Saturday Challenge: How Did I get to School?

Another challenge question from Randy Seaver's GeneaMusings: 

Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission Impossible music, please!):

1)  How did you get to your school(s) through high school?

That could be a quick and simple answer: the school bus.

Like the majority of the students in my rural school district, the bus stopped in front of my house in the morning and I got on. It stopped in front of the house in the afternoon and I got off. Rarely were there any designated bus stops in our district where a group of students congregated for the bus. In the rural areas houses are too far apart for that to happen. There was a fleet of somewhere around 20 school buses in our district. Additionally, students in the village, within roughly a mile of the school buildings, would walk to and from school. There weren’t a lot of “town kids”; they would probably fill up one to two more buses if they were loaded onto the bus.

Sometimes there were problems with the buses, but that wasn’t often and there would, of course, be a solution found. If a driver was sick, we would often be driven by the head of the bus garage or the mechanic. I think there might have been a small handful of substitutes available to drive as well.

I remember once in sixth grade, a group of the buses left before we got out of class to board them. We simply jumped on another bus and rode over to the high school to catch up to our buses. No problem, as they stayed there for 10-15 minutes to load the high school students. Except, somehow, the first few buses had already left there as well! One of them that had left was mine. I walked down the row of buses to the one that was now second in line and asked Mr. Nast if I could ride his bus home. His route criss-crossed with mine and actually went by our house.

Not counting appointments where I was picked up from school and such, I probably “missed” the bus about twice in my entire school career. The first time I actually had planned on not taking the bus home, however, my teacher didn’t know that. We were at a class in Syracuse for yearbook and she got us back to the school late. Pulling the suburban wagon up across the driveway, she blocked the exit so that most of the busses were forced to wait while we jumped out and got to our own buses. “Did I stop everyone’s bus? She asked. “Well, mine’s gone, but that’s okay.” I replied. “No. Actually yours is across the road,” a classmate joked. Looking over, the teacher laughed. Across the road sat a mini-motorhome camper. Knowing my family camped a lot, she realized that must be the “bus” my friend referred to.

 

Is this a bus? Someone said it was...

Another time I missed the bus was when a teacher kept us late during the last class of the day because of something one of my classmates had taken from another and would not return. I don’t remember who was involved, or what the item was. I just remember being annoyed as I rushed to my locker, grabbed my coat and books and dashed down the stairs and out the side door. My bus would normally be parked just a few feet beyond this door. Instead, that day I dashed out just in time to see the last of the line of buses making the turn onto Main Street. Sighing, I went to the pay phone near the main office to call for a ride. The phone was out of order and the secretary to the principal was in no mood to let me borrow her phone for a quick call home. Directly behind her was a window through which I could see the main driveway and here I saw my solution. “Never mind!” I called as I dashed out and headed for the back of the school. I actually arrived home before my bus even went by the house thanks to a timely fuel delivery made by my older brother to the school!