Outside of winter he made my brothers and sisters walk to school.
Why???
It builds stronger legs.
He was tough.

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for the first semester since the limited parking available did not allow first semester students to park "on campus," such as it was in 1982. My "favorite" part was driving through the parts of Newark that had burned in 1967 and had yet to be repaired, looking very much like the war zone that it had been. I actually remember seeing the smoke from the fires in 1967 in front of the family business one town over.
It was always great to dress warm in the winter to stand at the bus stop, only to swelter on the over-heated bus, and drawing complaints from other riders when I opened the window to breath. No more interesting interaction to report.

This was mainly to ferry kids who missed their primary bus. We also could not support a beef o Brady let alone red lobster so.You can imagine the ne’er do wells who would ride this: detention attendees, pot heads, jocks sent home from practice early for good reason.

But unlike the regular bus where there was a clear pecking order, the late bus was often a clash of the Titans. Why? It covered our entire city of 100k people so every ride was a potpourri of degenerates. Imagine the worst bus ride you ever took, put way more awful people on it, and then make the ride last 90 minutes.

That meant from time to time the meanest fucker from one bus would encounter the meanest fucker from another. Box cutters were pulled. Fingers were removed. Sex was had. I agree on the awesome will of the bus driver. I just remember thinking ours was blind because of his coke can lens.

Why I was on the bus more than once doesn’t matter. I close only promise g you that at one point I was challenged to a duel, I accepted, I won, and was banned from all buses for life. School was 10 miles away and my dad was proud I won but pissed about driving me to school until I got my license.

Ricky gallecki who had shot at my house with a 22 pistol never recovered his back pack that my friends threw into a river while I pummeled him. I would look him up on Facebook but I’m certain he’s dead.

Ps -
To this day there are no branded restaurants in new Britain ct aside from McDonald’s pop eyes etc.

There’s a reason I love you and it’s more than the vermin blood that courses through your veins.

I thought you made the name up like "Ricky Sanicky" (which is an awesome movie).

https://galeckilandscaping.com/avon-ct-landscaping

Someone called the cops as I had him on the ground. Fortunately I pled self defense and won. There’s a police report out there somewhere. Suck it Ricky. Thanks for calling my dad at work and telling him I owed “Jose $500 for the weed.”

Hopefully he learned his lesson.

We had about 5 or 6 kids from our street that would take the bus every morning. We called the bus driver 'Hot Rod Hernandez' because she treated speed limits like the mere suggestions they were, and hit the frost heaves on the back roads at full tilt. Every day was a thrill ride.

We all had the metal lunch boxes with the TV Shows painted across the stamped metal and the Thermos inside that took up too much space for a item that did not keep hot things hot or cold things cold and always smelt like ass by October. The only advancement they made with those lunch boxes was the buckle went from a metal clasp to a plastic latch that caught the lip of the lid. I remember I had Space 1999 and The Dukes of Hazzard. I am sure I had more, but those are the two I remember.

For some stupid reason we'd tee up the lunch boxes atop the storm drain at our stop and kick the ever-loving shit out of them, testing the limits of just how far a lunch box could fly. Bologna sandwiches, chips, and that stupid thermos would fly in all directions.

Here is our stop in 1977. That is me in my Toughskins denim tuxedo. The sleeves are rolled back because Mom always bought a few sizes too big. If you look closely you can see the lunch boxes lined up neatly behind us. Not sure if we'd started booting them when this photo was taken.

and a used Camaro.

When I was five, we lived in Athens.

Athens, Tennessee, that is. The kid next door at our previous house didn't believe there was any such place when I told him where we were moving: he insisted we were moving to Georgia. In his defense, Athens, Georgia, was about four times as large as its Tennessee counterpart in 1989. I don't know about the late 80s, but today the closest Red Lobster to Athens is about two counties away.

There weren't too many academic options in McMinn County at the time, so I started kindergarten that fall at North City. The town probably only had two elementary schools, and I have always assumed that this was the more northerly of the two. Whatever the case, my parents only had two kids at the time and it was a small town, so my Mom drove me to school in the mornings and picked me up in the afternoons.

As it turns out, we didn't stay in Athens long. We moved to Memphis at the end of October. There was just one thing I wanted to do before we left, though: ride the school bus.

I don't know why riding the school bus held such mystique. I knew kids at school who rode the bus, and I saw the buses come and go from the school parking lot. For whatever reason, riding the bus seemed like the thing to do, a great thrill I had been missing. So I asked if I could ride the bus home on my last day.

For some unknown reason, my mother said yes.

The great thing about being a kid is innocence. We usually think of that term in the sense of "not having done" a thing. But more fundamentally, it's about knowledge: innocence is not knowing how a thing comes about. Kids don't have innocence because they haven't committed crimes, they're innocent because they don't know how to commit them.

I was innocent that day: innocent about how school buses worked. And the bus driver was innocent too, because nobody had bothered to make whatever the arrangements are one makes to ensure that a kid gets dropped off at the right place by a school bus. (To this day I still don't know what that process entails.) I knew the school bus went near our house. And I watched out the window as lots of kids were dropped off right in front of their houses. So, with childlike faith and innocence, I concluded that the bus driver would somehow know to drop me right in front of my house. I thus watched with anticipation as he dropped two other kids at an intersection a few streets over from our house.

And then I watched with a tightening stomach as he drove past the turn to our house, away from our neighborhood, and dropped the rest of the elementary-school children. At some point towards the end of that process, he realized that I wasn't on his route and hadn't gotten off at the most sensible place (and that I had no idea what to do with myself at this point). But he had a whole route of high schoolers to drop off, so he couldn't do anything with me right then. So I rode all over McMinn County huddled in a corner with a bus full of high school kids around me.

Eventually I was able to tell the driver where on the route I lived and he took me home. I don't recall whether my mother was terrified at the delay or simply assumed that school buses took a really long time. To this day I worry about knowing where the stops are when I get on a train or bus.

the only other "chain" type of burger place back in the '70's in Vince Boryla's hometown, was... Chicken Unlimited. Ours looked like this one in Illinois.

McDonald's and Burger King would arrive, but not until in the 1980's. McD's has rebuilt but is in the same spot to this day; the BK is now a Wendy's.

Back to the bus: My friends and I walked to and from school, to avoid the type of bus-ride drama so aptly described by the OP Bruno. It was only a mile away, and only the junior high school was "so far away." Just two years. Elementary school and the high school were two blocks from the house, at most.

For some reason it was a badge of damned honor to get on the bus first. Maybe it's because Michigan Winters are cold and the bus was at least luke warm. The bus stop varied from year to year based on the whims of some administrator and which way the bus was to proceed through my neighborhood. But people would line up early just to be FIRST! Or, in the case of the pain in the ass girls down the street, who could see the bus stop from their house, they would run out and plop their book bag down to be first and then run back inside. This was likely to earn their bags a kick out of place by the next person who appeared at the stop.

Yes, your bag determined boarding order. Because your parents would kick you out of the house 20 minutes before the bus arrived because Mom just wanted some peace and quiet to go with Good Morning America. Once your bag was in line, and you didn't go hide inside from the elements like a sissy, you were free to engage in spirited games of marbles or tag. Marbles had itself own Lord of Flies like set of rules.

There was a year younger than me in the neighborhood named Shane. We called him Shane the Pain. He's probably still an asshole.

Minus the games, this kind of repeated itself for the separate busings of K-6 and then 7-12. Luckily for me, I lived only a mile from the high school and was considered within walking distance. Therefore, no one in my neighborhood was permitted to board the bus. It could be pouring down rain and the bus would drive right past you.

But minus those days, I'm not sad that I didn't have to ride it.

We didn't have a McDonald's in our town until 1989. Red Lobster...shit.

No one had backpacks at ND when I was there. We all had book bags. They had a rubberized interior with an olive drab exterior, made out of a canvas-like material that once it began to rip, total collapse was not far behind.

Professors, teacher's aids, and graduate students carried briefcases. I don't recall regular students sporting them. We students were like members of Easy Company hustling to take out the German machine guns and 88s (They were 105s!) at Brecourt in Normandy, "Weapons and Ammo only!" We weren't like our children in the late 80s and 90s who had backpacks with every damn book for the whole day inside, risking lower back injury and pinched nerves and collapsed disks - all before puberty!

We carried one or two books in our book bags ("Weapons and Ammo only!") and the main risk we lived with was some Engineering student picking up our book bag with our Sociology or Freshman English books in it and us being left with his undecipherable Freshman Biology notes and his drawings of the bar-eyed and straight eyed drosophila melanogaster fruit flies that looked like something a drunk Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí cooked up after six hours of partying on the Costa del Sol while eating eels and drinking Sangria.

Our crappy book bags invariably got ripped and soaked when manhandled by students who moved our bag off a hook in the South Dining Hall in favor of one for themselves and by the time we sorted through... not ours... not ours... not ours... Ours! we would sling ours onto our preferred shoulder and brave the elements of raw and frozen Northern Indiana and "soldier on" into the wind, the sleet, and the snow, our brows set low against the steel-gray gloaming, hoping that we are prepared for the spot quiz that our professor will spring on us while we are thinking about the creamy thighs of that St. Mary's girl who smiled at us at the last mixer and who we hope will grace us with a date at some time in the near future and who will click-clack the heels of her penny loafers on the gleaming entry floor of the Le Mans Hall foyer in a rapid pace to match the beat of our lonely heart as she walks toward us, back straight, eyes bright, and with just a hint of a smile to quicken our soul as a phalanx of pinched-face nuns side-eye her with slitted eyes, suspicious about what is on the pretty coed's mind and whether she is saying a Hail Mary as she strolls toward that Notre Dame man who is thinking about "you know what."

bag with a draw string from the last trip to JC Penney's

is the Red Lobster out on the 46 Bypass by the mall. You had to get there by 5 PM to avoid a one hour wait.

Those Cutters are very seafood savvy.

And it was a Shane who gave it to me after I commented about his thick cigarette smell radiating off of him. He did have a sweet ink drawing of a Poison album cover on the back of his Rustler jean jacket though

"Shane"

"Snake bite"

I gots to know...

It’s hilarious that I also had a delinquent named Shane on my bus like Bruno describes. Not a big kid, but meaner than shit and began smoking in kindergarten.
We called a snake bite when you would grab the forearm of someone with both hands and grip and twist so hard that the arm hair would rip out. I’m sure other people called it something different, but I’m certain that in my day it was a popular way of minor torture on most school busses across the country

Yeah, I've had that "Indian burn" twist on my forearm. Hurt like hell.

Shane is a good name. I remember Alan Ladd as "Shane" in the movie of the same name.

Boys in the 1950s saw all kinds of masculine black and white movies that inspired us. "Shane" was one of them. "Don't go, Shane!" We all identified with that kid.

At the same time, we had some black and white cowboy movies that caused us no end of trauma. For me, it was one where Jack Palance was a bad guy who met his end at the business end of a pitchfork inside a barn. I mean, did I really need to see him get impaled by a pitchfork against the inside of a barn wall?

Damn.

I do have a good Jack Palance story, however. Back when I worked for Bolthouse Farms, we were subleasing acreage to a company, based in the mountains up in Tehachapi, that grew sod for sale to the big box stores who then sold it to homeowners and landscapers.

The guys who owned the company took me and my supervisor out to lunch. They were going to sublease quite a bit of acreage out in the Lancaster/Palmdale area of Los Angeles County from us. They wanted the property that we had recently converted to pivot irrigation. The Lancaster/Palmdale area is quite windy and carrot acreage, once planted with those millions of tiny seeds, has to stay moist and pivots can move back and forth and keep freshly planted acreage moist. Carrot seed is tiny and is planted only 1/4 inch below the surface of the soil. Once you put water on the seeded acreage, it has to stay moist to germinate. If it gets hot and/or windy, the soil and seed can dry out and the seed will die and there goes your crop.

So, we are at lunch with these guys and they start to talk about Cummings Valley up near the Tehachapi State Prison. That's their main growing acreage and they need to expand. Everyone knows everyone in Cummings Valley. One of the residents was Jack Palance. They got along just fine with Jack. Jack was married and would sometimes get a bit sideways with his wife. One time, the two sod partners were having lunch at Jack's house. Sandwiches and a few beers. Jack's wife walks in with a 10 pound bag of kibble for their two huge dogs that were inside the house. She cuts the top of the bag of kibble open and pours it all out on the floor. The dogs start in on it. Jack turns to the guys and says, "That's how she likes to feed the dogs."

She sits down with Jack and they guys and she and Jack start knocking more than a few beers back. They get into a loud argument and Jack says, "Fuck it! Let's go, guys!" The guys follow Jack outside and Jack says, "I'll see you guys later. I'm headed for the other side of the Valley!"

The guys leave in their pickup and Jack peels rubber out of his place. I'll call it "Ranch House A," because there is a "Ranch House B" on the other side of Cummings Valley. When Jack and the wife get into a nasty spat, one of them will leave and go to their other house at the other end of the Valley for a few days. One of them will move back in with the other one after a few days. Two houses. One leaves when things get hot. No violence that way. I guess that's one way to handle an argument.

Cummings Valley. There is Cummings Mountain up there, as well, I met the men of the Cummings family back in the early 80s. The son that I met was in banking. He was having a party up at his family ranch. My first wife and I went to the party and I got to meet his father. He was a silver-haired cattle rancher. Compact. Well-built. No fat on him. I wandered through the house and saw his diploma from St. Mary's College in Moraga (East Bay not far from Oakland). My son is an alum. I saw him in his football uniform. This was back when St. Mary's was a respectable football power.

I saw the team photo with their coach. It said "Slip Madigan." Slip played for Rockne at ND.

Slip also took that team back to New York and beat a well-respected Fordham, that featured the "Seven Blocks of Granite," a line that included Vince Lombardi.

I spoke with Mr. Cummings about his days at St. Mary's. He loved Madigan. I felt quite at home up at the Cummings Ranch that day, talking about football and Slip Madigan and Notre Dame.

Sometimes, when the weather is clear and I can see Cummings Mountain peek through our Valley haze, it doesn't take much for my mind to think of Rockne and his wide, wide influence, even all the way to Cummings Valley.

I was a likely victim, not a perp.

I once observed a friend who had found a really sweet smoking jacket at goodwill for $1 trade said jacket for a bag of weed.

Another time, Crazy Joe, who was prone to getting bloody noses, decided to take said nose blood and use it to decorate his face and arms with Indian style war paint in addition to painting crude messages on the windows.

I rode a bus that served two Catholic grade schools, the Catholic HS, and a couple Lutheran grade schools. It was a contract with the city, so we road regular city busses, not school busses.

The biggest issues we had were nerdier kids getting picked on and middle school kids saying and doing stupid shit because they were starting to notice that some of the girls were pretty cute.

Mornings were more subdued because we were getting picked up around 6:45 AM to 7 AM. (School started at 7:45 AM) I played sports, so I only rode the bus home on game days or in between sports. I did get to witness this epic exchange. There was a very nerdy 7th grader. He got picked on a lot and tried to give it back but that just made it worse. His last name was "Keener" and everyone called him "Peener" referring to his allegedly small equipment. Every once in a while, our school would put a teacher on the bus to monitor behavior. (Non-union teachers) The main bully was named Chizek. He started in on Peener and our female gym teacher, who was also a coach had had enough. She went off on the kid telling him that Chizek sounded like "Cheese Dick" and how does that feel. She must have called him Cheese Dick 5 times.

I realize that may not be appropriate and she'd get fired today. Regardless, she instantly earned the respect of every kid on the bus and throughout the school. Peener still gets called Peener to this day, but he owned the name and he didn't get bullied much after that. Chizek's parent's found out he got punished. He was still a jerk. Probably still is. He will forever be "Cheese Dick" to most of his contemporaries. The teacher was hired away and made a principal in the local public system. Things seemed to work out.

that gym teacher rocks. kk rocks.

My parent's gave me two bus tokens for the day and off I went from Rose Street to Orcas to go to St Edwards in Seattle. That would be unthinkable today fro more than the fact that St Ed's closed down (Seattle).

As a child, you don't worry about those things, Apparent as a three or four year old I would ride trike around and call out the bus stops to downtown Seattle. Weird child.

1) Hair spray is highly flammable
2) Vinyl bus seats don't burn, but if you use enough hairspray, you can smooth out the embossed pattern
3) Cigarette lighters when pressed into hot vinyl make a pattern similar to a happy face
4) Farm girls a few years older than you with big hair and cigarettes can be a little intimidating at first, but pretty nice once you get to know them

Please keep it up. My favorite detail is the vertical blinds. Very evocative.

One thing you omitted is the enhancement (I initially wrote improvement but I’m not sure it’s an improvement) of the language that comes from riding the bus.

I say this as a guy who never rode the bus. I walked to my catholic school and all other schools throughout my childhood. I lived in a cow town that wasn’t big enough for me to need bussing. The farm kids needed bussing (and the kids from east of town were struck by a train on their way to school in 1961–the source of the requirement that school busses stop at railroad crossings).

My wife, on the other hand, rode a bus every day of her life in a variety of New Jersey burgs and burroughs and had the same feeling as your parents—get the kids on the bus.

I’ll never forget my son’s first day on the bus as a six year old (having unfortunately gone to a private kindergarten he had to wait an extra year to enjoy this institution). My wife asked him how his day was and he said “Good. Mom what’s a “fuck”?” I froze, completely uncertain where to go from there. In my house as a child, any expletive brought a rapid retribution—usually a slap to the face/head. I chose not to take that path with my kids but was uncertain how to proceed.

My wife proved her mettle that day—she remains what I consider to be THE model mom for a number of reasons but she was built for moments like this.

As I sat there speechless, she simply said “can you use that in a sentence?” Goddam genius.

The boy responded “this kid on the bus told me to ‘shut the fuck up and I didn’t know what a fuck was or how to shut it”.

She explained that fuck has a lot of meanings and that it was a private word that shouldn’t be repeated in front of teachers or other adults.

My kids swear like sailors and I’m certain their time on the school bus is the reason. I remain jealous of those who were lucky enough to ride the bus.

I don't care what anyone says - riding school buses is some hardcore Lord of the Flies shit.

It doesn't matter if the kids are eating lunch at school with the crusts cut off their sandwiches or if they are stealing lunch money from each other the moment they get on the bus and are giving each other noogies under the seats and at least one kid throws up on the way to school because he's being pantsed by the bully du jour.

Kids are animals and they like to torture each other.

My son, Nicholas, wasn't enjoying his first few weeks on the bus. One of the boys decided to mouth-torture him and started calling him "Nickelodeon." I asked him what the boy's name was. "Joseph," he said.

"OK. That's shit's gonna end tomorrow." I said.

"How, Dad? It really bugs me."

"No sweat, Son. Watch what happens when you call him something that he's not used to."

"OK."

School ended. Nick walked in the door all smiles. "How was the bus?" I said.

"Great."

"So, what happened?"

"Well, he started in with 'Nickelodeon,' and started to laugh. I said, 'How ya doin, Josefina?' He said, 'Stop calling me that!' I said, 'You stop calling me Nickelodeon and I'll stop calling you Josefina.' We shook on it and now we're friends."

"Good," I said. "I wish all of life's problems were that easy to solve."

Nicholas Kovacevich and Joseph Candle remained close friends until they went their separate ways at 8th Grade graduation.

My kids live a pretty care-free life and are do-gooders because that's what their parents are/were. The bus helps toughen them up to a degree. Every dirty word, crude gesture, and mean put-down they have learned has come from the bus. I use it as a "how does this make you feel" situation to try to help them decipher right from wrong and how to make tough choices when the only adult there just has the responsibility of getting everyone home alive.

So far, four years in, I love it.

My favorite bus story this year actually comes from a superintendent decision. Here in CT we were at 92% totality for the eclipse. At first our school was going to give out glasses and take all of the kids outside to view it. After many parents complained, it was decided that they would not take the kids outside. Instead, they would learn about it inside and then be handed glasses on the way out of school. At 3:30pm. At the height of the eclipse. Many parents picked up their kids early, the rest rode the bus.
Essentially "we wash our hands of this, the bus will handle it." To your last line I would concur, and add that drivers across this nation were tasked with driving their 10-ton containers full of feral animals during the eclipse, doing exactly what a school full of teachers and administrators would not.

Reading your post I had a horrible flashback with the line, "how does this make you feel."

The psychologist who taught pastoral counseling absolutely hated that line. Mentioning it in class or mentioning it in one of our videotaped counseling sessions (where we were counseling a volunteer) merited a long diatribe on how that phrase was so evil.

I can hear it now, "No one can control your feelings. Those are under your (their) own control. Etc., etc."

I will be sending you a bill from my counselor.

wo-man!

I'm letting it attract more quality responses, then I'll put the whole thing in

The only thing I'd add that I experienced in a town where we had to drive 45 miles to the nearest Red Lobster (my consolidated school district has multiple Dollars General and municipal bars though) are the nonconsensual sexual encounters experienced by a boy who was too afraid to speak up.

In 6th grade, a girl without a dad at home decided she needed to try kissing and that I wouldn't fight back. I'd never spoken to her and never have. I think she now has 3 kids who don't have their 3 dads at home.

In 8th grade, the richest girl in 3 towns who hated her dad decided to sit next to me and feel me up to see if she could noticeably excite me while her friends watched. I think she's mellowed after some wild high school and college years.

Of course, we're about a decade late on most trends. Napoleon Dynamite had that right about small towns.

Early 80's Texas... I'd walk 5 minutes from my house to an elementary school. We'd then all get on a bus for the 30 minute bus ride to the literal other side of the tracks.

The bus ride sucked, and we had to get up extra early to catch the bus. I learned many of the same lessons as Bruno.

Even at a young age I could see the value of integration. While I hated when I'd see my mom in school, my parents and my buddies' parents simple had more resources to invest in their kids' school. Any time a volunteer was needed, it was our moms we saw up at school. If something bad was happening or there were insufficient resources, you can bet your ass that my mom was up there meeting with the school.

and one day decided to slash and cut up the back of the seat in front of us. That made the newspaper and within weeks there were camera boxes on all of the busses. Sadly, they couldn't afford cameras for all the busses so it rotated and taller people (like me) could see when the camera was in there and when it wasn't.

I saw a guy get a handjob on the bus and heard lots of gang conversations.

I lived on a private golf course and rode the bus (6th-8th grade) with known gang members and people who are in jail today for drug-related offenses. Half of my bus was relatively affluent passengers and the other half had mustaches and probably were held back 1 or 2 times.

This was not her choice and I'm not proud that we called her that, even if no one once ever called her that to her face. We were suburban classist little shits.

Well done!

What were triggered are memories. I rode the bus from 5th grade right through to graduation from high school—eight years and, for the most part, I traveled with the same kids year after year.

Dad didn’t think it was important that I have a car, but Mom paid the price. It was she who had to pick me up from after-school practices. We lived west of town on the other side of the South Platte River, and it was a long distance from our house to the high school. I walked home from time to time, but it was a haul. Because it was a fair distance to school, we were picked up quite early (0720) in order to arrive in time for the first bell (0830).

I have only a dim recollection of the bus drivers, but my memories of the kids who rode the bus are vivid. The kids who rode the bus that serviced Platte Canyon Road before it looped through Columbine CC were farm and ranch kids who lived west of town on the other side of the river. We were often treated to country music duets sung by Roberta Rutledge and Nancy Simms as we rode along. Nancy had a big voice like Reba McEntire and a personality to go along with it. I had the hots for her right through sixth grade, but my affection was never reciprocated.

Then, there was Rita Dickenson. For as long as I knew her, and we rode the school bus together for 8 years, Rita wore her hair in a single, long pigtail. I often conspired to sit behind her so I could pull it. It was irresistible. How ironic it was that 10 years later, Rita and I would find ourselves in Medford, Massachusetts, both of us grad students at Tufts University, Rita at the med school and I at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy. Rita practiced pediatric medicine in Boston for her entire professional life.

before that I lived literally 2 blocks from my Catholic grade school in West Palm Beach so I walked. When we moved to Houston and went to public school I rode the bus most of the time, sometimes road my bike to school and did some car pooling as well.


But I can honestly say I never experienced a single thing that you mentioned. It was just a bus ride, nothing more.

That is a major metropolis around here.

How about not big enough to support a Dairy Queen?

But two stand out: (1) that my sons weren't able to attend an all-boys Jesuit school, and (2) that my kids have never ridden a bus to school.

The bus to St. Greg's in Williamsville was C-120. Basically, all my first notions about sexual congress, what it required, and the appropriate terminology for it were formed on that bus. When I was in 4th grade, for example, there was a very knowledgeable 6th grader who confidently told us all what "cunting" was (referring to male ejaculate) and how we'd soon have wet dreams, during which we'd "cunt" and have to wash our sheets. To this day, I have not heard anyone speak with such authority on any subject.

The high school bus was really just for psychological and physical brutality. Most kids from the suburbs got a ride downtown to school from an older sibling or neighborhood kid, or from their parents. But all the freshman were expected to ride the bus for the first couple of weeks of school just so they could be initiated by the upper classmen. If you were lucky, you just had to push a penny down the aisle with your nose. Worse were the nut-taps and charley horses. A plus was that a lot of the earlier-created confusion around sexuality and related terminology was cleared up, with the boasts of upper classmen who claimed to have had already done some blind fumbling around the back of a car with some chick from Niagara Falls.

None of these buses had seatbelts.

Lester was a cranky old man who would have rather have had a red-hot poker inserted into any bodily orifice than interact with a child. He may have been one of the MIA Alcatraz escapees.

Noise on the bus was forbidden. One day a few kids were pretty wound up and couldn’t keep quiet. Lester decided to deal with it the only way he knew how. He pulled the bus over in some neighborhood not on the normal route, turned the engine off, and refused to move until “you kids shut the hell up!” So, there we sat for over an hour while a few of the kids kept tittering on and off. I think finally one kid may have threatened to pee on the floor and Lester finally fired ‘er up.

Nothing like the 1980s for mass kidnappings.

it.
My first week in 1st grade the 8th grader up the street invited me to the back - he then proceeded to stuff me into his gym bag just to see if I fit. I did...he let me out about 10 mins later. I stayed away from the back of the bus until 7th grade.

I took the bus to high school for one year (then got in a carpool). I walked to grade school.

Our town was big enough for a Red Lobster but they hadn't been invented yet.

Fucking bravo