Ed Ray had to be to survive what he later described as "the worst thing that ever could happen to anybody." He referred, of course, to the hijack of a school bus near Chowchilla, Calif. Ed and 26 children were taken off the bus and jammed into two dark, sweltering delivery vans.
" 'I have grandchildren,' " Ed says he told the men when the vans stopped after 11 hours of driving. " 'I want to see them again.' They didn't even answer me." Ed felt in the grip of a terrible apprehension. Soon after, he and the kids were forced into another vehicle buried four feet underground. "There was fear," he admitted later, "and more than fear. The children asked me to beg the men to let us out, so I begged them. Some of the children were crying and asking for their mamas. One or two of them were howling so much I had to reach over and pinch them. You get 26 of them down in a little hole...but they did good, real good."
Once Ed had conquered his fright and dug the children free of their suffocating prison, Chowchilla had a new town hero. "If anybody had to be there with those kids, it should have been Edward," one mother said. Leathery and sun-scarred, Ray, 55, was weaned on hard tasks. One of seven children of a dairy farmer, he grew up in Le Grand, Calif., a wide spot in the road eight miles from Chowchilla, and graduated from Chowchilla high school. Five brothers and sisters still live within two miles of Ed and his stolid, freckle-faced wife of 34 years, Odessa. They have three grandchildren by two married sons. In his hours away from the bus, Ed works 33 acres of mostly cotton and corn. Odessa is a vault teller in a local bank and likes to bake, garden (roses, vegetables) and freeze fresh fruit. "We haven't lived this past week," she frets. "We've just existed, and the house has really suffered."
During the ordeal neighbors constantly phoned Odessa on the eight-party line. "You'd have thought he was some kind of saint," she says with pride. "Ed is wonderful," agrees his daughter-in-law Sandra, wife of son Glen. "If someone came up to him and said 'I need your shirt,' he wouldn't say anything. He'd just start unbuttoning it."
As for Ed, the first thing he did when he got home was to ask for a piece of chicken and a cola drink. "I feel good," he said, but seemed to be trying to comprehend what had happened. He nervously bit his nails and tears filled his eyes. He learned that Chowchilla would hold a day (Aug. 1) in his honor, but confessed that he was really looking forward to baling his hay. "I'm not a politician who likes that kind of thing," he says, "and I'm not going to ' be no movie star." Odessa concurs. "I just wish," she says, "we had it back where it used to be."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
