Curt Zimmerman and Marcia DeNeui are brother and sister.  Their parents,  Floyd and Dorothy Zimmerman, have passed away.  Both Curt and Marcia have pleasant memories of how their parents welcomed a busload of children and the bus driver, John Berlinger (featured in a recent blog post).

 A surprise blizzard hit the region, bringing below-zero temps, low to no visibility and fierce winds on Monday, January 16, 1967.

“It was snowing outside, and they let us out early,” Marcia said. “The wind was up.”

 After school was dismissed early in the school day, the buses tried to deliver children home.  Only one bus delivered home  all of its children that day. Three buses turned back to the school and one was stranded for seven hours before a rescue team reached them and brought them to safety.

“Our farm was 3 miles north and 4 ¼  miles west of Chokio,” Curt said.  “Our bus driver was John Berlinger.  We got within a mile and a half to two miles east of the farm, and when the bus turned west, we couldn’t see.”

Curt and some of the older  boys took turns walking alongside the bus to guide the driver, who watched through the open bus door, all to keep the bus safely on the road.

The serious nature of their situation was felt throughout the bus.

“Yeah, could feel the tension.  The boys were outside leading the bus and we all had our heads to the windows watching the boys,” Marcia said. “And we didn’t even know about the bus that was stranded.”

Marcia said that when the bus rolled into the Zimmerman farmyard , the bus driver “shut it down as if to say ‘we’re not going anywhere.’”

After being welcomed to stay, John called the school to let their location be known, Marcia said. Then the task became providing hospitality to the stranded and potentially scared children.

“It was exciting at first,” recalls Curt.  “It is a big old farmhouse, so we had room.  I remember the piles of shoes on the floor.  Piles and piles of shoes!  The coats were all heaped on the bed.”

“There were 27 kids,” Marcia recalls.  “There were a lot more kids on the bus then than there are now.”

“That’s a lot of kids!  Today you might wonder how you could feed that many, but back then people had a full pantry,” Curt said.

Coincidentally, a traveling frozen food truck had stopped at the farm earlier in the day, and Dorothy stocked up on wieners, ice cream and other food.

In addition to all that food available for dinner, breakfast included pancakes, eggs and sausage.
“We didn’t suffer,” Curt quipped.

The boys congregated in Curt’s room, where they entertained themselves playing Penny Ante with a pie tin of pennies.

“I don’t think we “played to keep,” he said.  There was story book time.  “The older kids helped a lot.”
Marcia likewise had all the girls in her room.  Five slept crosswise on her bed.  They were impressed with the feather tick on Marcia’s bed.

“They thought that was the greatest thing,”  Marcia said. “It was kind of like one big party. Everyone got along.  The older students were very helpful to our parents.  None of the little ones cried.”

When it was bedtime, all the boys were in Curt’s bedroom.  “Some of the boys were pretty young, so the older boys helped them out and got them settled,” Curt said.  “The little ones were a bit worried [being away from home], but it all worked out.  We had it pretty nice.”

Pretty nice, especially compared to the students on the stranded bus south of Chokio.

“Other kids (on the stranded bus) were doing exercises. Their bus stopped.  The bus driver, Clayton Kolling, was a hero.  He could have perished making the trips for help.  That was a scary time,” Curt said.

Tuesday morning the blizzard had stopped and roads were being cleared.  

“Parents started to show up,” Curt said.

Curt recalls that in the late 60s the highway department didn’t have the modern rotary-style snow plows.

“They pretty much just cut through drifts.  It wouldn’t take much of a snow event to plug them up again,” Curt explained.

Parents of the overnight-guest children were effusive in their thanks to Floyd and Dorothy Zimmerman.

“They were small farmers, a few cattle, hens, sheep.  We didn’t farm a lot of acres,” Curt said of his parents.  “They were very humble, small-town people; very generous and willing to share.”

The parents of children who stayed overnight gave the Zimmerman couple a pair of sweaters as a token of their appreciation, Marcia said.

“They wore those sweaters for many years,” Curt said.  “They wore them until they were practically worn out. Mom and Dad felt very proud of them.”

Three of the many men listed as part of the rescue team are Ordell Ritter, Gene Grossman and Dale Anderson.  The first two were recently interviewed, and some of their comments are printed here.  Dale has passed away, but his brother, David, graciously recounts his memories for this post.
 
Ordell Ritter

Ordell was in town when the blizzard hit, so  he joined with the other men in town on the rescue bus.  They took turns walking to guide the bus and keep it out of the ditches. He described how the tractor and the phone truck  went to the stalled bus by way of the Wernsing road while the backup bus,  led by the Cat, went a different route, meeting at the stranded bus.

“Clayton had made a couple of trips to get help.  He ended up a mile east at the Glen [and Rose] Carlson farm,” Ordell recalls. He also described how the entire group made it back to Chokio, where the school had a meal waiting.
Ordell said, “Everything turned out good.  We all made it back.  We were young enough.”
 

Gene Grossman

Gene retired in 1999 after working 33 years for Federated Telephone in Chokio.  It was still the day of party lines in rural areas, yet their service vehicles were set up with mobile telephone equipment.  In the days long before cell phones, it’s no wonder the phone truck was a key part of the rescue plan.

Gene, of course was in the phone truck along with Gary Riba and Roger Gerdes.  The phone truck was tethered to  the tractor that led it.  The men took turns walking in front of the tractor, guiding it down the road and away from the ditches.

“Everybody got cold,” Gene said. 

Because of the phone equipment on site, the team was able to keep in touch with the County Sheriff’s office in Morris.  The rescue caravan made it safely back to the school where, Gene said, “They fed everyone.”

Gene mentioned the astounding international media coverage of the rescue.

“I had a classmate in Germany at the Army Service Station.  He heard the story and got in touch with me.”
 

David Anderson

David and his wife were both home with the young kids when the storm hit.  He had been doing chores for his dairy cows and sheep.

“The barn doesn’t freeze if livestock is in it,” he said. In the home, they were kept warm by an oil-burning stove.

David said his brother Dale Anderson had “quite an experience being on the rescue team.”

“The temperature started at 55 degrees in the morning and it had fallen to 20 below zero when they got the children back to the school,” David recalls.

John Berlinger laughed when someone used the term “neat” to describe the story of the events of January 16, 1967, when a fast-hitting blizzard made it impossible for Chokio Public School to get all its students home safely that day.

“It wasn’t ‘neat’ then,” John said, referring to the day when the well-being of a great many students depended on the wisdom and courage of a great many adults.

At age 21, John was the youngest bus driver for the school.  “I was out of the service in March and started farming.  Bus driving was a source of supplementary income,” he said.

The morning of the surprise blizzard, once the drivers brought their busloads of students to the school, the drivers gathered for a regular meeting.

“When we got out it was good visibility, with the sun shining. We had no clue what was coming.  Usually, if there was a storm forecast, we would have an hour or two before it arrived,” John said.

In the day, buses were not equipped with communication devices; not even the AM/FM radios which would transmit messages from the Sheriff’s Department in Morris via KMRS Radio.

“I had no nothing.  I was just on my own,” he noted.  Although the bus driven by Clayton Kolling had a teacher, Arnie Hollen, along, John’s bus did not have an assisting teacher on board.

“I was able to drop off one… two… three families,” he said, mentally ticking through the list of those children on his route.  John  remembers there were 15 families served by his route.

“We barely got out of town five miles when it really hit.  We couldn’t see nothing,” he added.

John said he had gotten three families of children “dumped off,” when he could no longer see the hood of his bus. He asked one of the older boys to walk alongside the open bus door to help guide the bus and prevent it from going into the ditch.

“I couldn’t see for the last mile. I just kept going as far as I could go,” he recalls.

Finally he pulled into the driveway of the Floyd and Dorothy Zimmerman farm.

“I limped the bus into the driveway and the bus engine got wet. That was as far as the bus went. I was gonna stop anyway,” he said.

The Zimmermans welcomed them all, fed them dinner, and provided a place to lie down in the large farmhouse.   He thinks there were 25 children as guests.

“No one could get to sleep.  They were homesick, so we had to help them call their parents on the party line, which was often busy.  The children had to wait until the snowplow came through,” he added.

Once the roads were cleared, parents came to the Zimmerman farm to pick up their children, John said.

“Everything turned out fine.  That was the main concern,” John summarized.  “Something like that will probably never happen again because of better communications and improved weather forecasting abilities.”

John is in a position to know.  This fall he began his 51st year driving bus for the school. 

(Ramona Self is a member of the Almond Sr. and Betty Drone family, sister to the three individuals featured in the adjacent  post. Of the six children who were on the bus, two have passed. Ramona is the last of the group to share her memories for this blog.)
 
 Ramona Self seemed surprised at how emotional she became while calling up memories of the Chokio Bus Rescue.
 She wasn’t the youngest nor the eldest member of her blended family on the bus that  day. Perhaps it is because she was at the age of 8, in the 3rd grade, and able to understand enough about the situation to understand its import, yet not old enough to put the event in perspective.

Ramona recalls that the roads near the family’s farm home were dirt roads, which could make travel difficult.  “It got kinda rough going at times during the winter.”

“I remember it being quite cold that morning,” Ramona says.  Ramona remembers being “kinda glad” that the students were being sent home not long after arriving at school.

“They got us on the bus.  Unfortunately I was wearing a dress,” Ramona said. “We dropped off a few children, and then the bus just conked out.”

Ramona said that when the bus heater went out “it started getting quite chilly. The bus driver [Clayton Kolling] told us to stay on the bus, that he will walk  to a farmhouse.”

Later, the need to go to the bathroom made uncomfortable moments as students filed outside in groups to find relief.
Ramona says she was aware that older students were writing “wills,” or notes to their parents.  “I didn’t want to do that because I didn’t want it to come true.”

Instead, Ramona remembers talking to her older siblings about her worries.  “They said, ‘Don’t worry, they’re coming to get us.’”

“I tried not to bug them. They kept things on the “up” side, by chatting.  I was wondering what was happening and when the driver would be back.”

Ramona recalls that when Kolling returned to the bus from his first foray, he told the waiting students he had reached a farmhouse and called for help.   “Help is on the way,” she remembers him saying and candy bars and blankets were distributed among the students.

“The wind was blowing terribly,” she said.

When the rescuers arrived, she was happy to see that her step-father, Almond Drone Sr., was part of the team.
“They had blankets, hot chocolate, and they got us transferred to the other bus, which was warm,” Ramona said.

Upon arriving at the school, Ramona wanted to change out of her damp clothes.  She doesn’t know how clothes were available, but she recalls the relief of changing into dry clothes.

She also remembers someone making a public statement giving God thanks for the safety of the students and rescuers.

Later all six children and their father/stepfather Almond Drone Sr., stayed in one home in town together.  To this day, Ramona remembers what the home looks like and can describe it easily.

The Chokio Bus Rescue story had a mystery built inside it.  When you read the transcript of the Chokio Review, the headline refers to 29 children.  The list of students on the stranded bus provide names for only 27 students.  Where are the two missing children? They are Starr and Lois, members of the Almond and Betty Drone family.

The power of the internet solved the mystery.  Research on the Drone family name yielded a series of interrelated obituaries that provided the answers.  By studying the names and relationships it was determine which children of the blended family might have been of school age in January of 1967.

So it was that the Almond Drone Sr. family had seven school-age students enrolled in Chokio Public School that year. The family, originally from Staples, Minn., lived south of Chokio.

“Dad worked for the Northern Pacific railroad.  He took a job at Morris, Minn.  He was railroad foreman from Morris to St. Cloud,” Bruce explained.

They were the largest family on Clayton Kolling’s bus route.  Six of the children were on the bus that day. Bruce Drone was home, but the phrase “safe at home” might have been stretching it a bit.

He had recently been hospitalized for appendicitis, and still had drainage tubes extending from his abdomen.  The day of the blizzard the tubes malfunctioned and fluid built up in his abdomen.

“Mom called the doctor, but she couldn’t get me in because of the blizzard,” he said.

“Dad got as far as Chokio.  He joined the rescue team and stayed in town overnight,” Bruce said.

The next day a snowplow cleared the route  to the Drone farm nine miles south of town.  “Dad was right behind the plow,” Bruce said.  Then Bruce was taken back to the hospital in Morris, where he was re-admitted.

The Drone family children who were on the stranded bus included Ramona, Dale “Rusty,” Almond, Jr., Norman, Starr and Lois.
Norman recalls that the morning of the bus rescue it was cloud and storming.

“At 9 a.m. at school we were told ‘Get ready to go home,’” Norman recalls.

Almond Drone, Sr. made it from Morris to Chokio on the train, where it stopped.

“Then Dad helped with the rescue,” Norman added.

Memories of the long-ago rescue are hazy in Starr’s mind, but there are parts she recalls. “I remember we (older children) were writing notes to family, thinking we weren’t going to make it.”  Starr was 13 and in the 7th grade.

“We worried about the little ones. We helped keep them calm and warm.  We told them everything would be OK.”

She recalls bus driver Clayton Kolling as “pretty heroic.”

“It was scary when he left to go get help. He had to go through the deep snow, and walk along the fence, and bring stuff back to us.

One thing Starr does remember is what a fun year she had at Chokio Public School, and how nice the town was.

“It was a fun time being in Chokio.  I just really liked the entire town.”

Jim Erickson was farming south of Chokio. On the day of the blizzard he was taking care of their youngest, Dean, and watching for the men from Rural Electric to arrive at the farm to do some work.

Audrey Erickson was working at the bank in town and had picked up their daughter Janet, 9, and a friend of Janet’s, along for a sleepover.

“On the way home she couldn’t see and ran into the ditch,” recalls Jim. 

“That was a dumb venture, I tell you,” Audrey jokes.  “But I wanted to get home!” After getting stuck, Audrey assessed the situation.

“We had just passed a corner and I knew that family had a car sitting on the end of the driveway,” she said.  They got out of their stalled car and began walking to that car.  To protect the children, Audrey opened her coat and the two girls walked behind and on either side of her, using the panels of the coat to break the wind and protect their faces.

Relieved to find the neighbors’ car unlocked, they piled in long enough to catch their breaths.  Once rested, they walked about a block through deep snow to the neighbors’ farmhouse.  Even as the intrepid trio stood at the farm’s garage, the family inside could not see them. In clear weather, their presence would have been noticed immediately.

Audrey’s heroic use of her coat to protect the girls resulted in severe freezing of her legs. Jim heard later that the Rural Electric Association men who worked on their farm that morning took refuge in Artichoke Lutheran Church.

(Audrey Erickson is sister to Roy Erickson.)

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!”