The Galveston County Daily News

TEXAS CITY — Robert Gallaway Jr. had a front row seat to the Texas City Disaster, obscured only by his mother’s dress.

“I was peeking out the front door from behind my mother when everything just went up,” said Gallaway, who was 4 years old the morning of April 16, 1947.

It was on that day that a ship explosion in the dock area of Texas City set off a cascade of destruction that killed almost 600 people and nearly killed the town as well.

Like most in town, Ethel Gallaway — Robert’s mother — recalls the “beautiful orange smoke” that bellowed from the Texas City wharf area. The Gallaways’ home on First Avenue and Bay Street was as close as you could get to the S.S. Grandcamp without actually being on the docks.

The French cargo ship had caught fire, likely because of a discarded cigarette. As its mixed cargo burned — including several tons of ammonia nitrate fertilizer — the entire town marveled at the orangish smoke that painted the morning sky.

“We were standing in the doorway just looking at the sky,” recalled Ethel, 87, who was then a 26-year-old mother of three. “It’s hard to describe the way the sky looked after.”

Ethel’s oldest son, Wayne, then 6 years old, was in the main room of the shotgun-style home. Her youngest child, 3-month-old Glenda, was asleep in her tiny crib near the front room window.

Robert Jr. was in another room when he heard his mother scream.

“I came running and grabbed onto her leg and looked out the front door,” Robert, now 65, said of the moment the beautiful orange smoke turned into a mushroom cloud of fire, debris and black smoke.

“When you looked up, it’s hard to describe. The sky was full of the metal pieces. Going up. Coming down,” Ethel said.

Then came the blast wave.

“The house picked up and just twisted,” said Ethel. “It twisted the house right off the blocks.”

When Ethel and the kids came to, the house had been moved about 10 feet off its blocks, debris was scattered throughout the house, and the floor… well, the floor was gone.

“I took a step and my feet went right through the linoleum. I lost my shoes, so I went barefoot the rest of the day,” Ethel said. “I never went back for my shoes.”

She had more important things to tend to.

Robert and Wayne were in pretty good shape, but Glenda was trapped under a large pile of debris. Were it not for a large window frame that had crashed across her crib, the pile of debris might have likely crushed the baby.

Out the door Ethel went, kids in tow. At first, the family made it to Ethel’s sister’s house in La Marque. Meanwhile, her husband, Robert Sr., a plant worker at Union Carbide, was working his way toward the house not knowing that his wife and kids had made it out.

Eventually, the family reunited. But La Marque was still too close for Ethel’s liking.

“I just wanted to get out of town,” she said.

They got as far as a roadside rest area on state Highway 6 in Hitchcock.

That’s where they spent the night, five members of the family stuffed in a 1937 Chevy.

Eventually, the Gallaways would return to Texas City, moving back into a new home on the same lot about two years after the blast.

Ethel still lives in town, but even the slightest incident at a local petrochemical plant sends her to Robert Jr.’s home in Bacliff or Glenda’s in La Marque. Yet, like many who survived the disaster, she calls Texas City home.

“Were are you going to go?” Ethel said. “You can’t run from trouble.”

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At A Glance

WHAT: Texas City Disaster Memorial

WHEN: 9 a.m. today

WHERE: Memorial Park, Loop 197 and 29th Street

GUEST SPEAKER: Disaster survivor Joe Hoover