelief. They included: —His school grades “weren’t too good and I wanted to start over again and help myself by destroying my records.” —I didn’t like the school.’ —To cover up the theft of the projector. —Having to attend the junior high on the split shift made him late for a job he bad recently taken at a K-mart store. Baker was quoted by investigators as saying, “I broke into the [high] school for the purpose of burning it down,” and that he had been planning it for about a week. Baker was also quoted as saying that he carried a stack of newspapers into a small room in the high school’s library, placed them on a table and set them on fire. After his arrest Baker was placed in the Metro jail and held under a $5,000 bond. Appearing before a judge, District Attorney Tom Shriver and Baker’s high-priced defense attorney, John Jay Hooker, Sr. asked that the young defendant be committed to Central State Hospital, a mental health facility. “If released,” Shriver said, “the Baker boy could commit a similar crime.’ The judge approved the motion for him to undergo mental evaluation. Later the court ordered Baker to undergo psychiatric exams at both Vanderbilt University Hospital and Central State. Baker later said that his arrest “was three years out of my life” and claimed it was based on “misconception and coerced confession.” He is believed to still be living in Davidson County. DuPont High School was rebuilt in Hermitage and was named DuPont- Tyler Senior High School but was closed in 1986 and later was reopened as it is now, DuPont-Tyler Middle School. DuPont Junior High School was rebuilt on the same property in Old Hickory and is now named DuPont Hadley Middle School. Larry Brinton was a police reporter, chief investigative reporter, and managing editor for the Nashville Banner from 1956 to 1979. More recently, he was a prominent commentator on local TV news pro grams. Today he is retired and has been writing for The Nashville Retrospect since 2009.
Posted on: Wed, 26 Nov 2014 23:26:32 +0000
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