Snowstorms on the Island aren't what they used to be. Back in January of 1961, P.E.I. was hit by several bad storms. One in particular will be remembered by Sterling Burke of Bridgetown for quite a while. In a blizzard that produced drifts up to the telephone wires, Burke, Mrs. Annie MacPhee, a teacher; and 17 students in a school bus from Souris High School were trapped for almost 24 hours in a snow drift on the North Shore.

"The kids had a great night, they sang, slept most of the time", says Burke. Unbeknownst to them, reports of the stranded bus circulated throughout the rest of Canada and the U.S., and even as far as Spain.

Burke, now a carpenter, notes, "there are ten or 15 buses now on the route that I had. " He made a 104-mile round trip through an area encompassing Fortune, St. Charles and Goose River every day.

Storm warnings were out that Friday; the bus left the school at 12:30. Six of the students were let off before the bus fioundered in a drift. The bus had gone out the Hermitage Road, about a mile west of Naufrage, and onto the North Shore Road. Coming back on the Hermitage, the bus was trapped. There wasn't room to turn on the road and by this time (4 p.m.) visibility was so low that Burke had only been able to drive along sporadically. The only thing left was to wait for the plow to come.

"We didn't mind it at first, because we didn't think about it. We waited for the plow to come," recalls Mrs. Helen MacPhee from St. Charles, one of the students on board. "We weren't worried. If it wasn't for Sterling we would have been," she notes, adding that Burke told jokes to pass the time and keep the students' spirits up. "Sterling deserves a lot of credit for keeping his cool." Another pupil, Gladys King from Goose River, echoed the positive attitude among the group. "As far as I was concerned, I knew we'd get out." Someone had taken along a newspaper and a whole crossword puzzle was finished while they waited.

Mrs. Annie MacPhee, Goose River, taught school in Bear River at that time. Burke had picked her up and was taking her home to Monticello when they became stuck. A nearby vacant house was said to be haunted, and Mrs. MacPhee kept the school-children on their toes with ghost stories that night.

Mrs. MacPhee was as optimistic as the rest, but remembers it being so cold that night that the fur on her coat sleeve wwld steam up the window when the heat was on, then freeze onto the window when it went off. "One little fellow from Annandale," recalls Sterling Burke, "crawled in under the seat and slept there for the night."

"They didn't realize we were lost," Mrs. MacPhee says of relatives and friends. When they did find out, "the outside world was more panicky than we were". Mrs. Helen MacPhee notes that the people on the bus didn't think anything of their experience until a week later, when a letter came from Spain commisserating with the parents of the children who had perished!

To make sure there was enough heat, Burke kept the bus running continuously. "I never stopped her. I kept it running all the time. She was banked all the way right up to the hood."

During the bitterly cold night that followed, Burke recalls he "had to get out at the last of it to put papers on the radiator" to keep the engine from getting wet. He had to make frequent trips out the emergency door checking to insure no snow blocked the exhaust pipe.

A plow had got to within a mile of the bus that evening before getting stuck itself, though the group had no way of knowing. It wasn't until 10:30 the next day that another plow managed to reach both vehicles.

It had cleared that morning and Burke set off to the Monticello store, about a mile and a half away. On the way he met the plow and went back with it. An hour later the bus was free.

There was only one gallon of gas left in the bus' 30 gallon tank when they reached the store. "I didn't stop the bus until I got to the store," says Sterling, who was afraid, if stopped, the bus might not start.

The one bad effect the delay had on the children was hunger, soon remedied at the store. "I told them just to get whatever they wanted and I'd pay for it," says Burke.

Phones were out in the area. It was 4 p.m. when the school bus reached Eldon MacKenzie's store at Head of Fortune where a group of parents waited. Burke then went on to finish his route.

Putting in such an unusual night didn't bother Sterling Burke. "We had a great night, the kids sang and slept most of the time." As for being a bus driver? "It was a good job," but, he adds, "kind of hard on the nerves."

Copyright
Waldron H. Leard