GOING TO SCHOOL ON A BUS
5月
24日
I googled for images of the early school busses and there are no pictures of anything similar to my experience seventy-five years ago when I started school in the farming community of Sand Hollow, Idaho.
School was eight miles southwest along the graveled roads to Notus, Idaho. I was at the end of the bus route. My playmates along Sand Hollow Road north, Patsy and Jerry Stewart, went to the New Plymouth, Idaho, school. The bus was a blue box on the back of a flatbed truck. We sat on the benches around the edges. History says that was the seating arrangements of the first busses.
I have a scar where my left knee got hooked on a nail as the bus came to a stop and I hurriedly stood to get off at my stop. It was no big deal. Mom put on a little mercurochrome. I don’t even remember a band aid.
Each school morning, the bus driver picked up Virginia Butcher first. She got to sit with him in the front cab. The Butchers lived closer to school, where the driver started each morning, than he drove to start his route at our house. Virginia was still in high school, but that’s the first love story I watched in real life because they also went to the Baptist Church in Notus and I think I remember when they got married.
One day in second grade, I missed the bus home. The Notus School had all twelve grades in the same building. Elementary kids got out earlier than the upper grades. Dickie Randall and I went out to the field behind the school where he decided to dig for some worms and we forgot the time. Dickie and I started walking home. About a mile later, one of the sons of a neighboring farmer, from over the hill from Dickie’s farm, came by and offered us a ride home. Mom had cautioned me to never ride with strangers. I didn’t know them. I refused to get in the car. Dickie got in. They drove slowly as I continued to walk. I walked and they drove about another mile when Dad came looking for me. I wasn’t scared, I just followed rules. There was no discussion in the car. When we got home, I had my usual chores. Dad went back out to the field.
Another time, the small bridge over a drain ditch, three miles from our farm, was out of commission. The bus driver let the ten or so of us students off the bus and we all walked the rest of the way home. Again, there was more discussion about the condition of the bridge than of wondering why I was late. That was all part of life.
Today, 2021, as I run an early morning errand, many of the mothers are out with their children at the bus stops. There is concern if the students get home a few minutes late.
On the other hand, I was fortunate to have a bus. Grandpa Sam had to walk the three miles to their school in Bully Creek, Oregon, in the early 1940s. My mother-in-law remembers going to school in South Seattle on a horse drawn wagon around 1915. The very first school buses, known as school hacks or school trucks, started out as horse-drawn carriages around 1886 — and most people didn't take them! Walking to school was expected, and these early buses only picked up kids who lived REALLY far away.
Going to school and riding on a bus has been the same for close to one hundred years.
