My mother’s uncle Glenn (they called him Sweetbread) was our school bus driver. We were riding along home one evening when all of a sudden the bus stopped and threw the kids, books and papers out in the floor. Uncle Sweetbread had locked up the brakes, grabbed his heavy denim coat, piled off the bus, run across the road and up over the road bank before disappearing into the brush. Well, dreckly here he come back with his coat all rolled up and knotted. Some of the kids in front had seen what had happened but us in the back didn’t. A possum had run across the road in front of us. Uncle Sweetbread wanted it, and got it. The rest of the trip was uneventful but I, for one, was fearful that the beast would work his way out and wreak havoc on all aboard. I don’t know what he did with his catch and didn’t ask. I was a child and we weren’t allowed to ask questions of grownups. Just like the rest Uncle Sweetbread had come up in some hard times and I doubt he wasted any part of that possum.
—Ed Ammons
It’s been many years since I was a student on a school bus. Ed’s memory made many of mine come rushing back.
My very first bus ride stands out in my mind. I was so scared about going to school for the first time that I could barely climb the steps. I followed Steve to his seat to set with him and everyone laughed at me. The prettiest girl I had ever seen asked me to come sit with her in the front seat. I was entranced by her long straight hair and forgot all about being embarrassed.
Near the end of every school year water fights broke out at school and on the bus ride home. The teachers mostly looked the other way unless someone was getting hurt. Our bus driver would stop at a creek and let us refill so the fun could continue.
Last night’s video: A Flower with Implicit Faith in the Sun – From My Highest Hill 10.
Tipper
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There’s that word dreckly again. I knowed I’d heard it before.
the wind is picking up, it has been raining since 10:00 p.m. last night, the lights are flashing on and off, it’s supposed to be much worse between 4:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m. tonight, God bless us and protect us keep us safe and well, keep the tree standing up, God bless all the animals our friends family neighbors, keep us safe and well Lord everybody in the path of the storm in Jesus name amen
It’s so funny that today’s story is about the school bus because during lunch with my friends (we went through all 12 grades together, no kg for me!) they both asked about riding the bus & who was my bus driver(s). They were both town girls, so the bus ride seemed exciting to them. Like Tipper, I was absolutely terrified to get on that bus and I was not a shy child. It was very intimidating at 5 years old to get on a bus where 98% were strangers and many were juniors and seniors. I did know 4 of the high school girls because they had babysat my little brother and me. If not for them, I don’t think I could have gotten back on the bus because there were a couple of boys who got on the bus many miles from my house that were quite menacing, both in looks and behavior. There families had sketchy reputations that I’d heard the adults mention. My bus driver for my first 6 years was a dear man named Charlie Winters. His daughter was in high-school and a cheerleader who let me hold her pom pons on the sidelines during football and basketball games. He also took us to the Dairy Dell the last week of school and bought everyone on the bus a treat. The other two ladies that replaced him were both very nice. From Jr high on, I was involved in so many after school practices and activities (cheer, choir, intramurals, etc) that I didn’t ride the bus as much plus I got a car at 16 and took myself and when forced lol my little brother (3 yrs my junior) Ahhh what memories. Blessings Acorns and have a great weekend!
Our bus driver, Walter Purdue, would allow us to have water fights on his bus the last day of school. But we would start the fights a few days before the final day and he said it helped him get the bus cleaned out with the water everywhere. I don’t know about that, but it was fun and we were drowned rats when we got off the bus!
Well, that was certainly a much less “uptight” time. I wish we had them back. One reason they got away, I think, is that there is less confidence now in the basic integrity of individuals. It is not that it isn’t there at all but the general social atmosphere is one of more suspicion. As to driving the school bus at 16, Randy, several somebodies saw you as being steady, dependable and grown up. Just from what you have posted from your years at Michelin, it is more than clear they were right. Looking back now, I know I would not have been a good choice to be a student bus driver; too green.
The school bus. From the first grade up until 7th grade we rode the bus because of the distance from home to school. Middle school was only about a middle from home so our parents allowed us to walk to school even though we could have taken the bud. The walk was through a nice pine woods that we would rather walk than ride. In high school we walked again. High school was a little less than a mile and we either walked across an open field or through a cemetery. The difference being in the winter once the snow got deep enough or a trail wasn’t biased good enough we walked through the cemetery because the main road was always plowed. When I would tell people we walked to school through the snow we would always get the come back “yeah uphill three miles and back both ways.” Our answer would be not three mikes but one. We didn’t complain because every free moment was play lying outside in the snow. Happy memories.
In SC when I was going to school, students drove the school buses. They could get a bus driver’s license when they turned 16 years old. I drove a bus the last two and half years I was in school. My bus had a capacity rating of 60 passengers and the last students often times had to stand in aisle, all of the seats would be full. All grades of the students rode the same bus. Nowadays the elementary and middle/high school students ride separate buses and I never see a bus with more than a few passengers and the large high school parking lots will be full of cars. We were not allowed to have water fights or do similar things. I have heard of the older generations eating possums. They would catch them alive, put them in a cage and feed them milk and cornbread to “clean them out” before eating them. I have never ate possums but have tasted a coon. Armadillos are now beginning to show up in my area, we call them “possum on the half shell.”
I was bus rider 1-12 grades, though by the seventh grade I was driving some. I still rode the bus in between mechanical problems, etc. I was in the first grade in 1970-71 and I in those days there were still a lot of people who did not own an automobile, they had never learned to drive, they didn’t have a driver’s license, or all of the above, etc. My bus would enter into the next county north of mine and pick up several kids. The bus driver was little kin to me, but I treated no different than any of the others. I cannot remember if was in the first or second grade, but I do I recall a man who looked to be about 50 riding bus #11 (my bus) for about two weeks. This man was a stranger to me. The bus driver told me the fellar had a job near the school and was hitching a ride on the school bus till it was done. This man sat right behind the driver. He was neatly dressed, wore polished boots, and had a double bit axe between them. He never looked around and never said a word to anyone. I remember the same driver once taking off his belt and threatening two older boys who were fighting to be “set off the bus”. In later years I can remember smelling “likker” on the bus driver’s breath as he delivered us in the evenings. All those years I rode to and from without any incidents other than getting “picked on ” a little. Today a bus driver would be “put in the electric chair for ninety-days! It funny to think these days that about a third of the men who drove buses at my school were genuine “moonshiners” and they all wore overalls. Of course, I was too young to know such things when I was young. One was my wife’s grandfather who had been “sent off” to serve “a year and a day” three different times for “making likker”. These men figured out early that they could have a small supplemental income and health insurance for driving a bus a few hours per day. They were good and trusted men and people simply looked over what had been in the past for most, but there was an exception. The father of one of my friends was caught at a still one morning after delivering the children. The bus driver made bond, called the principal immediately and told him what happened. The principal asked the man if he thought his wife could run the route that afternoon. The moonshiner’s wife, who was in church every time the doors were open, drove the bus that afternoon and for the next fifteen years. Such was life in those days living in the hill country of north Alabama.