John the Bus Driver

Heroes come in many forms. Soldiers, police officers, EMTs, as well as firefighters regularly do uncommon things, brave things, that are acts of service in the name of their fellow human beings. In February of 1956, John Hearon, a bus driver, proved to be an unlikely hero by doing the impossible.

            Depending on who you ask, the number of lives he saved varies. Some say as few as 15, some as many as 35, but there were probably somewhere close to 21 people on the Continental Trailways’ Vista-Liner Bus as it left Amarillo, TX at 5:30 am for Tucumcari, NM, already 2 hours behind from the snow. Snow in the Texas Panhandle is anything but abnormal in February, but no one knew how bad this particular weather event would be. At 9 am, they plowed head long into a chest deep snow drift and the bus was there to stay. No one really showed concern as John reassured everyone that they could just wait for someone and flag them down to get help. The problem is that they were the last vehicle to enter Route 66 from the east before it was shut down entirely.

            After 5 hours John knew something was wrong. No one came their way and the snow continued to pile up in the worst blizzard any of them had ever witnessed. There were 2 sandwiches between the entire bunch, with a half a tank of diesel the keep the heater going, and the clock was ticking for the whole lot. Adrian, TX was the closest town to them as the crow flies, a few miles east, but uphill and into the wind. John decided that trek would be harder than setting out for Glenrio to the west. He made his mind up. He was walking.

            He had to turn back once to fight blindness. He made a headband with slits to see through the storm. Using the telephone poles that ran along the now vanished highway, fighting frostbite and hypothermia, John walked almost 14 miles. In a blue norther, his thoughts were solely about the hot coffee at the diner next to Joe Brownlee’s service station.

That's exactly where he collapsed. Outside the cafe he whistled with everything he had. It had been 9 hours since he left the bus. He told those that came to his rescue as best he could what was going on. With that, the cafe owner and some of the other men of Glenrio loaded up his Power Wagon with blankets and set out. It took 4 hours to get to the bus in chained tires and 4-wheel drive. After several trips, all the passengers made it safely to Glenrio, each owing their life to John.

By the time he got out of the hospital 4 days later, 61 inches of snow had fallen in the triangle between Tulia, Vega, and Glenrio, TX. That’s 5 feet in 4 days, a record that still stands.