When I was an apple-cheeked lad riding the bus to school, I never dreamed that one day I would end up behind the wheel. Here I am, still learning the ropes after nearly three years and thinking back to my drivers of yore.
The first one I remember was, fittingly, named John. He hauled me roughly three blocks from my house to Locust Elementary School. A real character with a flat-top haircut, John had a big transistor radio held together with thick rubber bands on his dashboard. AM stations spouting news or the top pop music of the day (Beatles, Beach Boys, Supremes, Four Seasons etc. ) was always on.
(This blog is based on actual events, though names, places and some personal details have been changed to protect the innocent as well as the guilty and avoid libel suits.)
John was definitely a rascal. If you sat directly behind him, sometimes while we were stopped he’d suddenly spin around, grab your thigh and squeeze hard right above your knee, causing a sensation like being tickled. If I did something like that today I’d end up in the hoosegow. We’re told to never touch kids unless it’s an emergency.
Also not recommended: Stopping and taking a kid into a liquor store so they can use the bathroom. Yes, I heard about a (now ex-) driver who actually did that.
Times have certainly changed. My friend Dave told me of the time when he was about eight years old and his bus was bombarded with snowballs thrown by a bunch of kids atop a snow mountain in a freshly-plowed supermarket parking lot.
“Our driver, Steve, stopped the bus and let the big kids (seventh and eighth graders) out to throw snowballs at those kids and chase them off the mountain,” Dave said. “All us little kids got to watch and yell out the windows at the carnage. It was one of the most exciting moments of my life up to that point.”
Nowadays I’d bet my last crinkled George Washington that Steve would be pelted with a pink slip for pausing his route to provide such excitement.
Speaking of excitement, when my kids were in grade school during the early 2000s, their driver was a foul-mouthed dame who delighted in leaving them in the dust even as they were coming down the driveway in the morning. She once gleefully told her passengers, “Watch! The Rolfe kids are going to miss the bus today!” before driving off.
My wife had to complain to their school to get her to stop, but that driver kept her job. How, I don’t know.
I do have to admit I’ve been tempted to follow that lady’s lead-footed example with a kid who deliberately shuffles so slowly from his house to my bus door that you can clock him with a sun dial. But patience is a virtue in this gig, especially if you want to keep it.
Those Were the Days
There’s a lot of stuff we drivers aren’t supposed to do anymore, like handing out candy (food allergies, medical emergencies and lawsuits go hand-in-legal-brief) or punting kids off the bus for misbehaving.
See: The School Bus Justice System
Used to be you could just pull over anywhere and make miscreants walk home. A colleague of mine told me she set a district record for most hellions ejected from her bus in one semester (57) before the rules were changed. Now we have to deposit the little Visigoths at their home or school unless they are so out of control that we need to call 911.
I don’t recall causing trouble during my salad days. I do remember Seb, my stoic high school driver, occasionally pulling over to browbeat us for being rowdy. In a kind of cosmic full-circle, I now have my “Roadside Lecture Series” where I harangue my precious cargo about the importance of not recreating the Battle of Bull Run while I’m trying to drive.
Who knows if any kids will remember me. Maybe years from now my little nemesis Robespierre will say, “Yeah, I had this weird old geezer who called me Porcupine.” Or Ignatz and his pals Stitch and Satch will chortle when they recall the driver who used to bark at them over the PA, “Will you stooges sit down back there!”
It’s the stuff of golden memories.
Celestial Chuckle 