Riding the big yellow school bus back in time

Published 8/30/05

The yellow buses are back, rummaging through my neighborhood for schoolboys and schoolgirls. You know, sometimes I’m tempted to get in line, enter that folding door and climb the stairs to my past.

Remember how the bus would always take off before you could sit down?

Even though I accidentally ended up in an unwelcome lap a time or two, I’ve not found it necessary to suppress all my school bus memories. I rode buses to an elementary school in Phoenix, Thaddeus Stevens Elementary in Pittsburgh, Mooresville Elementary just south of Indianapolis, and William Henry Burkhart Elementary, Perry East Junior High and Southport High School on the south side of that same city. The only school to which I didn’t ride the bus was Spring Hill Elementary, also in Pittsburgh. That’s because the steep hillside staircases, originally built to take steel workers from their hillside homes into the city’s steel mills, were part of Pittsburgh’s first transit system. In other words, the stairs were the bus.

But until a little red VW Beetle fell into my hands in high school, I was a daily rider of the bouncing yellow bus.

Some school bus memories are so embarrassing, I can still feel them 45 years later. Like the time I peed my pants in first grade and rode home in a pool of humiliation. When the bus stopped at my street, I more or less backed off the bus. That day in Arizona school bus history, I think I could have made a case for using the emergency hatch in the back.

Remember the decibel level on those elementary school buses? A whole district worth of kids trying to outshout each other in their shrillest playground voices. That’s why the bus drivers, at least in my era, were blaring their bus radios by the time we reached junior high and high school. Anything, I suppose, to block out that cacophony of kids.

The hipper bus drivers turned on FM stations, and we floated to school on the music of the Stones, Janis Joplin, the Doors and the Who. Oddly enough, the bus is where I first heard the song “Magic Bus,” which I don’t think was about a trip to school.

When we really wanted to drive the bus driver mad, we’d sing together those songs word for word, ooh, ooh, magic bus, and drown out the music that was meant to drown out us. Yep, we were a bus full of merry pranksters.

But on many days, I was an observer and, I suppose, on my way to becoming a reporter. I was moved by the way kids who with the cool and confidence factors treated those who carried the Napoleon Dynamite gene. I finally wrote an editorial about the high school bus experience and how it can be terrifying for some. I recently found that editorial. Oh well, it’s the thought that counts, right?

Of course, some school bus memories are so sublime, I can feel them 35 years later. For example, during my junior year, I would watch for Rhonda who always climbed the bus stairs with way too many books. I’d scoot in and we’d squeeze three in a row. On days she wouldn’t see me and would land in another row, not even Janis Joplin could brighten my day. Then a really weird thing happened. Rhonda started looking for me. And when I think about Rhonda, and her short black hair and pink lipstick, I remember us laughing and talking all the way to school over brooding songs such as “Solitary Man” by Neil Diamond. Hmm. This must have been the AM radio bus driver. When I started driving that red VW Beetle, I offered Rhonda an escape from the bus and started picking her up every morning at 7:15 a.m. sharp. Then one morning, she looked at me quite seriously and said, “Could we pick up my boyfriend?” Sure, Rhonda, why not.

“Don’t know that I will but until I can find her
A girl who’ll stay and won’t play games behind me
I’ll be what I am, a solitary man”

Yeah, this is that time of year when I find myself kind of missing the bus. If nothing else, the yellow bus is a vehicle for a lot of fond boyhood flashbacks.