1950s School Bus Memories

by Doug Tibbetts

Getting to and from school in rural Maine is now taken for granted; everyone is assured that a big modern bus will pick up the students and deliver them to and from school in a very routine and un-eventful manner. That was not always the case.

In 1953, my very first bus was a 1940s Chevrolet limousine with four rows of seats. It was often called the “hot dog” bus, due to its elongated design. The bus was privately owned by Ralph Merrill and contracted by the town selectmen for the school year. This bus took care of half of the town of Stetson. A Chevrolet panel truck equipped with two wooden benches, one along each side in the cargo area, handled the other half of town.

Our limousine was a heavy vehicle and was pretty good in the snow if it had snow tires, but sometimes tire chains were needed since the roads were not sanded very often. Only the really steep hills received any sand, which was accomplished by hand, with two men shoveling it off with spades as a third man slowly drove the truck.

The operator of the limousine was usually Charlie, the teenage son of Mr. Merrill. He clearly relished the challenges of snow in the winter and mud in the spring. If he saw someone stuck in a ditch, he would stop the school bus and try to tow them out.

One very cold morning, the limo broke down out on Route 143 down by the Etna town line. Luckily, an empty pulp truck came by, and nine or ten students were loaded onto the back, with the two biggest kids placed on the sides to make sure nobody fell off during the five-mile ride to school. Mrs. Savage, the school’s cook, also took the bus each day, and she got to ride up front in the truck’s cab.

On the last day of school before the Christmas vacation, a house fire broke out just before the end of the school day. We were riding the “limo” bus down Route 143, in the same direction as the fire. Our teenage driver was so fast he caught up to a fire truck tanker headed to the scene from Corinna. He passed the fire truck, and we got to the fire first.

That first year riding in the limo was memorable for another reason, since it was also the year that the threeroom schoolhouse upgraded to indoor plumbing and an oil-fired furnace. The next year we had a different bus and new operator. The bus was a 1947 or ’48 Ford and was yellow in color and was constructed in what we consider to be the usual style for a school bus, but it was only about half as long as today’s school buses. The owner and operator, Harold Leeman, was a dairy farmer, and he had to milk his cows in the morning before leaving for his school bus route and again in the afternoon after completing the return route.

Perhaps those long hours made him a little grumpy. Regardless, he had his own methods of bus discipline that may seem a little unorthodox today. Sometimes he would make an unruly boy sit up under the dashboard between himself and the door. The poor lad would have to fold up a little to fit in there, and every time we hit a bump, the student’s head would bounce against the steel bottom of the dashboard.

In cold weather, he might require a troublemaker to sit on the doorsteps. That spot was especially frigid, due to the folding doors not closing very well and the lack of a heater in the bus. As we traveled along, he would ask the offender, “How do you like it down there?” If a student really tried his patience, he would stop the bus, and everything would go deathly silent, for we knew this was not going to be good. He would come up the aisle and grab the culprit by the scruff of the neck, pick him up and unceremoniously deposit him in a different seat with a certain degree of force.

Notwithstanding this personal brand of justice, all the boys would gladly lend a hand whenever the need arose, from helping to put on the tire chains, to filling in a washout caused by a heavy rain. There were additional duties on the way to school, such as picking up a fifty-pound bag of potatoes at Lewis Merrill’s farm and lugging the bag onto the bus, and later carrying it into the schoolhouse. Also, a five gallon can of whole milk had to be picked up at Henry Hartwell’s farm and delivered to the school kitchen.

The school cook, Mrs. Savage, still rode on the bus, and she was not the only extra passenger. One of our teachers, Mrs. Damon, was picked up at her residence and rode the bus for two years. We also frequently had Mrs. Leeman, our bus driver’s wife, along for the trip. After school we had one other task: Mrs. Savage and her husband Ben had some pigs at home, so we had to carry a small, galvanized trash bucket onto the bus with the lunch leftovers for (cont. on page 6)

(cont. from page 5) the pigs to munch on.

In the winter, snow was a problem, but then along came the spring thaw, and mud became the issue. The bus could usually muck its way through, except for one morning when we got hung up in a mud hole on the Lapointe Road. Mr. Leeman left us in the bus and walked about a mile to the nearest farm, owned by Howard Ells.

Soon our bus driver returned, riding on the drawbar of Mr. Ells’ John Deere model A tractor. They got a chain hooked up to the front of the bus, Mr. Leeman got back in the driver’s seat, and Mr. Ells began to pull. The big John Deere snorted, gave off a big puff of smoke, and to our delight, stalled. Mr. Ells jumped down from the tractor, took hold of the flywheel, and restarted the tractor. He was more aggressive with his second towing attempt, and the muck grudgingly released its grip on the old Ford bus.

This was the only time we had to be pulled out, but during the winters we had often pulled cars out of snowbanks, as Mr. Leeman always carried his own tow chain. There was another time we were pulled out and we were towed off the road to a nearby house with the aid of an antique Farmall F20 tractor.

However, there were other problems such as one afternoon on the Mount Pleasant Road when we met the Worthmore grain truck operated by Shirley Savage. The road was narrow due to the high snowbanks, and in the process of trying to slowly pass by each other, both the grain truck and the bus became stuck and couldn’t move without sliding into the side of the other. Mr. Leeman had a couple of the boys get out to do some shoveling and help put on the tire chains, enabling both vehicles to get out.

At the time, the State of Maine offered a 50-cent bounty on porcupines

— which were killing hemlock trees — and if Mr. Leeman saw one in a field or tree, he would stop the bus and allow several boys to run out and knock the destructive animal on the head to collect the reward.

A later driver of the bus, Fred Beem, always kept an eye open for deer as we drove along during hunting season. His rifle was clipped to the bus’s dashboard with the type of metal fastener designed to hold a broom handle, so the firearm would be secure yet ready for use. Mr. Beem never missed an opportunity to get a little free labor from the boys on the bus. One of his additional duties was to go down to Etna once a month to pick up the federal government’s surplus food allotment for the Town of Stetson. He would have three or four boys stay on the bus at the end of the afternoon run and take us to the Etna town hall. There, we would open the rear emergency door of the bus and load it up with all the food items. Another operation was to haul firewood home from where he was cutting it, so he would take us there at the end of his run to load up the bus. We would open the back door and pile the aisle full of wood all the way to the front, crawl in, and be dropped off at home afterward.

Mr. Beem hooked up an old car radio to the left of his seat. If you sat near the front you could hear the radio, adding another element to my wealth of memories about riding the Stetson school bus.