In May 1927, one of the deadliest acts of mass violence in American history unfolded in the quiet village of Bath, Michigan.
Over the course of several weeks, Andrew Kehoe, the treasurer of the local school board, secretly wired the Bath Consolidated School—and his own farm—with hundreds of pounds of dynamite. On the morning of May 18, just one day before graduation, a series of explosions tore through the school building, killing 45 people and injuring dozens more, most of them children.
Kehoe was a respected member of the community. His violence was not impulsive. It was deliberate, methodical, and hidden in plain sight.
The bombing also killed Kehoe’s wife, Nellie, and ended with Kehoe himself detonating a truck packed with explosives and scrap metal, killing several more villagers before taking his own life. At the time, the crime seemed beyond comprehension—an isolated horror without precedent.
Nearly a century later, it reads differently.
In this episode, we are joined by John Smolens, award-winning author and longtime chronicler of Michigan life, to discuss his historical novel Day of Days, published by Michigan State University Press. The novel revisits the Bath School bombing not as spectacle, but as lived trauma—tracing how a single morning can permanently alter the moral landscape of a community.
Through the voice of survivor Beatrice Turcott, who recalls the bombing decades later from her deathbed, Day of Days examines how collective trauma endures long after the dead are buried and the wounded appear healed. Smolens explores how memory, silence, and resilience coexist in the aftermath of violence—and how reckoning with the past becomes necessary for surviving the present.
The Bath bombing is often described as an anomaly. This conversation asks a harder question: whether it was instead a harbinger—an early warning of a form of violence that America would come to know all too well.
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