Word: bus
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Hangar C in the Snark compound, a bus disgorges a squad of Strategic Air Command trainees assigned to study the air-breathing missile. Another group runs a test on an 80-ft.-high telemetry antenna whose dish spreads 60 ft. wide. At the Cape fire station, the crew gets a lecture in handling fires that might break out in the unearthly, exotic fuels. In a grey and silver building, one man takes charge of 53 spools of colored wire used to maintain the big IBM 704 impact predictor computer. On the launching pads, workers clamber along the service-tower catwalks...
...Kiss Goodbye. The bright yellow bus, with 46 pupils aboard, was bound for the elementary and high schools in nearby Prestonsburg. There was nothing unusual about the morning beyond cloudy skies, or about the bus and its journey. At about 7 o'clock Driver Jack Derossett, 27, started his usual route through the 75-family coal-mining town of Cow Creek, picked up his regular riders on schedule. Seconds before he was due, for example, James Goble, 12, John, 11, and Anna Laura, 9, the three children of Cow Creek Storekeeper James B. Goble, scooped up their books, kissed...
...Knew in My Heart." For unaccountable reasons (so unaccountable that his friends suspect a heart attack), De-rossett did not slow down. Instead, the bus rammed the wrecker, knocked it 60 ft. The bus itself lurched, swayed, tipped for a moment at the top of the embankment, then slithered through a grove of willow trees into the river. It hung for agonizing minutes in 3 ft. of water-long enough and shallow enough for 13-year-old Bill Leedy to kick open the rear emergency door, push smaller children out, then escape himself. Other passengers frantically rolled down windows...
...coal-mining Floyd County, where sudden tragedy is familiar, word of the accident spread fast. Mountain men assembled to grapple for the sunken bus; Cow Creek residents begged rides or ran through the mud to the river to see which of their children would be coming home again. Mrs. Goble soon discovered that none of hers would, accepted the news with resignation. Said she: "I prayed that at least one might be saved, but I knew in my heart I had lost them...
Fifty-three hours after the accident, the submerged bus was finally hooked 200 yds. from the point where it hit the water. Cables were lashed on by Navy frogmen: two tractors winched the tragic cargo ashore. As the first bodies were carried out, the Rev. Ivan Jones of West Prestonsburg's Assembly of God Church called for a moment of prayer. "Lord strengthen our hearts in this trying time...