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

By Ariana Harner and Clark Secrest
A book review by Bill Paul

Seventy years ago on the morning of March 26, 1931, a primitive, wooden-sided school bus set off into a snowstorm to return 20 children to their homes. It wasn't the end of a school day but just minutes into the beginning of the day when two teachers at a little two-room schoolhouse in southeastern Colorado decided to send the children home rather than wait out the storm inside.

In those long-ago days when weather forecasting depended on the rhythms of life rather than readings of barometric pressure or anything as sophisticated as satellite imagery, the teachers had no way of knowing that the worst blizzard in 56 years was beginning to unleash its fury.

Five of the youngsters never arrived home, and the remaining children and their driver experienced a condition so extreme that even from the perspective of nearly three quarters of a century later, anyone involved with school transportation shudders at what occurred. Indeed, the school bus driver, a chap by the name of Carl Miller, didn't make it home either.

The true story of the so-called Pleasant Hills school bus tragedy is told in a new book titled "Children of the Storm." Published by the Colorado Historical Society and Fulcrum Publishing, this 139-page book was pieced together from old newspaper accounts, manuscript collections, archival documents, memoirs and interviews with a handful of survivors, who are now in their 90s. By the time the story had run its course, the incident not only dominated news coverage but prompted President Herbert Hoover to invite one of the survivors to the nation's capital.

Rural Colorado
Set about 175 miles from Denver in southeast Colorado, the story describes rural life in a region where dry land farmers eked out a living. It was an era before highways and roads. No one had electricity and only two-party phone lines existed. The hardy individuals and families residing there tended to live in adobe homes and shacks dug partially into the ground to protect them against the brutal cold that swept down from Canada. It is estimated that the night the children spent in their marooned school bus, the wind chill temperature fell to 105 degrees below zero.

Actually, the vehicle transporting the children was not exactly a school bus. It was a 1929 farm truck that had been fitted with a wooden bus body. It had two rows of facing or perimeter seats. The interior measured about 5 feet wide by 11 feet long. The bus provided no interior heat. Cardboard was used to cover glass windows when they broke, and there was no insulation. Miller received $100 per month to transport the children, a sizeable sum in those days. In the summers, he would remove the bus body and use the truck bed in the fields on his 160-acre farm. The flimsy vehicle had a rear window and five rows of windows on each side. One rear wheel was equipped with a snow chain.

Within minutes of setting off on the journey homeward, Miller became lost and disoriented in the whiteout of a howling blizzard. Within a mile and a half of the schoolhouse, the little bus chugged into a barrow alongside the road and bumped to a halt. The primitive engine died and the bus was marooned with no power to drive out. It was to remain there for 33 hours before outside help arrived.

Here is where this book shines. The authors weave a story of ebbing hope as the children, ranging in age from 7 to 14, fought the elements to survive.

The authors readily admit that conflicting accounts of the ordeal and the fading memories of survivors mean that no one will ever know precisely what happened. What is known for certain is that the bus driver and children made Herculean efforts to remain alive. Fighting lack of sleep and hunger, most of the children remained awake through the long ordeal and participated in the exercise regimen Miller demanded of them. The cold and hypothermia were inexorable though, and gradually some of the youngsters succumbed. When frantic parents finally found the marooned bus, three of the children were already dead and two more had suffered such traumatic frostbite that they would soon die, too.

Media Exploitation
What occurred after the children were rescued has a familiar ring to it: media exploitation. Newspapers - led by The Denver Post and publisher Frederick Bonfils - and radio outlets nationwide quickly reported the news event. The story remained on the front page of the Post for 25 days. Immediately the surviving children were lionized and exploited in efforts to boost circulation and listenership.

In a preview of modern news coverage, one of the children was cited as the "hero" of the tragedy for his efforts to trudge out into the storm and find help. Bryan Untiedt was nominated for the Carnegie Medal, the highest civilian honor in the country. Yet it was a false heroism fabricated by the media. In truth, the storm forced the 13-year-old farm boy back to the hapless bus before he got more than a few yards.

Nonetheless, Untiedt received and accepted an invitation to visit President Herbert Hoover in Washington D.C. Hoover was struggling with his public persona as an inhumane and heartless president who failed to take necessary steps to lessen the effects of the then-emerging Great Depression. "Children of the Storm" contains a photograph of the gangling Unteidt, dressed in an ill-fitting new suit (farm boys of the day did not own three-piece suits) standing next to the President of the United States on the White House lawn.

In a harbinger of a public policy pattern that persists to this day, Colorado state legislators passed a law requiring the installation of telephones in county schools and the storage of blankets and canned foods on all school buses. Lawsuits were also filed. It took two and a half years to settle matters. In the end, surviving families received a grand total of $3,097.50

The tale ends with vignettes of the survivors, how they lived out their lives and how they dealt with their memories of the event and the emotional trauma they experienced during those 33 brutally cold hours. In the ensuing years, a few of them talked freely about the event, some visited the site (where a stone memorial was placed six months after the tragedy), others bottled up their emotions and lived with varying degrees of guilt and lifelong heartbreak. For them, closure never came.

"Children of the Storm" is a riveting tale of 20 children's experiences in a primitive school bus under unimaginably harsh circumstances. Although the likelihood of such an event occurring in the modern school buses of today is remote, the book is a must-read for anyone involved in pupil transportation because it offers timeless insight into children and their reaction to elemental conditions. The 70-year-old photographs of these youngsters show children that could be riding school buses today.

Fulcrum Publishing of Golden, Colo. published "Children of the Storm"; for more information on Fulcrum, visit its web site at www.fulcrum-books.com.