ONE DAY: Thursday, March 26, 1931. Three places: the blizzard-swept plains of extreme southeastern Colorado, the palatial mansion of Frederick G. Bonfils in Denver, and the USS Arizona steaming north from Puerto Rico.
Onboard the Arizona, President Herbert Hoover enjoyed the day sailing through what The New York Times described as “slightly rolling turquoise seas in warm brilliant sunshine.” After visits to the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, he was returning home to face choppy economic waters, which he tried to calm by preaching “mobilized voluntary action” as a cure-all for the Great Depression. Such rhetoric failed to impress millions of unemployed Americans who believed that the president was at best inept, at worst inhumane. His advisers urged him to demonstrate his humanity and searched for opportunities that would enable him to do so. Hoover listened because he wanted a second term.
The Denver Post for March 26, 1931, reported frigid tempera- tures in the city and even harsher weather outside of it. Still, the Post proclaimed “’Tis a Privilege to Live in Colorado.” Frederick Bonfils, the paper’s publisher, knew that his readers liked good news, heartthrob headlines, and sensationalism. On March 26 he gave them doses of each: a gangland story, reports of men getting drunk on radiator alcohol, the saga of a sleepwalking boy, and the marital woes of a would-be beauty queen. That he lived in one of the city’s grandest mansions, that he was among Denver’s richest men, and that his paper sold more than 300,000 copies each Sunday was not enough. Good stories made money. Bonfils wanted more.
On the eastern plains of Colorado that Thursday, twenty children—ordinary children who had likely never been in a mansion or seen a great ship except perhaps at a movie—struggled to keep from freezing to death in a stranded makeshift wooden school bus. Their lives and deaths (such good human stories) were soon caught in the webs spun by Frederick Bonfils and Herbert Hoover, who exploited the calamity without apparent concern for compounding it.
In Children of the Storm: The True Story of the Pleasant Hill School Bus Tragedy, Ariana Harner and Clark Secrest skillfully recount the Pleasant Hill disaster and its aftermath. Many details of the initial event have been told or mistold before. The scope of what happened afterward has not been related until now. Bonfils died in 1933, Hoover in 1964. Some of the survivors of the Pleasant Hill bus tragedy are still alive. Perhaps the truths brought out in Children of the Storm will help both the living and the dead rest in peace.
—Stephen J. Leonard Metropolitan State College, Denver
This section was adapted from the foreward of Children of the Storm: The True Story of the Pleasant Hill School Bus Tragedy. The book will be available August 6th, 2024. Preorder your copy today.
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