Bus driving, long hours but interesting times

Bus driving, long hours but interesting times
Melvyn D. Magree
Originally published as
Oh, the bus driver's lot is not a happy one
in the
Nortland Reader
now the
Reader Weekly
August 31, 2000

Would you like a job that may pay over $18,000 per year that requires a moderate skill level, has some variety, and let’s you meet lots of people?  Try bus driving.  You have several opportunities in the Northland area from driving a mini-coach to a school bus to a city bus to an over-the-road coach.

The minimum requirements are being 18 or over (21 for some employers), having a valid driver’s license, passing a physical and a background check, and having a willingness to learn.  The larger employers will train you and pay you at least minimum wage for your training time.  Training varies from one to two weeks for school bus to five weeks with DTA.

If you like kids the best place to start is with a school district or a school bus company.  The Duluth Public Schools are not currently hiring but Ken Willms, manager of transportation, says that could change anytime.  Voyageur Bus Company is hiring according to Josh Penshak, the trainer at Voyageur.

Your starting pay at Voyageur would be $8.75 per hour; after several years experience you might get about $12.50.  Your usual schedule would be about 6:30 to 9:00 and 2:00 to 4:30.  Your actual schedule would vary according to the route you picked at the beginning of the school year.

Note: most of what follows is based on my own experience with Medicine Lake Lines and Ryder in the Twin Cities.  Medicine Lake Lines/Ryder operated school buses, mini-coaches, and transit buses.  It may not be exactly the same as you would find in Duluth.

You might find your training a piece of cake or you might wonder if you’ll ever do it right.  Persistence really helps.  It took me seven days before my school bus trainer would let me be tested.  Even then I took one left turn on the test too wide and had to back up in the intersection.  Would you believe that three years later I was training others in transit buses?

After you finish your training and have your Class B commercial driver’s license (CDL) in hand, you will be assigned a route.  For the first few days you will be accompanied by an experienced driver as you learn the route.  I don’t know why but in my car I could generally find my way around but with a school bus it took three days to learn my first route.  Three years later, I was often handed a route copy and asked to substitute on a route in ten minutes or less.  Duluth with its grid pattern of streets should be easier than the labyrinths of Twin Cities suburbs.

One of the jobs of a growing child is to test limits.  School bus riders are no exception.  Fortunately, on most routes you’ll find those who get obnoxious are the exception.  A word from you will suffice to get many kids to sit facing forward and talking quietly.  But if you have some seemingly incorrigible kids, you have many tools that are covered under “student management” in your training. 

You can find a safe place to pull the bus over and have a chat with the miscreant.  Or, you can write the student up and let the school deal with him or her.  One of my most satisfying experiences was, after a particularly obnoxious sixth grader returned from a two-day bus suspension, he apologized and was very helpful thereafter.

You might be able to get more work hours with charters.  I can’t say what kind of charter work you would get in Duluth.  I know I had a wide variety in the Twin Cities from school outings to ferrying the cast and crew of “West Side Story”, the latter charter being a story in itself.  You might also be a minor hero just by keeping your cool when a student breaks her arm on an outing.

Your success as a bus driver depends more on your attitude than anything else.  If you have a positive, problem-solving attitude, you will be a successful bus driver.  The bus drivers who didn’t succeed were often their own worst enemies.  One driver who I had trained got mad at another driver and didn’t show up.  I was disappointed because she had showed such great promise.  Another driver deliberately rammed the bus in front of him; fortunately no students were in either bus but the other driver was out for at least three weeks.  I know the ramming driver was immediately fired; I don’t know if any charges were made.

On the other hand, I knew many drivers who had been driving ten to twenty years and came to work every morning with a smile on their face.  I know if we hadn’t moved to Duluth I would probably still be driving from the terminal now owned by the British company First Group.

Do I miss bus driving?  Yes and no.

Although I normally get up at six, I don’t miss getting up at five or even earlier.  I also don’t miss the split shift, spending 15-20 minutes to drive home, spending an hour or two on a task, and then driving back, and getting home finally at 6:30 or a later in the evening.  I don’t miss the rowdy kids.  And I don’t miss the routes where I barely met the schedule and wondered when I’d get my next break.

But I do miss the easy charters where I nap, eat lunch, or read.  I do miss being in control of a big machine.  Every morning when I pulled out of the garage I felt a sense of pride: hey!  I can do this!  And of course I miss the people.  The chats and chess games in the drivers’ room.  The passengers who always had a friendly greeting.  The seniors who appreciated help with their groceries.  And of course, I miss getting paid to drive to interesting places.

But although the pay isn’t as great, I’d rather write about bus driving than do it.

©2000, 2007 Melvyn D. Magree

First snow and I wimped out

We were going to go to the fitness center by bus this morning, but we kept having one delay after another.  When we finally were ready we decided to drive instead.  Because of the snow we decided to take the SUV which has more aggressive winter tires.

When I was on the main street approaching a stop sign, I put on the brakes well in advance.  Da-da-da went the ABS.  I stopped without entering the intersection.  I drove down a hill and up a hill keeping my speed at about 20mph.  Nobody caught up to me.

When I got to the next stop sign, I wondered about continuing.  When I got to the third stop sign two blocks before a major downhill, I decided discretion was the better part of valor.  I turned around and headed back home.

When I got to the last stop sign near our house, I approached it carefully because I knew downhill traffic would be coming to my left.  Sure enough, a driver couldn’t stop and went right on through the intersection.  If I hadn’t waited, we would have been T-boned!

As we approached our final turn I had a tailgater!  Plus an illegally parked car on the side street was across the street from a legally parked car, a street that is barely three-cars wide.

The skid control did go into action before I went between them, but I was going straight as I passed them.

Finally, we pulled into our garage and hunkered down with some coffee.

We do think we’ll walk out to the corner restaurant for lunch, crossing the street only when we see no cars coming.

What did I learn in school?

I learned a lot but I’ve forgotten most of it.

I find I remember the classroom setting more than I do what was actually taught.  Maybe this is why so many of us think we were never taught about certain things.  I can still picture my first elementary school, buying Victory stamps, and the VE banner that was displayed.  I remember reading Dick and Jane and writing the numbers out to 200!

I remember many things about my second elementary school, but the classroom scenario that sticks out the most is the vote on the distance to the moon.  What, a vote on a scientific fact?  I remember a fourth-grade substitute science teacher doing this.  For years, I thought she didn’t know and was asking the class.  But she may have only been sampling the class.  I remember that incident more than I do how far is it to the moon.  Without looking it up, I’d say 250,000 miles. With all the moon shots in the news, you would think that number would stick better in my head. Is this one of those facts that get forgotten because we can always look it up if we really need to know?

I do remember learning typing and driving, probably the two most important life-long skills most of us need and use.  I do remember taking French in 8th grade, but I didn’t continue because I would rather learn printing.  How many people set type by hand now?  I took Latin in high school because I was advised that it was the basis for many other languages.  All I remember of that two and half-years was that I was elected president of the Latin club, and we read an abridged “Aeneid” and “Horatio at the Bridge”.  I remember a music teacher telling us that anyone with intelligence can learn to sing.  I didn’t get around to learning until I was in my 60s, and now I don’t practice enough to keep my voice in shape.

I don’t remember learning much about World War II in school.  That may because we might have been using textbooks that hadn’t been updated.  Also the teacher was not very inspiring.  The only history I remember from that whole year is a picture of the Haymarket Square riot in a text book. The picture was on the right-hand page of the small but thick orange textbook.  The picture was an engraving from some archive; I don’t remember if it was a photograph or a drawing.  And I don’t remember much about the Haymarket Square riot other than there was lot of police violence.  It was probably labor related and took place in Chicago.

Was I taught about Hiroshima and Nagasaki in my American History class?  I don’t remember.  I had that class in 1954.  It could be that the textbook hadn’t been updated.  These events have been reported over and over for almost 70 years, and so it is hard to remember where I learned what.

Another digression: “, and so…”  Mr. Conrad, my 11th grade English teacher, frequently told us how to use "and so", but I don’t remember exactly what he prescribed.  This particular piece of grammar was almost the only thing I remember from the class.

I had Mister Rush for trigonometry and another class.  I don’t remember much of the material but I remember his punctuating his remarks with “When you go to Case…”  meaning Case Institute of Technology, now part of Case Western Reserve University.  Darned if five of us didn’t go to Case. Only two of us graduated, yours truly not being one.  But I got to come back for graduate school.

Now, Miss Palmer, I remember her well.  She was a fearsome taskmaster, but she taught Shakespeare well.  I enjoyed reading an act each day for homework for both “Hamlet” and “Macbeth”, and then we would reread each act a few scenes at a time.  She gave me a lifelong love of Shakespeare, but I have yet to read all of his plays.

Interestingly, I don’t remember taking much homework home.  I had two study halls most days and got most of it done in one of them.  The rest of my study hall time I read science fiction from the school library.

College and graduate school are also a blur.  I remember translating “Clementine” into French,  I remember reading Candide (English, condensed) and “Brothers Karamazov”.  On the latter, what did I care what the meaning of the mortar and pestle was?

How much do you remember of school?  For most of us, that is only what we use on a regular basis.  I have a Master’s in mathematics and I don’t remember anything from “Functions of Complex Variables” in graduate school.  I do remember the book was blue, I think the author was from India, and it is still on the right hand side of my book case, first shelf above the bottom shelf.

What we really learned in school was to learn.

Back to Nagasaki and Hiroshima, I remember reading about the horrible deaths both immediate and years later.  I remember that prisoners of war were killed in the blast.  I remember the justification that lives were “saved”.  I have long questioned how many kids’ lives is one soldier’s life worth.

Where I think I learned this is from reading newspapers regularly.  If your only news source is radio or TV you’ll never have time for all there is to know.  With newspapers, you have a larger selection of stories, you read them at your convenience, and with the Internet, you have a huge selection to choose from.

One of Mel's high school classmates said, "Learn something each day."  Mel often wishes he wouldn't forget it the next day.

Also published in Reader Weekly, 2014-08-14 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2014/08/14/3890_what_did_i_learn_in_school

God, civility, and the Golden Rule

Some letter writers to the Duluth News Tribune have recently been calling for God in our lives to solve many of our problems.  Torquemada, the Spanish Inquisitor, believed in God, and he had thousands murdered because they didn’t believe as he did.  The Puritans believed in God, and they had dozens murdered because the innocent victims would not admit to being witches.  Plantation owners believed in God, and they kept slaves who they would whip for whatever cause.

The problem with a belief in God is that too many “believers” are very selective in what they believe.  Too many ignore a central tenet of monotheistic and other religions.

“Do not unto your neighbor what you would not have him do unto you; this is the whole Law; the rest is commentary.” – Hillel, a Jewish teacher in the first century, B.C.E.

“Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.” – Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew 7:12

“...and you should forgive and overlook: Do you not like God to forgive you? And Allah is The Merciful Forgiving.” _ Qur’an (Surah 24, “The Light”, v. 22)

"What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others." – Confucius

“One should never do wrong in return, nor mistreat any man, no matter how one has been mistreated by him." – Plato’s Socrates (Crito, 49c)

You can find many more variations and sources of the “Golden Rule” at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule.

What these religious and ethical variations call for is for us to be part of communities.  These communities are at neighborhood, city, national, and world levels.  They are as informal as holding a door for a stranger at a public building or as formal as churches and civic associations.

Unfortunately, many of us don’t act as if we are in some of these communities.  We walk out of our houses to our car on the street or in the garage and drive somewhere else without even seeing a neighbor.  We don’t bother to shovel our sidewalks because we don’t use them, completely ignoring all the footprints in the snow.  As we drive we are focused on thoughts elsewhere, whether in our heads, on our radios, or even on our cell phones.  We drive over crosswalks without even looking for pedestrians.  We drive through red lights ignoring any traffic or pedestrians waiting at the cross streets.  We race through parking garages without headlights and without watching for vehicles backing out.

Our first try at building communities should be to consider doing unto others what we appreciate others doing unto us.  Do we want to walk on clear sidewalks?  Do we want other drivers to be attentive to vehicles around them?  Do we want drivers to be attentive to us as we cross a street?  Do we want other drivers to wait for us to back out of a blind spot?

If we start with these small changes, maybe we can look at how we treat others in a larger context.  Do we talk about public employees as “they” or do we consider them our neighbors.  Did “they” make a patch on our street, or did a city crew make the patch?  Did “they” plow our street, or did an overworked city plow driver make our street more drivable?

Remember that the Good Samaritan of the Book of Luke was an “other”.  To build communities, we need to be open to including the “other” as our neighbors.

Investment or tax

Clive Thompson argues that we should have more public transit to reduce the incidents of texting while driving: "Clive Thompson to Texters: Park the Car, Take the Bus". He decries the fact that in the U.S. we are so car-dependent that we increase the number of textures driving; in other countries young people don't even consider getting a car as soon as they are eligible because public transit is so convenient.

Can't you just hear the "no-taxers" screaming about the cost of better public transit? Of course, most of them drive on tax-supported roads. They never stop to think that more public transit might reduce their travel time. Of course, fewer cars on the road also means fewer accidents, which are a cost in themselves. Fewer texters on the road means even fewer accidents. And fewer accidents means fewer court cases, which means less taxes to pay for courts. And fewer accidents means more money in all of our pockets to spend elsewhere.

Many cities even find that it pays to have free bus service: Bozeman MT, Steamboat Springs CO, and Park City UT. Park City really wins the prize with every 10-minute service on its mainline from early in the morning until late at night. Park City parking is very limited; I wonder how much acreage and dollars would have been used if there had been no free bus service.

Hang up and drive!

The other day just as I was ready to step off the curb a pickup truck from a local institution turned right in front of me and pulled into the lot of the coffee shop I was heading for.

I thought the driver was someone I knew and I walked up to the driver's side to kid him about nearly running me over. The driver was on the phone and wasn't who I thought it was. I should have told him that he could have hit me, but I was too polite for my own good and said nothing more than "I thought you were somebody else."