Chowchilla was thrust into national headlines in July 1976 when an entire school bus of children was kidnapped. Twenty-six children and the adult bus driver were taken from the bus, which the kidnappers concealed under brush in a wash, and driven around in two vans for 11 hours before being forced into a moving van which had been buried in a quarry in Livermore, California.

Part-time bus driver, Ed Ray, a local farmer, enlisted the aid of some of the older children to dig their way out. After 16 hours underground they emerged in the middle of the night and walked to a nearby guard shack at the entrance to the quarry. All were pronounced to be in good condition and returned home to find that mass media had descended on the town. Ray was able to remember the license plate of one van while under hypnosis and this led to the capture of the kidnappers as they attempted to flee to Canada.

A rough draft of a ransom note was found at the house of the owner of the quarry; the owner's son, Frederick Woods, and two friends, Richard and James Schoenfeld, were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. The ordeal was dramatized in the 1993 ABC-TV Movie "Vanished Without a Trace" starring Karl Malden, which is sometimes shown on the Biography Channel. The drama series Without a Trace also featured an episode called "The Bus", which involved a school bus hijacking incident very similar to the Chowchilla event.