Jean Hollen worked decades as a music teacher, at Chokio-Alberta and other schools in the area.  However, January 16, 1967, found her at home with her first child, Heidi.  Arnie, a teacher, had left for school, and Jean was handling her usual routine when the weather turned rough and a blizzard began to ravage its way throughout the region.

Jean was listening to the radio and knew a Chokio bus was stranded south of town. Since school was cancelled for the blizzard.  But as the day wore on, Arnie didn’t come home.

 Finally she got the word.  Superintendent Burton Nypen was shocked that she didn’t know.

“Didn’t anyone call you?” he asked.  “Arnie is a chaperone on the stranded bus.”

Jean kept listening to the radio, and heard that they were trying to get a snowplow out to the stranded bus.

Heidi was old enough to remember that when Dad was away from home, she sometimes was allowed to sleep by her mother.  She began her campaign early.

“If Dad is gone, I can sleep with you,” she told her mother enthusiastically.

Meanwhile, Arnie had his hands full supervising and encouraging the bus load of students while driver Clayton Kolling made three forays into the storm, twice bringing back blankets and candy for the freezing students.

Arnie coordinated bathroom trips, not allowing students to be outside the bus alone, and then requiring the students to stay right by the bus door. The blowing snow was so fierce a child could have been easily lost.
 
Arnie’s job was made a bit easier as the older girls took the young girls under their wings, and, in a similar fashion, the older boys were mindful of the younger boys.

Jean said Arnie took off his own winter jacket and used it to wrap around some little girls.  Instead of slacks and boots, some girls wore patent leather shoes and tights.

“Arnie made them keep moving.  The students crawled over the seats.  He told them they could not just sit, they had to keep moving. They were very lucky the way that it turned out,” Jean recalled.

Through it all, Arnie was aware that Clayton’s life was in danger.

“Arnie said ‘I didn’t have time to be scared. I couldn’t think about it. You have to do what you can do to survive,’ Jean remembers.

However, Jean says Arnie did get scared after it was all over, thinking of how the outcome could have been disastrous.  Arnie told her, “You couldn’t show the kids you were scared.”

The day’s drama was not over when Arnie walked through the family’s front door about dinner time.  He was met by his pint-sized daughter who was furious that his presence cancelled her bedtime plans.

“Now I can’t sleep with Momma!” she wailed.

Although a teenager at the time, Dean Monson has a good supply of memories about the Chokio Bus Rescue of 1967; both of his own experiences, and the stories his dad, Luverne Monson, told.

“I remember the day.  School got out real early,” he recalls.

“We talked about (the rescue) almost any time there was a winter storm,” Dean said.

“The hero was Clayton Kolling.  If not for him the kids on the stranded bus would have frozen,” he noted.  “How he walked to nearby farms and back, loaded with blankets, and managed to find the bus every time … that was unbelievable!”

Dean was not one of the students on the bus.  His family lived in town.  He and other strong young men were put to work loading a bus with blanket and candy bars  at the school.  This was to be the rescue bus, driven in the caravan by Dean’s father, Luverne Monson.

He remembers watching men work on the Cat, trying to get it started in the bitterly cold weather.

“At first they couldn’t get it to fire, but they finally got it,” he said. “They would have never made it without the Cat.”
Dean remembers his father telling stories about the rescue.

 “My father drove the bus, and couldn’t see the Cat ahead of it.  He kept ‘tapping’ the back of the Cat, so that’s the reason why they chained the two together,” Dean said.

Ultimately, Dean credits the driver of the stranded bus, Clayton Kolling, for his ability to make multiple walks in the blizzard to call for help and bring blankets to the freezing children.

“He was tough as nails,” Dean said.

Having served as Chokio’s  longtime postmaster, Jim McNally had no trouble recalling names when recounting his memories of the Chokio Bus Rescue of 1967.  He even remembered the interviewer,  how many siblings she has, and other details from her family’s relatively short residence in Chokio.  When talking of the rescue crew, he was careful to add, “Your Dad (Larry Stillwell) was there.”

Jim recalls the morning of the surprise blizzard.

“It started out mild, but then the temperature went down bad.  The snow was coming down in balls,” Jim said.  “The superintendent decided we must get the children home.”

Jim remembers that John Berlinger’s bus-full of children spent the night at the Floyd and Dorothy Zimmerman home, but Clayton Kolling’s  bus went into the ditch three miles south of town.

Jim recalls how the men in town gathered to outfit the rescue caravan.

“With a storm, a gas engine couldn’t keep up.  I was in the Federated telephone truck, and that was a diesel,” Jim said.

The (stranded) school bus had no heat, and it was getting pretty cold. They weren’t (all) dressed warmly.  We helped get them out and into the (rescue) bus,” Jim recalled.

Mary Herrera seemed tickled to be asked to share her memories of the Chokio Bus Rescue.  She was quick to explain her memories were limited and possibly inaccurate; yet her comments mirrored so many  of the others shared by people connected to the January 16, 1967 event.

Mary’s family name was Nitzel.  She has a sister Charlotte who was not on the bus that day.  They have an older brother named William.

“I think I was in the sixth grade – age 11 or 12,” Mary recalls.

“All I remember is there were two or three older students, high school age.  All the rest were younger,” Mary said.

“It started to snow before the weather really hit.  Then we were on a bus that went past the Catholic Church.  We dropped off at the Kaleys and Wernsings.  At the Wernsing drop the bus driver told us the weather was pretty bad.  He said we’d take the next turn and head back to town,” she added.

“So the driver took the next left to get us back to school.  He didn’t go very far before the bus slid into the ditch.  It was still morning,” Mary said.

“The driver, Clayton Kolling, said he knew where we were at, and he would get help to get us out of the ditch,” Mary recalled.  “We had to stay on the bus.  We played games and sang songs.”

“It seemed like five or six hours before the rescuers arrived,” she recalled.  “They had four guys on each side with rope.

Mary doesn’t remember much about the ride back to Chokio or the gathering at the school.  She recalls “there was two or three of us who stayed in a home that had a basement with rooms.  They were very gracious to us.”