Short Stuff: The Church Choir That Didn't Explode

Perhaps the most amazing coincidence ever documented took place when a church in a tiny town in Nebraska exploded in 1950.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Dave is here in spirit. He wanted
to let us know that he's thinking of each and
every one of you individually, and this is short stuff,
that's right. I was raised in the church choir, my friends,
so this one hits really close to home. Actually not
at all, right, but I did sing in the church choir.
I've seen church choir's performed before, so it really hits

(00:26):
home for me too. This is a really fun story,
I think. Is this Were you familiar with the story before?
You know where I first heard of it a time
life books? Ad? Are you really? Is there anything those
things haven't taught us? I don't know. I wish I
had a upset of those. Those are fun me too.
We'll have to go on eBay and look for him together.

(00:47):
I'm sure they're all there. So, um, what we're talking
about is not necessarily just a church choir. It's almost
tangential to it. Or we're really talking about is one
of the most astounding coincidences in a history of documented history, Like,
there's no coincidence that really holds a candle to this.
In my book and there's plenty of coincidences. I remember

(01:09):
we did an entire episode on one. Remember the poor
guy who was in both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings
and survived them both. Um, there's been some amazing coincidences before.
This one, to me takes the cake. It's a pretty
good one. And we're talking about a terrible incident that happened,
but it could have been a lot worse. On the

(01:32):
evening of March first, nineteen fifty and Beatrice in Nebraska,
when a church blew up, I mean blew up, like
the walls blew out, the roof came down, windows got
knocked out of houses in the vicinity, a radio station
got knocked off the air by the blast. However that works.

(01:54):
It was. It was a big time explosion that just
destroyed this church. Uh. And I guess we should go
ahead and say how this happened. Uh. The ideas that
there was probably a gas leak, and that gas leak
just you know, did what gas leaks do and filled
a space with gas. And Uh, there was a gentleman

(02:15):
there who would show up. What was his name? Was
it the reverend himself? It was the reverend. Yeah, Walter Clempole. Yeah,
what a great reverend name, Reverend Clinpole in nineteen fifties,
Nebraska reverend name too. So he shows up at his
West Side Baptist church, uh, like he always does ahead
of time, to light the furnace to get it nice
and warm for choir practice, because in early March in

(02:39):
that part of Nebraska can be a little chilly. Uh.
And then he went back home to go to dinner.
And so the idea is that this gas fills up,
it eventually reaches the flame of that furnace and church explodes. Okay,
so a church exploding from a natural gas explosion lit
by a reverend. This is not all about making reverend
Climpole look back. Now, he didn't like that furnace because

(03:03):
he wanted to blow up the church. Like you said,
he was lighting it for choir practice. What makes this
astounding is that that explosion took place at seven pm
on March one, like you said, which was a Wednesday,
and every Wednesday was choir practice, and every Wednesday at
seven twenty pm choir practice started. So this explosion that

(03:25):
destroyed the entire church took place five minutes after choir
practice officially started. And The thing that makes this the
most astounding coincidence of all time is that not one
single member of that fifteen person choir was in the
church at the time. Every single one happened to be late.
That's right, Uh, And I think we should save the

(03:47):
reasons for everyone being late till after the break with
a little cliffhanger, but before the break. Uh. If you're
trying to figure out the odds of something like this happening,
there's no exact scientific way to do that, obviously, But
what they can do, and what they have done, is
look back and said, well, how often were people generally

(04:07):
late at choir practice at this church, and what are
the odds of that happening to everybody? And they kind
of went back and look at past um choir practices
and saw that each person would be late about of
the time one and every four choir practices. So everyone
being gone for this specific night ended up being a

(04:30):
you guessed it, one in a million chance. Yeah. I
think all of them had either an equal chance or
twice the chance of being struck by lightning that year,
as this actually happening is all of them being late
for choir practice at the same time Okay. I think
that's a great setup. We'll come back after our short
break and we'll talk about why these folks were late

(04:51):
right after this. So before we get going on the reasons,

(05:16):
I think one important thing we didn't point out is
it's not like everyone got on a bus somewhere to
go to choir practice and the bus broke down. Like
everyone was late for their independent reasons. Some had a
little bit of overlap, as we'll see, but that's sort
of the remarkable part of all this. Yeah, yeah, it
is amazing. So um, Reverend clempole Uh, he usually got

(05:40):
there as early as anybody. Um, he usually got there
about seven ten um. And it turns out that his daughter,
who was going to come with a Marylyn Ruth, the
dress she had put on it was was dirty. So
his wife, the Mrs Reverend Walter clempole Um, had to

(06:00):
put a new dress on the irony board get it ready,
and that made the family late. That's pretty okay. I
like that one. That's a good one. It just keeps
going from there, though, And we should mention we could
not find Reverend Walter Clemple's wife's name. We are not
just doing the antiquated thing of calling a woman Mrs
so and so so and so husband's name, right, thank

(06:22):
you for that. So let's go over some of these
all right. So, Um, like I said, it just keeps
going from Reverend Clemple and his family's reason for being late.
Next up, we've got Ladona vander Grifft, which sounds like
a made up name. She was struggling with the geometry problem.
She was a sophomore in high school, and um, she

(06:44):
she was like, I'm not letting this problem beat me.
I have to finish this before I leave for choir practice.
Best part of this whole story, I think, I think
so too. So she not only did that make her late,
but it also ended up making the sd s sisters
Royena and um what was her name? Sadie Rona and
Sadie st S were late because of La Donna indirectly

(07:07):
as well, right, because I think they were supposed to
Uh were they supposed to ride together? Yeah? Well no,
they had car trouble. The sts sisters had car, so
they called La Donna. Vander Griffin said, hey, can you
come pick us up? She said, just after I figure
out this Pythagorean theorem thing. Oh yeah, yeah, so they
were supposed to ride together, I got you. Yeah, Yeah,

(07:27):
but they weren't supposed to they they they only called her.
They would have arrived had their car not been um
in trouble. And then even furthermore, had La Donna not
been doing geometry, all three of them might have made
it on time. Yeah, they were double blessed. Yes, amazing stuff. Uh.
And of course the reason I say double blest is
obviously with a situation like this in a church, the

(07:50):
entire church believes that this was God's hand leading them
away from that explosion. Naturally, I would too, indubitably, indubitably
what else do we have here? We have Mrs Leonard Schuster.
Uh And and Schuster went to her mom's house to
get her ready for a missionary meeting. Apparently, so that's

(08:11):
what made Schuster late, Right, had to untirer mom's shoes,
each to their own shoe. What about Herbert Kith? He
was a late operator, which is that's the late operator
in Nebraska's name. In sure, he supposedly had a letter
that he had been putting off writing, and he finally

(08:32):
sat down to write it, and the letter itself made
him late. Um, And that's apparently unusual for him. He
wasn't necessarily the most prolific letter writer, but that was
the one for him. Do you know what it sounds
like to me? What sounds like chary practice wasn't much
of a priority for anyone there. It kind of sounds like,
I got a math problem. I really need to write

(08:54):
this letter. Yeah. Or Joyce Black really demonstrates that too.
She was a stenographer, she said. Um. And by the
way she was saying all this, they were all saying
all this stuff to Life magazine, which did an article
on this couple of weeks after it happened, called why
the choir was late? Um. She said, I was feeling
just playing lazy. It was very cold out my my

(09:16):
house was cozy and toasty, and I was just hanging
out there, all right, That's why I was late. But
she was the most forthright of all the very honest,
very honest. Uh. The piano player herself, Marylyn Paul. Uh.
Usually the piano players there pretty early, and I think
Marylyn had a knack for arriving about a half hour early.
But Marylyn must have eaten some turkey for dinner, because

(09:38):
she fell asleep and her mom woke her up at
seven fifteen and she said, all right, and well, I
gotta get out of here. I'm kind of already late.
And it says here she only had time to tidy
up and then leave. Let me clean up a bit first.
So her mom was actually the choir director, and she

(09:58):
was late because Marylyn and was late. So I I
like in all this stuff too. I wonder if like
she was mad at Maryland or was like, why are
you not waking up at seven in the evening? Who
who naps like that? Um? Or if if everybody was
very patient. I like to think they're all very patient
and polite waiting for one another. You know. Well, it
says that that mom tried unsuccessfully to awaken her earlier, right,

(10:22):
That's what I'm saying. There was a ghastly at church
in a carbon monoxide leak in the Paul's will you
wake Up? And then Lucille Jones and Dorothy would um.
They were neighbors and they were both in the choir,
so they would naturally ride together. And one of them,
oh I think it was Lucille, was listening to a

(10:45):
radio program from seven to seven third, probably Mannix or
co Jack and um and uh again. Dorothy was just
sitting there patiently waiting for her friend to finish listening
to this radio program. Unbelieved bole. We also left out
Harvey all the last one. What did Harvey do? He

(11:05):
had the worst excuse of all of them. He was
taking care of his kids, his wife was out of town,
and he started talking, and I guess talking makes Harvey
loose track of time. But he lost track of time
and ended up being like, I guess as kids, I'm
not sure. I could not, for the life of me
find that Life magazine article directly. Um, we have to

(11:27):
thank our friends at Snopes for helping us out a
big time with this one. Yeah, it's probably the kids
were like, Dad's finally talking to us, right, He's paying
attention to us. Yeah, but I can tell he doesn't
know what time it is. Yeah, this is one of
the stories. I'm glad there wasn't some gross dark thing underneath. No,
it was all above the boards and uh amazing. So

(11:50):
all of those people, for all those different reasons, were
late to choir practice, and had they all made it
on time, they would have perished in that explosion. I
love it. Thanks Time, Life Books, Thanks Snopes, Thanks to you, Chuck,
thanks to Dave for producing this, thanks to you guys
for listening to it, and short Stuff is out. Stuff

(12:13):
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