Stormy Night

 It was a dark and stormy night (Thank you Edward Bulwer-Lytton).  Well, of course it was dark, it was night.  I was at a sleepover at my friend Mark’s house which is where the stormy part comes in.  We were in our sleeping bags in his back yard when it started raining so we moved inside.  Rain in Fresno in July is weird enough but the precipitation wasn’t the strangest thing to happen that night.  It was July 15, 1976.  As Mark and I listened to the Queen album Night at the Opera over and over again until we got too sleepy to go on, about 40 miles north of us 26 children never came home from school.

            The next morning after we got up and grabbed two bowls of Frosted Flakes, we turned on the TV to watch cartoons or maybe some old black and white horror film; sometimes one of the channels would show the same one Friday night and then again Saturday morning.  But when we switched on the tube there were neither cartoons nor The Murders in the Rue Morgue, there was instead the seeds of a real horror story on the screen.  The image we were looking at was a school bus, something we’d seen a thousand times before that morning without giving it a second thought, but this one was cantered over in a grove of reeds or tule grass, I don’t know which, lit from most likely the spot on a Sheriff’s car, and as empty as a ghost town.

            As Mark and I dropped the needle on Bohemian Rhapsody, 26 children and their bus driver had been kidnapped right off a lonely country road outside of Chowchilla.  The image of that abandoned bus, poorly lit and listing to one side, was far more haunting to me than any murder victim from a movie.  The youngest missing child was 5, the oldest 14.  Just like me.

            Parents of those children, and parents everywhere, must have been haunted by what could have happened.  This was just a few years after the Tate/LaBianca murders and after the Zodiac killer in a letter to the Chronicle talked about how “school children make such nice targets.”

            Thankfully those parents anguish was taken away when all 26 children and their bus driver were found alive in a quarry in Livermore.   Their kidnappers had put them in a buried moving van through a hole cut in the top.  After 16 hours the bus driver, Ed Ray, and some of the older boys used a board to pry open the cover that the kidnappers figured was too heavy to move (thank you Archimedes) and escaped.

            Today, May 18, 2012, Ed Ray passed away at 91.  I understand that many of the “children” from that event visited him in recent days to pay respect to a man who rose to the times and likely saved over two dozen lives.  Ed Ray is a name that will be remembered long after today in all of Chowchilla and at least 26 homes.

The kidnappers, none of which has made parole in the last 36 years and probably never will – there have also not been school bus kidnappings - will not have their names noted here as my way of hopefully starting a trend where all future kidnappers, school or workplace shooters, and serial killers will go to their graves, by whatever means they arrive there, unnamed, unknown, unremembered, and without infamy. 

As a side note, I used to work with a guy who grew up in Chowchilla.  One day we were talking about it and I asked him what it was like during that time.  He said the only things he remembers is all the TV vans in town and walking down an alley past a car that Diane Sawyer was changing in and he got to see her bra.