Scars linger years after tragic Lake Chelan school bus crash

WENATCHEE — November 26, 1945.

For people who lived in the Lake Chelan Valley at the time, it’s one of those defining dates. Like when President Kennedy was assassinated. Everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing when they learned that a Chelan school bus with 20 children went into the lake.

Fifteen of the children and their young driver — just home from the war — drowned in the icy waters that snowy Monday morning, the first day back to school after Thanksgiving break.

Five other students and a woman catching a ride to town for a dentist appointment made it to shore after escaping through a broken window as the bus sank into Lake Chelan’s deep waters.

The tragedy touched everyone in the Lake Chelan Valley. About 700 people attended a memorial service for the victims. Students raised money for a monument with the names and ages of those who died. A small park was built, and the monument was erected at the site where the bus went into the water, about five miles up the South Lakeshore Road.

Some of the nine families who lost children left Chelan, perhaps because of the fatal crash. But some remained, and raised their other children there despite the lake that served as a constant reminder of their loss.

In the 65 years since the tragedy, most — and perhaps all — of the parents of those children have died. But their sisters and brothers — even if they weren’t yet born or were too young to remember the event — still carry the memory of that day.

“I grew up in the shadow of that bus accident,” said Marci Hale, who has moved back to the home on Chelan’s South Lakeshore Road where she grew up.

Hale was born after her brothers, Douglas, 8, and Stuart, 6, were taken by the lake, just down the road from her home. It was just nine days before Stuart’s seventh birthday.

Hale is certain she was only born because of the accident. “My mom and dad had already had their family,” she said.

The Asklund family, too, stayed on Lake Chelan’s south shore. Their home was less than 10 feet from the lake that claimed 11-year-old Lewis — who was called “Louie” — and Barbara, 8.

Marybeth Asklund, like Hale, was born after her brother and sister died. She said she has no idea whether her parents would have had her or her younger brother, Roger, if they hadn’t lost their two oldest children, although her parents did have a surviving son and daughter who were too young to be on the school bus that day.

This was a time before grief counseling, when people who suffered losses — even tragic ones — were expected to deal with it themselves, and get on with their lives.

It was also a time in our history when loss of life seemed almost pervasive. World War II had just ended, and many families had lost sons in the war.

Still, even Berniece Asklund, who her children describe as reserved, couldn’t always be stoic.

Marybeth Asklund remembers once, perhaps 20 years after the bus accident, when she and her mother were driving home, past the memorial on the lake.

“When we drove down through the rock cut, there were people camping at the monument. She rolled down her window and started screaming at them,” Asklund remembered. “When we got home, she called the sheriff.”

It was out of character for her mother, she said.

But, “To us, that was Louie’s grave. He was never recovered.” Barbara was one of the five children found inside the bus.

Asklund and her sister and brothers still bring flowers to leave at the monument on Memorial Day. So does Hale. It’s a tradition they carry on mostly for their parents, who perhaps never really got over the loss of the children they sent to school that snowy November day.

Lives of surviving children shaped by tragedy

Nine families lost children that day. Six of them lost two children. But only Roger and Elizabeth Hale lost their only two.

So naturally, when Marci Hale was born, everyone wanted her to survive, and thrive.

“I was everybody’s kid. I was spoiled rotten. Royally,” Hale said, cheerfully.

She said she was in her 20s before she realized why the whole neighborhood seemed to take an interest in her every accomplishment.

Hale was schooled at home until she was in the fourth grade. When her mother finally decided that her musically gifted child needed to be in the school band, she refused to send her on the bus. Instead, Hale lived in town, with the pastor’s family, and for a time with an elderly woman and her blind cat.

She did ride the school bus briefly, in the eighth grade, she said.

But her upbringing was anything but typical.

“I was raised at home, completely sequestered with adults. It took years to get past that. Years and years and years,” she said.

Although she was an only child, Hale was also the little sister to two brothers whose memories were so strong, she grew to know them.

“I was raised with them being here, in spirit. Mom talked about them very, very freely. I think it was her way of surviving,” she said. “People would be shocked by the way my mother would talk about Douglas and Stuart, like I should have known them.”

In a way, she did get to know them. “Douglas would have been a baseball star. He could throw a baseball, and it would just whiz. And Stuart, he was a practical joker. He tied knots in my parents’ pajamas,” Hale said, describing the brothers she never met.

Her parents eventually divorced, and Hale said it was tough when her dad left. Her mother — who still wasn’t used to setting a table for three — had to start setting a table for two.

But on top of being completely spoiled and protected by her mother — who later remarried and became Elizabeth Parr — Hale also felt she never quite filled the hole that the tragedy left in her parents’ lives.

“Basically, I knew I was the replacement child, and I was completely inadequate,” she said.

Hale believes her mother never got over the tragedy. “She never let go. Never, never, never. Her whole desire was to die and go to heaven and be with her boys,” Hale said.

But, she said, while her mother never let go of her sons, she also never let go of her daughter, until she suffered from dementia before she died.

Unlike the Hales, Walt and Berniece Asklund rarely talked about the bus crash that killed Louie and Barbara.

They still had two children at home the day the bus plunged into the lake.

Carl, the middle boy, was only 3, and he became the oldest.

“I don’t remember it, really. I remember my brother and sister. And I know it affected my folks, deeply,” he said.

He, too, lives on the lake, about nine miles above the crash site.

Pauline Asklund, now Pauline Dolan, was 15 months old when her brother and sister died. For years growing up, she didn’t know about it.

But eventually, she got a younger sister and brother who may or may not have been born if Louie and Barbara survived, she said.

“I think it had an effect on Carl. He went from being the next-to-youngest to, all the sudden, the oldest,” she said. “I think place in the family makes a difference.”

Dolan said her parents never talked about the crash, or how much they missed their children. “It was never discussed. If we asked questions about it, it was like pulling teeth,” she said.

There were other families nearby who suffered the same loss, so growing up it didn’t seem unusual to them. “They took care of us. They fed us and clothed us and taught us right from wrong. It was just something that happened. It was their own, private hell they had to live through,” she said.

Still, she and her sister, Marybeth Asklund, later wondered if their mother didn’t hold them at arm’s length, knowing she could not possibly handle the loss of yet another child if she were to get too close.

“Our mom was really reserved. But we don’t know, maybe she was always that way,” Dolan said.

Marybeth Asklund said that before the crash, her parents also lost another child, August, who was born with a disability.

“All my mom ever said was that he was never right, but she could get him to smile,” Asklund said.

Doctors convinced her that August needed special attention, and should be sent to a place where he could be helped. But after they sent him away, “he didn’t last six months,” she said.

If her mother was more reserved after losing Louie and Barbara, she may also have been feeling guilt over the loss of her firstborn, she said.

The thing that perplexes Marybeth Asklund the most is how her parents were able to raise them so close to Lake Chelan, after two of their children drowned. “The house wasn’t 10 feet from 12 feet of water. There was no beach,” she said.

And each of them had scary moments — like the time her little brother fell off the floating dock, and her father couldn’t immediately find him. Still, they didn’t have to wear life jackets, and were allowed to swim out of sight.

“I don’t know how they could put that aside enough to stay there. We were glad they did. We loved it there, and we were in the water 24/7.”

Asklund said mostly she wishes she knew the siblings she lost before she was even born.

“I think our lives would have been different. I think it would have been really cool,” she said.

It’s been 65 years since Barbara and Louie, Douglas and Stuart, and 11 other children and their driver, Jack Randle, died in Lake Chelan. Fewer and fewer people remember it.

Yet still, talking about it can bring tears to their siblings’ eyes, even if they have no memory of those shining faces that boarded the bus that day.

Marci Hale choked up when talking about how she is touched by the toys and money that people leave behind at the memorial. Someone once left a set of black-and-white photos there, including one of the bus being pulled from the lake. The person who left them must have been looking for closure, she said.

With a shaky voice, she said, “People do stop, and it does mean something to them.”

And for Pauline Dolan, it was the memory of the red winter coat that she and her husband bought for their daughter, Kris, when she was little, so many years ago.

She has no idea how her late husband, Richard Dolan, knew that Pauline’s sister Barbara was wearing a brand- new red winter coat when she got on the bus that day. He didn’t grow up in Chelan, Dolan said, so her parents must have once mentioned that they had just received their winter order from Sears &Roebuck in the mail, which included Barbara’s new coat.

Richard Dolan somehow realized he should warn his mother-in-law before they showed up on her doorstep with her granddaughter in a brand new red coat.

“I don’t know how he thought if it, but he told my mom that he bought this coat,” she said.

Then, her voice betraying her unexpected emotion, she said, “Until then, I didn’t even know that Barbara had a winter coat that was red.”

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Information from: The Wenatchee World, http://www.wenatcheeworld.com