Chowchilla hero to be honored

A park in Chowchilla will be renamed later this month in honor of Ed Ray, the unassuming bus driver who made national news when he helped free 26 kidnapped students.

The city of Chowchilla and Ray’s family are planning a ceremony near where Sonoma Avenue meets the 625 North 15th Street park at 4 p.m. Feb. 26, which would have been Ray’s 94th birthday. He died in 2012, grabbing headlines as news outlets around the country remembered him as a hero.

In the 1976 incident, Ray helped free 26 students kidnapped by brothers Richard and James Schoenfeld and Frederick Woods. The trio buried their victims alive in a rock quarry in Livermore.

Glen Ray, 69, said he appreciates the city’s effort to honor his father, though he noted his father never considered himself a hero.

“My father was a very simple man. He never thought that this was a heroic act,” he said. “This was his job. These kids were entrusted in his care, and it’s his job to get them home safely.”

The park in Chowchilla that is getting the Edward Ray Park sign is the largest and most used park in town, according to officials. It is roughly 27 acres and has softball, baseball and soccer fields, as well as a skate park and a picnic area.

Ray said putting his father’s name on a park is fitting, because his father loved children. “When you drive a grammar school bus for almost 40 years, you have to have a love of kids,” he said.

In 1976, the kidnappers drove the victims around for nearly a dozen hours before stopping at a Livermore quarry, where Ray and the 26 children were forced into a buried moving van.

The trio planned to demand a $5 million ransom, but Ray and several of the older children were able to stack mattresses high enough to climb out of an opening at the top of the buried van.

Ray and the kids pushed open a metal lid covered with about 200 pounds of industrial batteries, cleared away some debris and freed the rest of the children after 16 hours underground.

Marty Piepenbrok, the community relations manager for Chowchilla, said the city is working on accommodating what could be a relatively large crowd for the short ceremony. An estimated 600 people attended Ray’s funeral in 2012.

He said the city is working to get one or more of the kidnapped children from 1976 to speak at the ceremony. Members of the Chowchilla City Council and the Ray family are also expected to speak.

The ceremony is meant to be a modest celebration of Ray with a simple park sign, Piepenbrok said. In the next year, he said, plans are afoot to raise the necessary money to pay for a more decorative wooden sign, a flagpole and 26 large stones, one for each child he saved.

Ray was born in Le Grand on Feb. 26, 1921. He moved to Chowchilla with his family and graduated from Chowchilla High School in 1940.

In 1942, he married his wife, Odessa, and bought a ranch in Dairyland, where they grew corn, alfalfa and raised dairy cows. She is expected to attend the ceremony, as are many other members of the Ray family.

This story was originally published February 4, 2015 at 4:39 PM with the headline "Chowchilla hero to be honored."