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

5 x 8

176 PAGES

PAPERBACK

9781682754757

Ariana Harner 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.

“In late March 1931, newspapers across the country carried the story of twenty children stranded for thirty-three hours in a school bus during a brutal snowstorm on Colorado’s Eastern Plains. A blizzard hit just as school was starting. . . 

“It’s the subject of Children of the Storm . . . by Ariana Harner and Clark Secrest, [who] interviewed the seven living survivors. They’ve done an excellent job of separating truth from newspaper hype and demolishing the seventy-year-old myth of the boy hero. The resulting story of horror and exploitation is far more interesting than the legend.” 

— Sandra Dallas, New York Times bestselling author  

“Fulcrum Publishing has done a welcome service for the Colorado history community by reissuing this scarce and long-out-of-print human drama, Children of the Storm. The book relates the events of late March 1931 when a ramshackle wooden school bus carrying twenty pupils and the bus driver crashed during a killer blizzard in desolate far southeastern Colorado. In the late 1990s, historian Ariana Harner and Colorado journalist/historian Clark Secrest located a handful of survivors, who spoke publicly for the first time about their deathly ordeal—and the resultant exploitation that they did not seek.” 

  —Thomas J. “Dr. Colorado” Noel, Prof. Emeritus of History, University of Colorado at Denver 

"Children of the Storm conjures up a community and a cast of characters, mostly children, facing the great defining tragedy of their lives. Written with a clean, novelistic voice, the story takes us to the heart of our own vulnerabilities in the face of many great forces—an indifferent, sometimes hostile, nature, the self-interested pressures of larger, institutional powers. We become so absorbed in this world, we may not even realize how avidly we’re turning the page."  
— Andrea Dupree, Co-founder and Program Director, Lighthouse Writers Workshop 

"To this day, communities in southeastern Colorado are showing the rest of us how to learn and heal from a near unimaginable tragedy—in this case, a tragedy dating back to the Great Depression. This is essential High Plains history, told with an unflinching eye and an abundance of compassion. "

— Steve Grinstead, co-editor of Western Voices: 125 Years of Colorado Writing