The newspaper headlines along the walls of a museum dedicated to the London School explosion of 70 years ago depict the chaos reporters and editors faced in covering one of America's greatest tragedies.

From the moment on March 18, 1937, when the school's band director dashed into a Western Union office in Overton exclaiming, "The London School is blown to bits, hundreds killed and injured! Get help!" until the next morning's headlines, it was apparent that no one knew the full grasp of how many lives had been lost.

Click the image above for an audio slideshow in the survivors own words. Click the image above to see a video on London history. Click the image above for more photos. MORE NEW LONDON STORIES: Cenotaph honors those killed in school explosion  London Museum houses items from tragic day  Cemetery home to 129 killed in blast  Through their eyes: Four survivors discuss how the New London explosion changed them forever  During oil boom, before explosion, the school was the PRIDE of New London  Reporters converge on New London  Odor now added to natural gas  Community gathers to honor those who died in school explosion and those who lived  Faces, forever changed: School blast survivors still unable to talk about those they lost  Remembrances roll as London School graduates gather  Silence was normal for many survivors  A shared pain: London School graduates gather to mark blast's 70th anniversary  Explosion survivor's faith still strong after tragedy

The Longview Morning Journal, predecessor to the Longview News-Journal, reported between 300 and 400 people killed. The Dallas Morning News thought 700 children were dead, while the Wichita Falls Post said 476 bodies had been recovered while 100 children were still unaccounted for. The Henderson Daily News reported 488 people dead, the New York Times said the count was below 500, while the Fort Worth Star-Telegram announced that more than 600 children perished.

To this day, there is still not an accurate count, but about 300 children and teachers did die that day when manual training instructor Lemmie R. Butler turned on a sanding machine. He had no idea that the area was filled with a mixture of gas and air. The mixture ignited, carrying the flame into a nearly closed space beneath the building, which then was lifted into the air and smashed to the ground.

"It was my first big scoop — but as painful a story as I have ever covered," stated Sarah McClendon in her 1996 biography "Mr. President! Mr. President!: My 50 Years of Covering the White House." McClendon's 53 years as a reporter included pressing questions of U.S. presidents from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to George W. Bush. She was a Tyler Morning Telegraph reporter on March 18, 1937, when she returned from the beauty shop to find a stunned office that had learned of the explosion. She grabbed her photographer, Kenneth Gunn, and was the first reporter on the scene, she said.

"It was like a vision from the end of the world," she stated in her book. "Most of the school had, literally, vanished, leaving a rubble-littered crater to show where it had been. I found one man walking, dazed, among hundreds of bodies, mostly children, covering the ground. He managed to tell me that he was the assistant superintendent and what little else he could. I called my office in Tyler and the International News Service in Dallas just before the telephones were out. No one could phone in or out for hours."

In a twist of irony, the explosion seemed to give a bloody baptism to many of the 20th century's prominent journalists. Among them was Walter Cronkite, who came from Dallas to cover the grisly scene.

"You couldn't even recognize the building. There were no walls. There was nothing left of it. There was something that looked like a roof, but it was on the ground. It had just collapsed," Cronkite said in a Channel 8 News report, "The Day a Generation Died," which aired in 1987 on the 50th anniversary.

"As we got closer and were able to park the car and get out and get up to the scene, we realized that these ... these tough oil field workers with tear-stained faces, and their hands were bleeding, torn away by these jagged edges of stone and brick, and they were carrying bodies out every other minute or two."

The blast overshadowed what was a communications milestone in local history, as KOCA of Kilgore and Henderson became the first radio studio in Rusk County. Ted Hudson's station hit the airways at 7 a.m., but when he learned of that blast around 3:30 that afternoon, he grabbed enough equipment to go on the air and went to London. He connected with a telephone line torn loose from the building and was there for the next three days and nights.

He summoned doctors, nurses and others to help, directed rescue and clean-up efforts and would later inform ministers and singers where to go for the next funeral, according to museum accounts. His listeners were not just anxious and grief-weary East Texans but Americans throughout the nation, many of them parents mesmerized by what could have been their own worst nightmare.

"As long as I had not known the broadcast was going beyond our own section, I was perfectly at ease," Hudson once said, "but when I learned we were on the national network I got a real case of mic fright and turned it over to another announcer."

McClendon would become the Tyler newspaper's reporter for governmental hearings which sought to explain why the blast happened, she said in her book.

"The one good thing that came out of this disaster was the campaign initiated by the National Junior Chambers of Commerce which led to putting an odorant into gas so that leaks can be smelled," she stated.

"Thousands of lives have been saved because escaping gas is now easily detectable. I know I am especially alert to that warning aroma whether in my home or in public places. And I like to think my stories helped put it there."