Tragic bus crash haunts survivors

His twin brother's April 17, 1966, Holy Communion certificate from St. Isidore's Church in Yuba City.

The condolence letter a decade later from the Sutter County Board of Supervisors saying that we don't "second guess the Lord" or know the reasons for the catastrophe.

Photographs of the 29 dead students — and survivors — of the May 21, 1976, crash in the Bay Area of a bus carrying members of the Yuba City High School Choir, the deadliest such accident the National Transportation Safety Board has investigated in its history.

"We will remember," read the high school marquee aside the flags at half-mast after the crash.

Tom Randolph, now 49 and living in Walnut Creek in the East Bay, who survived the crash that killed his brother, said the concordandtime.com Web site he began this year seeks to do just that. To remember. With photos and letters and a communion certificate.

Because the wisdom more than three decades ago was that you grieved. And then you got on with your life. You didn't talk about the tragedy.

"That was the philosophy at the time," Randolph recalled. It may have worked for many. "Some people put it away like a box of momentos," he said of the accident.

But the horror of what happened 32 years ago in the Bay Area hasn't gone away for Randolph.

Sometimes, Randolph said, "It comes back like it's brand new."

Xon Burris was a 22-year-old firefighter on the job for two months when the chartered bus crashed off a freeway off-ramp in Contra Costa County before the choir reached the concert site 125 miles from Yuba City.

"Everybody went back home and closed their doors and hoped the pain and despair would go away," Burris said.

But Burris, who retired in 2007, said, "Anybody who had anything to do with the accident — you just never forgot it."

Some couldn't talk about it years later. One firefighter invited to a memorial didn't respond to the invitation and when Burris called, the man said he didn't want to talk.

"He will never even utter the words 'Yuba City,'" Burris said. "He will not say a word about it."

Burris welcomes the Web site Randolph established.

"We want to remember the students, what their lives were about, and who they were," Burris said. "We want to connect the survivors so you know you are not alone."

Loraine Johnson understands that the 1976 accident still has a hold on many. As a 17-year-old, she was in the high school choir and riding in a car ahead of the bus when she heard the crack of the rail's off-ramp and turned around to see the bus in mid-air before it landed.

She had to be packed in ice after going into shock.

"This body's been trying to die since 1976," said Johnson, who now lives in Colorado. She's written of a doctor's description that she has one foot here — and one foot in heaven.

Randolph grew up in a big Catholic family, was an altar boy and went to Catholic school. He said when the bus rolled off the freeway off-ramp rail, the vehicle seemed to launch into space before landing on its roof.

"I thought I was going to wake up with Jesus," Randolph said. "I was really surprised to wake up and find myself in the wreckage of the bus."

At the bus crash site, he said, heat from the vehicle melted the dirt back into clay.

"That ground has never sprouted life again," he said.

"Nothing grows there," Randolph said. "Even now, nothing grows there."

It's different at a nearby waterfront memorial in Martinez. Retired firefighter Burris goes there weekly to water flowers, and the public contributes as well to the memorial of the 1976 tragedy.

"To this day," Burris said, "people put (down) little feathers and pine cones."

Contact Appeal reporter Ryan McCarthy at 749-4707 or rmccarthy@appeal-democrat.com