The Galveston County Daily News

GALVESTON — Eight-year-old Harry Kelso Jr. was taking a spelling test in his Texas City classroom the morning of April 16, 1947.

His school was about a mile from the Texas City harbor, where a freighter loaded with explosive ammonium nitrate fertilizer was burning.

The city’s firefighters had been struggling to extinguish the blaze when the ship erupted into a mammoth fireball, creating a smoke column nearly 2,000 feet high.

More than 56 years later, Kelso, now a physician in Galveston, still does not remember the word he was trying to spell correctly when the blast from the exploding ship hammered his school.

He can easily recall what happened afterward, however.

“The explosion blew a roller window shade off, and it landed in between two desks in front of me as I tried to get out,” Kelso said. “The classroom’s door was off its hinges.”

Kelso’s father had been gravely injured in the initial blast of what would become known as the Texas City Disaster, the worst industrial accident in U.S. history.

In Galveston, Dr. Truman G. Blocker Jr. was performing surgery at the University of Texas Medical Branch when the S.S. Grandcamp exploded.

Surgical instruments bounced on Blocker’s tray.

He ran to a window to witness a mushroom cloud rising above Texas City.

“Having a lot of information about the atomic bomb, I thought this was one and that World War III had started,” Blocker once said in an interview.

Kelso’s father, a Monsanto chemical plant engineer, was rushed to UTMB along with many other injured people.

Harry Kelso Sr. had been watching the Grandcamp burn from his Monsanto office, about 300 yards from the ship. The explosion shattered his office window; he suffered severe facial lacerations and nearly lost his right arm as a result.

Blocker and his surgical team repaired the damage to the elder Kelso’s face and arm.

In gratitude for Blocker’s work on his father, Kelso and his wife, Margaret, recently made a commitment to establish the Harry B. and Marie S. Kelso Endowed Blocker Scholarship at UTMB.

The scholarship, named in memory of Kelso’s parents, will benefit deserving students in the university’s M.D./Ph.D. combined degree program.

Called the Blocker Scholars Program, graduates of the program will become leaders in advancing medicine, using their background in basic and clinical sciences to translate research results into clinical practice.

The Kelsos’ contribution was one of the capstone commitments to the university’s $5 million Blocker Scholars Initiative, which solidified the academic infrastructure of the M.D./Ph.D. program. Kelso himself co-chaired efforts to raise funds for the initiative in the Galveston region.

Blocker, who in 1967 became the first UTMB chief executive to hold the title of president, was hailed as a model physician and scientist by his peers.