A Million Miles or More

One can reach back indefinitely for a beginning date to hang on the bus business. Horse-drawn stagecoaches had hauled passengers for centuries before the engine replaced the horse. The Butterfield Overland Stage began operating in 1858. In 1912, out in California, J. T. Hayes was using Model T Fords to carry passengers between San Diego and El Centro. Greyhound dates their start from 1914 when Carl Wickman began hauling miners over the four mile unpaved road between Hibbing and Alice, Minnesota. Within a few years, embryo bus lines were common.

When I started driving, many of the older drivers were still there. Their colorful careers had spanned the United States with an assortment of experience from automobiles and stretch-jobs to the diesels of 1952 -- from 7-passenger capacity and dirt roads to 37-passenger capacity and paved highways. It is my good fortune to have known some of these drivers personally. Their imagination some 80 or 90 years ago turned automobiles into buses, while their daring and skill kept those buses moving over dirt roads, through mud holes and through snow drifts until they reached the narrow concrete strips of the forties and fifties and finally the interstate highways of today.

This story starts with the stories these pioneer drivers told me and ends with my own experiences with Greyhound from the day I was hired in1952 until the day I retired in 1985. What was it like for the men who started the bus business? How did it feel in the 50's, 60's and 70's to drive a bus down the highway? What did those bus drivers see, hear, feel and think? What bawdy stories did they invent? It's all here including "Rain, Ice & Snow", "Asleep at the Wheel", "Sex on the Highway", "Accidents", etc.

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Bus business was booming in 1952 and continued to flourish throughout the 50´s. Greyhound -- with routes across the United States -- ran numerous schedules that often carried three or four buses running down the highway like a train. The gasoline Supercoach was still on the road, but it was the new diesel Silverside that served as the backbone of Greyhound's fleet until the Scenicruiser came out in 1954. To the Silverside and the Scenicruiser, most of my road memories are tied.

It didn't take much for bus driver's to dream up new jokes. Driving down the highway with their minds focused only on the road, they had room to think of other things, and they did. The new Scenicruiser with its double deck and two windshields inspired the following.

Two crows nesting west of Springfield missed no chance to fly over the windshield of oncoming buses and drop their load. They sat on a telephone line one day as a new Scenicruiser approached, and one crow said to the other, "Shall we?"

The second crow replied, "Sure. Why not?" They flew up into the air and began their bombing run, unaware that they were diving on a new bus with two windshields. As they cleared the first windshield with bombs away, the upper deck windshield caught them, and knocked them senseless into the ditch. When they finally came to and began stumbling around trying to knock the dust off their feathers, one crow said to the other, "Damm! Did you ever see a second section follow so close?"

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In 1912, out in California, J. T. Hayes was using Model T Fords to carry passengers between San Diego and El Centro. He sometimes picked up customers from the curb in front of the Pickwick Theater in San Diego, and his operation eventually became known as Pickwick Stages.

By the early twenties, mighty Pickwick Stages was mushrooming up out of the West and steadily gaining territory eastward. Her Pierce Arrows with running boards and doors opening from each row of seats (there were no center aisles) sucked up sand from the plains of New Mexico. Her drivers over the muddy roads of Oklahoma and Texas became known as mud slingers, and a man who could not keep his bus rolling through the