Children of the Storm: The True Story of The Pleasant Hill School Bus Tragedy

by Ariana Harner, Clark Secrest

Overview

The story of twenty schoolchildren on the southeastern plains of Colorado, fighting for lives that had just begun... Imagine being one of twenty children, ages seven to fourteen, stranded in a makeshift school bus for thirty-three hours, during the worst blizzard to hit Colorado in over fifty years. The gripping narrative of CHILDREN OF THE STORM leads you through this haunting experience. The morning of March 26, 1931, began with sixty-degree weather and students excitedly running to board Carl Miller's bus for their routine ride to the Pleasant Hill School. By the time they arrived at the pair of forlorn one-room schoolhouses, it was dark, windy, and cold— obvious signs of a spring snowstorm. Soon after, following the teachers' orders to drive the children to a nearby home for safety, Miller lost his sense of direction in the ensuing whiteout and lodged the bus in a ditch. When rescuers found the survivors a day and a half later, the blizzard had taken its deadly toll.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781682754757
Publisher:	Fulcrum Publishing
Publication date:	08/06/2024
Edition description:	Second edition
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Ariana Harner formerly wrote and edited for the Colorado Historical Society (now History Colorado). She received a bachelor of arts from Mount Holyoke College and a master of arts from the University of Denver. Currently, she lives and works in Denver.
​
Clark Secrest is a retired editor and writer, now residing in Southern California. He graduated from the universities of Denver and Missouri and wrote for the Denver Post and the Colorado Historical Society (now History Colorado). He is the author of Hell’s Belles, a crime history of Denver and Colorado.

Read an Excerpt

Foreword
One day: Thursday, March 26, 1931. Three places: the blizzard-swept plains of extreme southeastern Colorado, the palatial mansion of Frederick G. Bonfils in Denver, and the USS Arizona steaming north from Puerto Rico.
Onboard the Arizona, President Herbert Hoover enjoyed the day sailing through what The New York Times described as “slightly rolling turquoise seas in warm brilliant sunshine.” After visits to the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, he was returning home to face choppy economic waters, which he tried to calm by preaching “mobilized voluntary action” as a cure-all for the Great Depression. Such rhetoric failed to impress millions of unemployed Americans who believed that the president was at best inept, at worst inhumane. His advisers urged him to demonstrate his humanity and searched for opportunities that would enable him to do so. Hoover listened because he wanted a second term.
The Denver Post for March 26, 1931, reported frigid tempera- tures in the city and even harsher weather outside of it. Still, the Post proclaimed “’Tis a Privilege to Live in Colorado.” Frederick Bonfils, the paper’s publisher, knew that his readers liked good news, heartthrob headlines, and sensationalism. On March 26 he gave them doses of each: a gangland story, reports of men getting drunk on radiator alcohol, the saga of a sleepwalking boy, and the marital woes of a would-be beauty queen. That he lived in one of the city’s grandest mansions, that he was among Denver’s richest men, and that his paper sold more than 300,000 copies each Sunday was not enough. Good stories made money. Bonfils wanted more.
On the eastern plains of Colorado that Thursday, twenty chil- dren—ordinary children who had likely never been in a mansion or seen a great ship except perhaps at a movie—struggled to keep from freezing to death in a stranded makeshift wooden school bus. Their lives and deaths (such good human stories) were soon caught in the webs spun by Frederick Bonfils and Herbert Hoover, who exploited the calamity without apparent concern for compounding it.
In Children of the Storm: The True Story of the Pleasant Hill School Bus Tragedy, Ariana Harner and Clark Secrest skillfully recount the Pleasant Hill disaster and its aftermath. Many details of the initial event have been told or mistold before. The scope of what happened afterward has not been related until now. Bonfils died in 1933, Hoover in 1964. Some of the survivors of the Pleasant Hill bus tragedy are still alive. Perhaps the truths brought out in Children of the Storm will help both the living and the dead rest in peace.
 
—Stephen J. Leonard Metropolitan State College, Denver
October 1999
 

Table of Contents

• Contents

 
 
 
Foreword............................................................................................. xi
Acknowledgments......................................................................... xiii
Notes to the Reader....................................................................... xv
Preface.............................................................................................. xvii
New Introduction by the Authors........................................ xxiii
Chapter One: The Children of Pleasant Hill....................... 1
Chapter Two: Lost........................................................... 15
Chapter Three: The First Day........................................... 19
Chapter Four: Waiting..................................................... 33
Chapter Five: Blankets and Fried Potatoes..................... 45
Chapter Six: “Ship of Mercy”........................................... 59
Chapter Seven: “Daddy Is Coming”................................. 67
Chapter Eight: And a Hero Is Created............................. 81
Chapter Nine: Going Home............................................. 93
Chapter Ten: Remnants of a Disaster............................ 105
Chapter Eleven: A Political Pawn from the Plains......... 115
Chapter Twelve: Later................................................... 123
Notes................................................................................................. 143
Bibliography................................................................................. 151
Index................................................................................................. 155
About the Authors....................................................................... 163