I’ve been everywhere, man I’ve been everywhere, man Crossed the desert’s bare, man I’ve breathed the mountain air, man Of travel I’ve a’had my share, man I’ve been everywhere —Geoff Mack (recorded by Johnny Cash and others) “I’ve Been Everywhere”
I’VE BEEN EVERYWHERE words by Linda Zukauskas, photos by Bernie Meehan Jr.
WHY HIRE SOMEONE to spend 25,000 hours restoring a 1954 GMC PD-4501 Greyhound Scenicruiser bus? John C. Webb Jr. explains his reasons for doing so. “I fell in love with buses when I was 5 and my grandmother took me into New York City on a New Jersey Transit bus. I couldn’t get over how the driver was able to keep this big machine on the road. I was fascinated.” Years later, after Webb’s family moved, he regularly rode the bus from New York back to Pennsylvania to visit his grandparents. “My parents would put me in the front seat and ask the driver to keep an eye on me,” he says. “That was my first introduction to Greyhound, and it was all I needed.” Overland transport enjoyed a glamorous status in mid-century America. Men and women would wear their best clothes and hope to obtain seats on the Scenicruisers, which were designed by Raymond Loewy to evoke the romance of cross-country train travel in the dome cars of the era. Adding to the glamor and popularity of the Scenicruiser, a dapper Cary Grant stepped off of one in 1959 in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, just before the sequence in which Grant’s character is chased though a field by a crop duster. 46
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General Motors manufactured 1,001 GMC PD-4501 Scenicruisers from 1954 through 1956. These two-level coaches spent 20 years ferrying Greyhound passengers across the United States in luxury and comfort. The bus company described the ride as comparable to floating on air, thanks to the the rubber-nylon bellows at each of the 10 wheels. THE HUB OF NEW ENGLAND’S CAR COMMUNITY
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This is a life-long dream come true. I never thought I’d own Attention to detail in the shop has made all the difference at the show. Since the restoration, the a Scenicruiser, and now I’m in disbelief.” Siata has won at the Greenbrier Concours d’Elegance, Sunday in the Park, Radnor Hunt Concours d’Elegance, Atlanta Concours d’ Elegance, and more. SHOW-READY SIATA PHOTOS BY RUSS ROCKNAK
“It wasn’t uncommon to walk into a terminal in New York, St. Louis or Chicago and see lines of people waiting to go,” Webb says. “As one bus filled, another pulled up, with drivers waiting on standby to fill demand.” The Scenicruisers were manufactured exclusively for Greyhound by General Motors and used on long-haul runs. Webb knows his bus was first assigned to the New York-Miami run and estimates it traveled approximately 4 million miles from 1954 through the early 1990s. “These buses would do 100,000 miles a year,” he says. “Once everyone was off at a stop, the bus would go into a garage for fuel, clear the lav, and be on its way again 30 minutes later. Really, it’s anybody’s guess as to how many miles this bus has done.” Webb considers the design of the Scenicruiser something of an optical illusion. 48
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John C. Webb Jr., owner/operator
“These buses aren’t any taller than an average bus, but you feel as if you’re climbing high, and with all the glass, you can see all around. People loved that.” The upper level included space for an oversized luggage bay, which was large enough to hold a spare engine that could be delivered to a disabled bus. Greyhound eventually used the extra storage space to haul packages and increase its revenue. “When I was 10, my grandmother urged my grandfather to buy me a share of Greyhound stock,” Webb says. “I would read the annual reports to find out what the company was doing and its plans for the future. I still have those reports.” Webb relates the story of Carl Wickman, a former coal mine drill operator who opened a Hupmobile auto dealership in 1914 in Hibbing, Minnesota. Unable to sell any of the seven-passenger vehicles
in stock, he bought one and began transporting miners to and from work for 15 cents per ride. Thus he founded not just the first bus company but an entire industry. “The story I heard was that one miner told Wickman, ‘Your buses are so good and reliable, they run like greyhounds.’ The name stuck.” When he entered the workforce, Webb wanted a job driving for Greyhound, but he was too young; the minimum age for a Greyhound driver was 24. So, he went to work for Ritchie Bus Lines in Northborough, Massachusetts, before joining his family’s insurance business. While Webb enjoyed driving for Ritchie, visiting places he’d never seen before and bonding with passengers on his charter runs, there was really only one bus for him. “One day, a friend saw this bus for sale in a magazine. I got on the phone THE HUB OF NEW ENGLAND’S CAR COMMUNITY
and talked to the owner for an hour and a half before agreeing to buy the bus, sight unseen. I was so glad that I did, because I don’t see any for sale now.” For a decade, Webb struggled to find the help he needed to restore the bus. He was frustrated by broken promises and false starts before he found Matt Pfahl of Pfahl’s Mack & Antique Truck Restorations in Bethlehem, Connecticut. Preparing to cross three states to pick up the bus and transport it back to his shop, Pfahl loaded almost every piece of equipment he could grab, including a forklift. He nearly underestimated the job. “Most people buy a bus to convert it to a motor home,” Pfahl says. “First, they open the windows, which are hinged at the top for emergency egress, and toss out the seats and luggage racks. Next, because the seats are elevated, the typical WWW.MESHNEWENGLAND.COM
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Not content to just remember the rides of his youth, John C. Webb Jr. persevered for years to complete the award-winning restoration of his Scenicruiser. If you’re ever lucky enough to watch as the countryside slips past the bus’s panoramic windows, you’ll understand how, in the middle of the last century, the Scenicruiser elevated coach travel to a glamorous and luxurious experience.
ambitious owner cuts into the floor to make it even and maximize headroom. That’s when the unibody construction becomes structurally unstable. Usually, the empty bus is put out to pasture to rot.” Webb’s Scenicruiser had no wheels or axles. Pfahl and his team knew they couldn’t just roll it onto their trailer. Instead, they spent three hours with the forklift and other tools to shift the metal hulk onto dollies and then onto the trailer. They spent another five hours loading pallets of boxes packed with thousands of pieces, including trim and molding. With the sun setting behind one trailer filled with boxes and another holding the bus, Pfahl phoned Webb to announce, “I’m finished.” Pfahl laughs when remembering Webb’s response. “I had to stop him and tell him I meant I was done with the loading and we 50
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were ready to roll home. He was so happy that the restoration was actually going to start, he told me to take my guys out to dinner and celebrate.” Another seven years passed before Pfahl used the word finished again in reference to the Scenicruiser. His team of restoration specialists included Tom Davis, Jesse Dunlap, Tom Gereg, Bob Grandpre Jr., Bill Lockwood and Keith Wilcox. All 45 seats—43 passenger, one driver, and one toilet—were long gone, as were the person who had originally dismantled the vehicle and any documentation detailing where the parts should be reinstalled. Relying on years of restoration experience and the book Greyhound Scenicruiser by Tom McNally, the team first restored the floor and added new sheet metal to the exterior, using 45,000 rivets. Only 1,000 seats were originally pro-
duced for this model, and Pfahl pulled a few rabbits out of his hat to source the proper upholstery in a turquoise-andyellow combination for the front of the bus and black for the rear, with removable headrest covers. The luggage racks came from a donor bus. A Mexican fabricator needed three years to recreate the 19 pieces of curved glass and another year to replace pieces broken in transit. The flat glass was a little easier to obtain. It was manufactured by Plymouth Glass in Thomaston, Connecticut. Other components came from Arizona, Illinois, Kentucky and New York. General Motors’ design for the Scenicruiser specified twin 4-cylinder diesel engines. The idea was that if one engine failed, the other engine would provide enough power to deliver passengers safely to the nearest terminal. The configuraTHE HUB OF NEW ENGLAND’S CAR COMMUNITY
tion proved to be a failure shortly after the Scenicruisers went into service, which led to a legal dispute between General Motors and Greyhound. The problem wasn’t resolved until the Marmon-Herrington Company replaced the dual engines with one 8V71 Detroit V8 diesel paired with a Spicer four-speed manual transmission. In addition to those early engine woes, the Scenicruiser had air-conditioning issues. The system was pitted in a losing battle against the greenhouse effect caused by the abundant glass on board. Some bus operators resorted to painting the skylights white to mitigate the problem. The Scenicruiser buses were upgraded three or four times over their years of service during the middle of the 20th century, receiving new paint jobs to indicate their refreshed status in the marketplace. This particular restoration project WWW.MESHNEWENGLAND.COM
used the 1962 Super Scenicruiser livery that Webb remembers fondly. The paintwork consumed eight gallons of white paint and four gallons of blue. Extensive investigation went into finding the right decals, from the reflective Greyhound logo and lettering to the signs on the interior of bus cautioning that smoking was allowed but only where it was not prohibited by law. Next to the smoking sign is a plaque for the driver’s name. According to Webb, drivers wore full uniforms, including a hat that Greyhound mandated be worn as passengers were loaded or unloaded. The drivers commanded Webb’s respect, and not just for their professional appearance. “These buses are four-speed and a challenge to drive with two reardrive axles,” he explains. “To avoid grinding the gears on 38 feet of linkage, you
have to time a shift just right. You double clutch and listen to the engine. When it gets to just the right point, you can slip into the next gear and build up a rhythm where you don’t hesitate or miss. If you miss it, there’s a horrible noise and the passengers wonder what you’re doing.” Pfahl’s restoration earned Webb’s Scenicruiser the Antique Automobile Club of America’s National Bus Award in 2017, a First Junior award in 2017, and a Senior award in 2018 at the AACA Eastern Fall Meet in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Webb smiles when he looks at the bus now. “This is a life-long dream come true. I never thought I’d own a Scenicruiser and now I’m in disbelief. When we were five years into the project, I told Matt I didn’t know if I could keep going. But then, I figured I’d kick myself if I got as far as we did and quit. I’m glad I didn’t give up.”
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