When called on the phone for his memories about the bus rescue, he first referred to them as bad memories.  But then he corrected himself, and said the memories were good for an important reason.

“We got them home,” he said, referring to the community’s successful efforts to retrieve a busload of students from a country roadside during a hard-hitting blizzard.

Roy lived in Chokio with his wife, Rose Ann, and their children, some of whom were school-aged. He worked for the Co-op and was out delivering fuel oil to customers west of town.

“I ran into the storm before reaching Johnson. I made it to three places, and each of them said I should get out of the storm and stay at their homes,” Roy said.  “The last was Charlie Spittle’s place, and  the bus was stalled not far from there.

“I came upon the bus, and talked to Arnie,” Roy recalls.  Arnie Hollen was a teacher assigned to ride along on the bus when there was threatening weather. Clayton Kolling was the bus driver who made three trips on foot to call for help and bring emergency supplies to the bus.

Roy told them he would drive to the nearby farm of his father-in-law, Rudy Luthard, to phone for help.

“I had the window of the truck open, trying to see, when all of a sudden I saw the evergreens of St. Mary’s Catholic Cemetery,” he said.  “I had gone right past my father-in-law’s!”

Roy continued north past the cemetery, and came upon Robert Grossman, who was stalled.   Grossman jumped into the fuel truck with Roy and not too far ahead they came upon Dr. John Busch, the local veterinarian, whose truck was stuck.

“I asked him if he wanted us to try to pull him out, and he said yes, because he had medications in the truck that must not freeze,” Roy said.  They were successful, and followed the doc to Tirevold corner, where Roy joined others stuck at the intersection of the Highway.

At this point, Roy and Robert joined Dr. Busch in his truck.  The two took turns  walking in front of the truck to help the veterinarian keep from running into the ditches.

Finally the trio arrived at the Co-op gas station. “We learned that Clayton had already got to Glen Carlson’s.  We were about froze up. The rescue caravan was just getting ready to leave,” Roy said.

The next thing Roy did was go home and change clothes.

(Roy was listed as one of those contributing to the rescue in the Chokio Review of January 19, 1967. His sister, Audrey Erickson, also tells her storm story in a future blog post.)

One evening, more than a year ago, Julie Carlson was looking for some paperwork in her Texas home when she came across an envelope with a newspaper article from 1967 about the Chokio Bus Rescue.
“My husband never even knew about it, so I gave it to him to read,” she said. 

Coincidentally, her mother, Rose Carlson, was interviewed the next day at her home in Morris, Minn., about the bus rescue. The Glen and Rose Carlson family had three girls on the stranded bus. They also provided meals and lodging for bus driver Clayton Kolling.

“It was the longest day I ever had,” Rose said of that wild winter day nearly 50 years ago.

Julie recalls mild morning temperatures on that day. “It was very warm. We didn’t want to dress as heavily as we usually did.”
 
Julie remembers her dad’s concern about the weather that morning before school.  “We had a barometer on the TV console.  Dad, as a farmer, was also a weatherman.”

She recalls him saying, “The bottom has fallen out of the barometer. You’re going to go to school with everything you own.”

“Mom sewed all of our clothes.  She was an excellent seamstress. I had wanted a corduroy suit like I saw in Seventeen Magazine. It had the blazer and a skirt, fully lined,” Julie said, describing the outfit she wore that day. 

“As it turned out, Julie was very glad to have [worn] it that day,” Rose said.

“I did not want to wear my coat.  I ended up wearing a coat, stocking cap, everything,” Julie remembers.

Not long after school began that day, it was dismissed due to an approaching blizzard.

“They let us out almost immediately.   It seemed to me at the time to be unprecedented that the school should put a teacher on each bus.  I don’t remember there being a teacher on the bus before. We were probably not paying attention to the route,”  Julie said.  She believes the last student off the bus on the way home was Kay Wernsing.

“After he drove into the ditch, the first thought I had was that he [Kolling] would just drive back out.  He tried that, and it didn’t work,” Julie said.  She believes Kolling wasn’t in the process of turning or backing up when the bus got stuck.  “There’s no way he could have turned around on those narrow gravel roads,” she said.

Julie recalls how she and her friend Roberta “Bobbie” Zierke, both sophomores, stepped into leadership roles on the bus once the seriousness of the situation became clear.

“I had babysat for Bob Wade – Connie, David and Maria. It wasn’t surprising they listened.  We’d been bossing them around forever! We didn’t have kids crying and whining, although I think we all cried when the rescue team arrived,” Julie said.

One of the first challenges of their predicament was how the bus was positioned. The front was lower than the back, and the right side lower than the left.

“You could sit on the left side, but if you tried to stand, it was too slippery, so everyone sat on the right side,” she noted.

Second, the children grew hungrier as the hours passed.  “We thought this wouldn’t last long, so we ate our lunches. I don’t remember if everyone had lunches, but I like to think those of us that did shared.  I think that was at about 10:30 a.m.,” she said.

Julie doesn’t remember how they passed the time. “It seems like the boys gathered in the back and the girls grouped up toward the front.   Sort of the natural order of things.” 

After a while, the inevitable happened. The children needed to go to the bathroom.

“We took girls out to the bathroom, a few at a time, four different times,”  she said. “Bobbie and I were getting soaked [from fresh snow melting on them inside the bus]. There was some shelter from the wind on that (right) side of the bus, but not much.”

“It didn’t occur to us that our situation was serious until later in the day,” she noted. “Like usual for a winter day, the light started to drop, and then things seemed worse.  Hopefully we never let on to the younger children what we were thinking,” she said.

She describes the teacher on board, Arnie Hollen, as a guiding adult figure.  “It was a great comfort that he was there, so we weren’t having to be ‘the adults.’  He was calm and reassuring to us.”

Julie’s younger sister Peggy was home with their mother, Rose.  “I don’t think she said anything all day,” Rose recalled.

Their father, Glen, also at home, wanted desperately to aid in the rescue.

“He wanted to go out by himself to try to help.  Mom said, ‘I’ve got three children out in this blizzard.  I’m not going to lose a fourth family member to this!’ Mom was doing a whole lot of cooking and baking.  It’s possible that someone told her the stranded students might be brought to their farm. Talk about a sign of the times.  Can you imagine today having enough food in your home to cook for 30? I’m sure she had enough,” Julie said.

After three walks in the blizzard to summon help, Clayton was at the Carlsons when news of the successful rescue came via telephone.

“He was so exhausted.  We gave him our son’s bed, and Clayton’s feet stuck out over the edge of the bed,”  Rose laughed.

Clayton’s life-saving efforts made a strong impression on Laurie.  “I was in the third grade.  I still have pretty vivid memories of it and will always remember the heroism of our bus driver, Clayton Kolling, who suffered frostbite walking to several farms.  He brought back blankets and candy bars.”

What Laurie remembers most is the rescuers, tied together by rope, leading the rescue vehicles between the ditches. “I also remember the image of the men, 13 of them, I believe, who walked out to us, forming a human chain from fence line to fence line.”

“I think there was a type of Caterpillar rig following behind them, and it towed [the rescue bus] back into town.  The men had scarves tied around their faces, many of them floral patterned, looking like they were borrowed from their wives.  They had icicles on their eyelashes.  It was quite an image,” Laurie said.

Julie said the rescue caravan brought the cold  and hungry students to the west door of the Chokio school, just north of the sixth-grade classroom.

“I remember I had to go to the restroom.  When I got there I looked in the mirror and didn’t know who I was.  Ice was frozen in my hair.  My hair was wild,” she said.   Her boyfriend, the late Brad Munson, had come to the school to see her.  “I wouldn’t let him see me.”

Julie is sure Burton Nypen, the superintendent, was at the door as the students filed in.  “There must be an awful weight on your heart to have to make these kinds of decisions,” she said.  “We used to joke that for a while, if there was a flake of snow in the air, we would be sent home from school.”

In town, Julie and her sister Laurie stayed with good friends, Jim and Pauline Pesek.

Soon after, the Carlsons were among those sought by the media. “I remember the Associated Press called us.  It was national news,” Rose said.  Julie and Bobbie were interviewed via telephone on NBC’s Today Show.

Julie doesn’t remember much about being interviewed.  “We were just glad to be alive,” she said.

Gary and Jane Riba had purchased the Chokio Review just a few weeks before the blizzard of January 16, 1967.

Their plan  for the paper was to include more photos in the weekly newspaper’s coverage of local events.  True to plan, Gary shot, developed and published three photos of the stranded bus in that week’s issue.

Jane wrote three detailed stories about the stranded bus and the rescue of the students, taking up most of the front page. It turned out to be such a big story that national and international media outlets would contact locals for interviews.

On the day of the blizzard, Jane recalls, the typographer and his wife, who served as babysitter for the Riba children, made it to Chokio from their home in Morris, but had to turn around and head for home just before the blizzard hit.

Stranded bus driver Clayton Kolling “made a call that he needed help.  So the townspeople got together,” Gary said. “We knew exactly where the bus was.”  Gary was among the group of rescuers.

“We decided to have two vehicles go to the west edge of the section [in which the bus was stalled] and two vehicles go to the east side of the section. And that’s what we did,” Gary recalled.

“The temperatures were like 30 below, and the wind was around 70 miles per hour, so it probably brought the wind chill to about 70 below,” he added.

Despite the frigid conditions, the rescuers knew another part of the plan was critical to the success of the mission.

“We had ropes on the left and right of the truck and Cat, and two people at a time would go outside and guide each vehicle,” he said.

“We could be out there only two to three minutes before we needed to switch off,” Gary remembers.  He suffered frostbite  on his wrists.  Over the years, he has noticed his lungs “don’t like the cold.”

Gary recalls that the tractor and the telephone truck (in which he was a passenger) arrived a bit before the Cat and the backup bus.

“We gave blankets and candy to the kids when we arrived,” he said.

When the backup bus arrived, the children were transferred from the cold, damp bus to the warmer one. On the way back to town, the drivers were able to follow the tracks made by the vehicles on the way out to the stalled bus.

“It  started to drift in, but they could see enough ,” he added.

Gary said the relative youth of most of the rescuers helped the situation.  “When you’re young,  you look at it as a challenge. You gotta work at it to get ‘em.  Friends of ours had children on the bus.  You HAVE to get there.  It was quite an adventure.”

After the auspicious start to their newspaper career in Chokio, life quickly returned to normal.

Even then Chokio was shrinking and advertising was down, Gary said. They kept at it two and a half years, supplementing their income with Gary driving bus and Jane cutting hair. Later the Herman paper made an offer to purchase the newspaper and the Ribas sold the Chokio Review.

 Roger Amborn was the only bus driver to deliver his entire busload of children to their respective homes after school was dismissed on the day of the Bus Rescue. 

It was slow going as he carefully negotiated the route northeast of Chokio. He was one of the youngest drivers at age 26. His youthful strength came in handy as he carried the youngest two of the Earl Adolphson children through deep snow to their front door, with the other siblings huddled closely behind him.

Getting himself to safety was his next challenge.  When he left Adolphsons,  he drove south a mile then turned west until he hit the tar road.

“I could have gone north one mile to our farm, but I couldn’t see,” Roger recalled.

“Upon turning south on the tar, the bus motor quit and the wind pushed the bus down the tar road past the Melberg home. He did not see the house as he passed by,” Julene noted. The heater was no longer working.

“The bus was off the road a bit, south of the Earl Melbergs farm. I decided I knew where I was.  I walked north half a mile.  I could see a fence line for a little bit. For a while I walked backwards (facing away from the storm) because my eyes were froze shut.  I hit something that knocked me.  It was Melberg’s mailbox,” he said.

“When I pounded on the door, (Melberg) grabbed me and said, ‘Where the heck have you been?  Everyone is looking for you!’”

Roger didn’t know that anyone was looking for him. Neither did his wife, Julene.  She taught second grade, and was in town for the duration of the storm.  She saw her students safely off to their in-town “snow homes,” as pre-arranged.

It wasn’t until Roger was known to be safe at the Melbergs that she learned of his long ordeal in the storm.

“I didn’t know where Roger was,” Julene mused. “I didn’t know he was missing!”