BY KRISTIN BEUSCHER
OF PASCACK PRESS
WESTWOOD, N.J.—An April Fool’s Day prank went too far in 1958, prompting the evacuation of Westwood High School.
In those days before the new regional school was built on Ridgewood Road in the Township of Washington, the high school was located at Third Avenue and Mill Street in Westwood, now the location of condominiums.
On April 1, 1958, Principal Maurice Coppens found among his morning mail a handwritten note stating that a bomb would go off at 1 p.m. The word bomb was spelled “bom,” and the letter was signed “Your Enemies.”
Principal Coppens called the Westwood police. A team of police officers, many of them off-duty, and firefighters came to investigate. The men were called by telephone, as opposed to using the fire or air raid siren, in order to avoid alarming the residents.
Police Chief John Lindemann notified the county of the threat and requested a bomb squad, but reportedly was told the problem was a local one.
The kids returned from their classes to their homerooms and were told about the bomb threat. Although such threats are all too familiar to us in 2019, what followed next would be inconceivable in this day and age. Students and teachers alike began searching for the weapon in desks, closets and lockers before finally being instructed to vacate the building. They followed fire drill procedures, filing out to the street.
Starting at 12:15 p.m.—45 minutes before the threatened explosion—a search team methodically scoured the empty two-story building, going from room to room and looking in every locker, desk, cabinet and closet for any explosive device. The search team included 20 firefighters, eight police officers, the principal, assistant principal, assistant superintendent, and school custodians. They found nothing. The search was discontinued at 1:40 p.m., at which time the students returned to their classes. They had to stay in school until 3:30 to make up some of the lost time.
The Associated Press picked up the story and made light of it.
“Police and firemen searched through Westwood High School for a ‘bom’ yesterday, but they didn’t even find a bomb.”
The Herald News out of Passaic ran the story under the headline, “Westwood High School heeds a poor speller.”
After the incident, the Westwood Police Department’s attention turned toward identifying the person responsible for causing so much trouble.
Since the note was handwritten, police compared it with handwriting samples from each of the school’s 973 students. When the field was narrowed to two suspects, officers sought help from the state police handwriting analysis laboratory at Trenton.
By the end of April, the police had identified the author of the bomb threat based on the handwriting on the note. A 15-year-old female student from the school was arrested and charged with the crime. While her name was withheld from any news reports due to her being a teenager, police did note that she had no criminal record. Once in custody, the girl was taken to the Edna B. Conklin Welfare Home in Hackensack as a juvenile offender.