Lessons learned riding school bus last a lifetime. (original) (raw)

I learned everything I needed to know to get along in life while riding a yellow school bus.

My father, J.T. Trew, drove a Perryton school bus for many years during the late 1930s. This usually meant I was the first to get on the bus and the last to leave.

Although we lived only 15 miles from town, the bus route often covered more than 60 miles each morning and each evening. Since this was before Farm-to-Market highways were invented, the route was almost all dirt and when it rained became black gumbo mud.

Our first school bus featured padded bench seats along each side wall with the exhaust pipe running through the middle of the floor topped with a grill to keep from burning your shoes. You sat with feet braced against the grill to stay warm and to keep from falling off the bench.

As I matured, I learned about class distinction by staring out sitting just behind Dad during the first grade, then across the aisle in the second grade, back a row or two in the third, and finally graduating to freedom to sit where I liked during the fourth grade.

I learned about segregation when rowdy boys, couples a bit too loving, and friends making too much noise were ordered to distant, individual seating. Patience and endurance were acquired as the long, bumpy miles passed slowly beneath the wheels. At times, I felt as if I spent half of my life riding the bus, for in the wintertime we left before daylight and returned home after dark.

I saw discipline in action as Dad gave stern lectures, made others walk the last mile to their homes and once put two big boys off the bus to fight it out in the ditch while the rest watched through the windows.

Manners, etiquette and the powers of the opposite gender were taught as all of us said "Yes sir, yes ma'am," let the girls go first, all the while observing the girls could get by with almost anything.

Witnessing an act of sexual harassment and the resulting punishment left me impressed until today. A boy kept touching the posterior of a girl in the next seat ahead. After two unheeded warnings, a world history book flattened his nose flush with his cheeks and sent him to the hospital. That taught me every action could trigger a reaction and to keep my hands to myself.

Although the school bus journeys were long and arduous, it was much better than the lot of my parents who had to walk or ride horses to school, or my grandparents who were fortunate to get any education.

� Delbert Trew
"It's All Trew" - August 26, 2005 column