Review by Martha Quillen
Colorado History – June 2001 – Colorado Central Magazine
Children of the Storm – The True Story of The Pleasant Hill School Bus Tragedy
by Ariana Harner and Clark Secrest
published in 2001 by Fulcrum Publishing
ISBN 1-55591-275-3
ON MARCH 26, 1931, a school bus with 21 students aboard got lost in a blinding blizzard and slid into a ditch out on the sparsely populated plains of Southeastern Colorado — almost in Kansas. By the time the missing school children were found five students and the bus driver were dead.
Authors Ariana Harner and Clark Secrest do an admirable job of telling the tale of this tragedy in a compact 120 pages (plus some very interesting end notes) — complete with pictures, and survivor stories (and in this case, the survivors have added seven decades of experience to their reflections).
The Pleasant Hill school bus tragedy was a media sensation in its day. A thousand mourners attended the public funeral service, even though the largest building in Holly, Colorado — where the memorial service was held — could accommodate only 600. Flowers were sent by the governor, The Denver Post, the Elitch Gardens greenhouses, and numerous other Colorado businesses. Reporters, photographers, a movie crew, and two Colorado National Guard airplanes showed up.
And that was just the beginning. Newspaper readers followed the survivors’ progress in the hospital, and later read about the many gifts and ceremonies that were presented in their honor. President Herbert Hoover wrote the widow of the bus driver and visited with one of the children in the White House.
According to authors Harner and Secrest, this particular media intrusiveness was inspired by the efforts and philosophy of Frederick G. Bonfils, owner of the Denver Post. In an economy gone sour, Bonfils felt tales of survival and heroism distracted the public from their troubles — so his highly influential newspaper led the pack in an already sensationalistic era.
THERE IS, OF COURSE, a touch of irony in writing a book that laments the publishing industry’s crass exploitation of children for the sake of a good story. But the authors’ make their point by showing that the Post’s 1931 coverage wasn’t particularly devoted to facts (unlike their own).
The Post wanted a hero, so it manufactured a hero. The paper wanted a tale of beleaguered survivors joyfully embracing life, so on April 12th it brought the kids and their families to Denver and gave them (with the help of many other Denver contributors) first-class meals, hotel rooms, entertainment, and presents aplenty to enjoy.
This party time in Denver was pretty curious — since the children were still recuperating from painful frost-bite and exposure, and also because the children (coming as they had from a small, interrelated community) ended up publicly celebrating while still in mourning for friends, and in some cases relatives, who were buried on March 31 — less than two weeks earlier.
But despite flagrant sensationalism, some outright fabrications, and a notable degree of insensitivity on the part of the media, the results weren’t all bad. The consequent outpouring of donations from far and near provided doctors, nurses, hospitalization, transportation, emergency and burial funds for hard-working farm families who might otherwise have been financially ruined by such expenses. And a substantial fund was also raised for the widow of the school bus driver, who also lost her eight-year-old daughter on board the bus.
For whatever reason — be it an attempt to make sense of the senseless, or a need for public mourning, or merely sensationalism and voyeurism — tragedy incites curiosity. Be it the Titanic, Oklahoma City, Columbine High School, Jon Benet, or the Pleasant Hill school bus, national post mortems happen. So what makes the newspapers focus on a certain tragedy? What makes the public note one tragedy and ignore the next? Is all this publicity harmful? Exploitive? Obscene? Children of the Storm makes you think about such things.
It also makes you reflect on the differences between how such events were handled in the past and how they’re handled today. And it includes, of course, many of the contentions of the time. Some people felt the school teachers were to blame for sending the bus out in a howling blizzard; and some resented the press for making a hero of one boy who did no more (and no less) than the others.
FOR BETTER OR WORSE, people seem to have a basic need to go over tragedies again and again — perhaps merely in the poignant hope that next time they’ll be able to prevent a similar occurrence. Whether such scrutiny is actually helpful or not, though, Children of the Storm provides an opportunity to reflect on a tragedy with a little less exploitive cruelty than usual. Seventy years have passed, and the teachers, the school board, and the parents are beyond being hurt by remonstrations. Although it would seem that some of the survivors have not entirely recovered to this day, they have added numerous more pressing concerns to their lives. And thus readers can reflect on the “could haves” and “should haves” of this tragedy without encouraging an exploitive public bombardment of the victims.
Yet this story is as stark and heart-wrenching today as it ever was. Young children slowly froze to death while their bus driver desperately searched for a road, a fence, a farm; it was twenty degrees below zero; the wind shrieked across the fields at seventy miles per hour; the visibility was nil.
OLDER CHILDREN, in pain with frostbitten feet and hands, were wracked by guilt because they hadn’t been able to keep the younger children warm. And as for the parents? Here’s a paragraph from the book:
Ernest Johnson, recovering in the Lamar hospital from exposure, wrote to the editor of the Lamar Daily News on April 3. He lamented that after looking for the bus all day Friday, by the time the children were rescued it was too late. “I always told my little son that I would come to him in time of trouble no matter what happened and he kept telling the children, ‘My Daddy is coming.’ They told me that was the last words he said — ‘Daddy is coming.’ Fate kept me from reaching them in time, for he died about an hour before we found them.”
So what can I say?
Authors Harner and Secrest have done a great job at resurrecting this tragedy. With support and pictures from the Colorado Historical Society, they’ve put together an interesting and thought-provoking book, and many readers will likely find themselves fascinated by the events depicted. But somehow in exploring this tragedy, the authors have also (presumably inadvertently) touched upon the idea that maybe we’re all just a little too fascinated by such accounts.
My recommendation? Read the book, and blame the authors for simultaneously appealing to your worst instincts and making you aware of them.
–Martha Quillen
