A Luckless City Buries Its Dead

Flanked by weeping relatives, a Spanish-American couple sat in the shimmering heat in Sutter Cemetery, holding hands and staring dully at the bronze coffin that held the remains of their 17-year-old son Bobby. Six of Bobby's classmates placed their white carnation boutonnieres on the coffin. Bobby's young niece threw herself on the coffin and sobbed brokenly. Several in the large crowd also cried. Bobby's father silently shook his head a couple of times as though he had been struck, then moved woodenly with his wife toward the green limousine at the head of the long cortege.

In the same cemetery Mrs. Harry Rosebrough watched dry-eyed as her son was buried. He had died on his 16th birthday. Pamela Engstrom, wearing the blue-and-white gingham dress-- a gift from her mother--had died the day after her 18th birthday. The victims also included Twins Carlene and Sharlene Engle, 18, who loved to sing songs composed by their mother, Wake and Smile in the Sunshine and Take Pride in America. After their funeral, Sharlene's dusty 1963 Ford station wagon was parked across the street from her home. A FOR SALE sign was in the window.

So it was in Yuba City last week as the 15,000 citizens mourned their dead. A week earlier a bus bearing 53 members of the local high school choir and Chaperon Christina Estabrook had ripped through 72 feet of guardrail as it turned onto an exit ramp in Martinez, about 80 miles from Yuba City. The bus plunged 21 1/2 feet to the ground. It landed on its top, wheels still spinning and roof crushed down to the seats.

Blood dripped on scattered sheets of choir music. "I heard someone scream 'Oh my God' from the front of the bus," sobbed Kim Kenyon, a 16-year-old junior whose girl friend was killed in the seat beside him. Added Perry Martin, 18, the choir's chief tenor: "Everything was a tangle of weeping and moaning and of scattered arms and legs." The final toll: 29 dead, including Mrs. Estabrook, whose husband was preceding the bus in his car, and 25 injured, including Driver Evan Prothero, 50.

Withered Flowers. Flags flew at half-mast throughout California. In Yuba City there was a joint service for five of the students who were Mormons. A second joint service was held for Tom Brooks, 17, and his steady girl friend Lori Killingsworth, 18. But most of the rites were conducted individually, followed by burial among the withered flowers that were scattered about the sere 20-acre graveyard four miles outside town. On all sides lie ripening rice fields, surrounded in turn by the orchards that make this the Peach Bowl of America. In the distance rises 2,117-foot Sutter Buttes, which passes for a mountain range in this sunbaked, mosquito-plagued tableland some 40 miles north of Sacramento.

Yuba City is right out of American Graffiti, an unattractive town of gas stations, seedy bars and hamburger joints, supported by agriculture and nearby Beale Air Force Base. It has known tragedy before. On Christmas Eve in 1955, the Feather River broke through the levee and drowned 40 people. In 1971 authorities discovered the bodies of 25 itinerant farm workers in shallow graves; eventually, Labor Contractor Juan Corona was convicted of the murders. Twenty-two of the victims now lie in Sutter Cemetery, near where the teenagers were laid to rest last week.

They were the children of labor leaders, of policemen, of county officials and of doctors (including one whose teen-age son's heart, corneas and kidneys were used in transplant operations soon afterward). The boys and girls had gone through junior high school together. They had all performed together in Fiddler on the Roof earlier this year. Only three weeks from graduation, many of them had gone to the prom the previous Saturday. Now their friends dazedly shuffled through Yuba City High School, pausing disconsolately from time to time at the principal's window to read the daily notice that listed the condition of the injured; at week's end 17 were still in the hospital. Said Karen Hess, 18, the president of the student body: "This is the first time that most of us have ever had close friends die." At 9:30 a.m. one day, Linda Green, an 18-year-old senior attended a memorial service at the Ullrey Memorial Chapel for Rachel Carlson, 16. At 11 a.m. she went to the First Methodist Church for a service in memory of Maria Azim, 15. At 5 p.m. she attended a memorial service at the Chapel of the Twin Cities for Jodi Lynn McCoy, 18.

In their grief, the people of Yuba City were drawn together--by the ties of tragedy and friendship, by anger at prying reporters (some of whom were thrown off the high school campus and out of several stores) and by good deeds. Within hours of the accident, school officials established a Yuba City Choir Memorial Fund, which quickly collected $10,000 in cash and pledges for another $20,000. Private pilots ferried parents of the injured students, free of charge, to hospitals in Martinez. The Loyal Order of the Moose set up a center that collected 313 pints of blood in eight hours and had to turn away hundreds of prospective donors. An undertaker offered free burial plots but had no takers.

Religious Faith. But none of that could dispel the pain. Said Housewife Mary Lawrence: "I feel for parents who have no religious faith. What can you do if you love a child and then lose him? You have to take your strength from somewhere else." Said State Highway Patrolman Dan Gust: "I've seen a lot of accidents. But when you get right down to it, you get hurt just the same as anybody else." Gust's son, Steven, 17, had died in the crash.

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