Children of the Storm

""In late March 1931, newspapers across the country carried the story of twenty children stranded for thirty-three hours in a school bus during a brutal snowstorm on Colorado's Eastern Plains. A blizzard hit just as school was starting. . . ""It's the subject of Children of the Storm . . . by Ariana Harner and Clark Secrest, [who] interviewed the seven living survivors. They've done an excellent job of separating truth from newspaper hype and demolishing the seventy-year-old myth of the boy hero. The resulting story of horror and exploitation is far more interesting than the legend."" -- Sandra Dallas, New York Times bestselling author ""Fulcrum Publishing has done a welcome service for the Colorado history community by reissuing this scarce and long-out-of-print human drama, Children of the Storm. The book relates the events of late March 1931 when a ramshackle wooden school bus carrying twenty pupils and the bus driver crashed during a killer blizzard in desolate far southeastern Colorado. In the late 1990s, historian Ariana Harner and Colorado journalist/historian Clark Secrest located a handful of survivors, who spoke publicly for the first time about their deathly ordeal--and the resultant exploitation that they did not seek."" --Thomas J. ""Dr. Colorado"" Noel, Prof. Emeritus of History, University of Colorado at Denver Children of the Storm conjures up a community and a cast of characters, mostly children, facing the great defining tragedy of their lives. Written with a clean, novelistic voice, the story takes us to the heart of our own vulnerabilities in the face of many great forces--an indifferent, sometimes hostile, nature, the self-interested pressures of larger, institutional powers. We become so absorbed in this world, we may not even realize how avidly we're turning the page. -- Andrea Dupree, Co-founder and Program Director, Lighthouse Writers Workshop To this day, communities in southeastern Colorado are showing the rest of us how to learn and heal from a near unimaginable tragedy--in this case, a tragedy dating back to the Great Depression. This is essential High Plains history, told with an unflinching eye and an abundance of compassion. -- Steve Grinstead, co-editor of Western Voices: 125 Years of Colorado Writing