The Day a School Bus Vanished

After 25 years, what sticks most in my memory are the moments of dark comedy. The first call came into the San Francisco bureau of the Associated Press late in the night. A tipster, or “stringer,” was on the line, talking rapid-fire to my supervisor about how a school bus had turned up near a country ditch, and how the children and driver all had vanished without a trace, as though they had been zapped up by a spacecraft or something. She hung up on him.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“A drunk, I think,” she said.

There were only two of us working in the bureau. I was 20 years old, there for a three-month stint as vacation relief, a college boy from Fresno happy to be out of the San Joaquin Valley and taking a first whiff at what seemed like the journalistic big time.

The telephone rang again.

“Don’t hang up,” the stringer began again.

We started working the phones. A secretary at the Dairyland Union School District office confirmed the details: A bus had been found stashed in the bamboo beside the Berenda Slough outside town, hours after it was to have returned 26 children from a summer school swim party. As she spoke, I could hear a crackling sound in the background. An electrical storm, she explained, had pushed in over the valley, adding to the freakishness of this night, July 16, 1976.

Within a couple of hours I was on my way to Chowchilla, flying over the Altamont Pass in my old yellow pickup. I was sent for two reasons: I was available, and also they figured my valley connections might come in handy. In truth, I had never been to Chowchilla before. To me it was just one more exit heading north on Highway 99, after Madera, before Merced.

As I drove I watched the lightning strikes flicker across the valley floor and listened to the radio news broadcasts, spreading the word about the bus mystery. I arrived in the early morning hours. There were maybe four other reporters already at the police station, receiving updates from an admittedly baffled sheriff.

He was dressed in a flannel shirt, bluejeans, work boots. Deputies kept popping in to announce that yet another television crew was on its way. They were coming from everywhere--Los Angeles, New York, London, Tokyo. The sheriff said he needed to go home for a break. He had been up through the night, and it was now almost sunup.

He returned a short while later. Gone were the old shirt, jeans and work boots. He strode toward the firehouse that had been converted into a “media center” dressed in a black suit cut in a Western style, a bolo tie, polished black cowboy boots and, as I recall, a gray Stetson. From his hip hung a pearl-handled pistol. There was a new sheriff in town.

The day that followed is now something of a blur in my mind. It was spent knocking on the doors of frightened parents, pursuing tips about witnesses who may or may not have seen strange vans casing the countryside, chasing phantoms. In fact, there was nothing much new to report. The town was overwhelmed with cameras and reporters. I recall a radio reporter coming under heavy fire from the locals after they overheard him describing Chowchilla as a “dusty farm town.”

I was out at the abduction site when the bulletin came. The children and bus driver had been found safe in Livermore, 100 miles or so to the east. They had dug their way out of a buried truck trailer. Their kidnappers--three harebrained idlers from wealthy families on the San Francisco Peninsula--had left them there to make a ransom demand. The kidnappers couldn’t get through, however, because the lines into the Chowchilla police station were busy, swamped by calls from reporters, psychics and assorted others with hunches and theories to share.

Some 30 hours into their ordeal, the children were brought back--oddly enough, by bus. Townspeople cheered as the charter pulled into a parking lot behind the firehouse. I remember a hush as the first little ones stepped down from the bus. Then the cameras crowded in closer and flashbulbs started exploding. One father exploded and took a roundhouse swing at a television cameraman.

That punch--and all it represented--would stick with me, one of those moments that can open eyes and shape a person.

Ed Ray, the bus driver, was the star of the press conference that night. A squat man in coveralls and crew cut, he told the story of the abduction by masked gunmen and the despair that fell over the hostages in their makeshift dungeon.

“They were crying,” he said at one point, speaking in the thick twang that migrated into the valley during the 1930s.

A reporter interrupted. In a heavy British accent, he asked:

“Were they ohl?”

The bus driver looked at this man like he was nuts.

“Nah,” he said, “they were just little kids.”

“No, no, I mean, were they ohl crying?”

And now 25 years have passed, plus a week or two. And I am seated at a booth in the coffee shop that, then as now, was the place to go in Chowchilla for something to eat. This is the first time I have been back since 1976. There’s a new subdivision outside town, near a shopping center, and some antique shops scattered through downtown. That’s about it for changes.

The 25-year anniversary has produced a round of media interest in the case. I am picking through a few stories now as I eat my lunch. They are not much different from previous anniversary pieces, rolled out every five years after the busnapping. They tell how some of the children went on to lead happy lives, how a few took hard turns. Some of the victims, grown now with kids of their own, express a reluctance to revisit the incident. Those who do mention lingering fears of buses, strangers.

“We had a lot of therapy afterward,” a woman who was 5 years old at the time says in a San Francisco Chronicle story, “but I still have these dreams that happen around every July.”

Inevitably, they track down Ed Ray, and he obliges with recollections about the abduction and thoughts about the life terms given to the kidnappers. Ray, now 80, “rarely speaks about that frightening day,” I read in the Fresno Bee, “. . . unless when he’s asked about it.”

I look up from this clipping and take another peek at the old man seated at the restaurant counter. He is slouched on his stool, sipping coffee from a cup that he holds in both hands. A few minutes ago, I caught him shooting a sideways glance my way as I scribbled something in my notebook.

Someone had told me I would find Ed Ray in this coffee shop, and I would bet my boss’ paycheck that this was him. There was a time when I would have vaulted across the restaurant to drag from Ray whatever comments I could. Twenty-five years ago, in fact, in a firehouse overflowing with reporters from all around the world, we all had hung on his every word.

Now it’s strange. I can’t think of a single thing to ask the man. I gather my clippings and notes and rise out of the booth. He sees me coming his way, straightens up in his seat, as if bracing himself. I give him a slight nod as I walk past him and move right on out the door. Let him drink his coffee in peace. The way I figure it, 25 years is a long time to be held hostage by a newspaper story.