One of the best decisions I have ever made was to marry a country girl. Although we now live “in town,” she can change tires and isn’t afraid to drive in the snow. An additional benefit to marrying a country girl is that said spouse usually has “relations” who still live out in the unspoiled wilderness, and said wilderness often hides some silently decaying pieces of American industrial art, like this old Ford bus that my grandfather-in-law drove into the woods one day and just parked.
At one point in time, the bus that is the crux of this story probably looked much like the one pictured above. I’ve always been fascinated by school buses, and this one is the best of the lot that has been my school bus loving life. Considering that my formative years were spent riding in green vinyl style atop the chassis of 70s and 80s International and Chevy-based kid haulers, that should come as no surprise.
The first thing that strikes me about the Ford bus is that it couldn’t have held nearly as many children as modern ones do, which is probably by design, considering that a basically stock 221-inch flathead pulled this 1-1/2 ton people mover down the road.
Unfortunately, there is precious little information floating around the automotive universe regarding school buses, but I will take an educated guess that this particular one has a Wayne bus body. I’m not even 100% certain of the exact year of this bus, as the title proclaims it to be a 1936, but the hood sides are from a 1935 model. The hood sides are interchangeable, however, so that could have happened any time in the bus’s history.
But I digress. My wife’s grandpa, Carl, bought this bus to use on family camping trips. Like many men in mid-20th century America, Carl had a large family that included a wife and six children. This old school bus would have been the perfect vehicle for transporting people and supplies, and I’m certain Carl used it for hunting trips and who knows what else. I’m sure it’s filled with stories that can no longer be told.
In contrast to my in-laws, my wife and I live on a 100×48 lot with a big garage, a big house, and a bunch of old cars. There’s little room to park anything that doesn’t run or pull its weight. Therefore, I’ve always been jealous of those who live in open rural spaces, because at some point (about 1970, according to my wife’s late grandmother, Peg), Carl just drove the behemoth a few hundred yards behind his house and shut off the engine for the last time. And there it sat. The forest grew up around it and boxed it in.
For the next 40 odd years, the bus became a coop for small animals like rabbits, and a playhouse for the family’s kids and grandkids, including my wife. Another benefit to living in a country family is that nobody is all that afraid of dirt and tetanus; just get yourself outside and burn off some of that energy! Who needs video games when you have a ’30s school bus to play in? Sadly enough for the old bus, some of that playing must have included some glass smashing, because this old thing is as open to the elements as a dugout.
But what a place to play! Modern society may not completely understand what they’ve lost as they’ve allowed art for art’s sake to fade from their everyday lives. In the 1930s, a school bus dashboard was a work of art that someone toiling away in a design department drafted with one goal: beautiful functionality. Modern gauge clusters are soulless video games compared to the elegant simplicity of a 1930s dashboard. Perhaps they must be that way; the quest for safety has rightly or wrongly stolen the soul from the machine.
In 2008, there was talk around the family that one of the neighbors wanted to scrap the old bus, since scrap prices were really high at the time, so I was compelled to go wander around the battered machine. I’m fairly itinerant after a few sedentary hours, so a walk around the woods is a pleasure anyway. I kept thinking of ways I could save this majestic old beast from the torch, from the crusher. I tried to make a case for dragging it out of the woods and slowly fixing it, but as you can see from the pictures, it was sunk to its axles on the driver’s side, and that thick sheetmetal was ravaged by time, as all things are.
The engine had sat without a carburetor for years, draining that old devil moisture into the long opened intake valves, permanently welding piston rings to cylinder walls in a slow dance of death. The transmission was locked in gear. The glass was all gone. I am a public employee, and even if there would have been a certain poetic justice to a school teacher driving around in a classic school bus, the assets and liabilities columns just didn’t add up, family sentiment or no.
So my wife and I just stood out there taking pictures. My wife thought of her late grandpa. I thought of Henry Ford and his enigmatic personality, and how mellow a flathead sounds through twice pipes. The breeze fluttered through the trees, birds chirped, and somehow the bus didn’t seem out of place. Rusting sheet metal commingled with green earth in a perfectly natural way. The bus was at home. The thought of it going to the scrappers was blasphemous to me, but I always try to understand that many people don’t share my attachment to machinery. Some see just a bucket of rusty bolts.
I convinced Peg to let me try to sell it, and she agreed. Although there was interest, nothing worked out. It was probably for the best. I can’t imagine trying to pull this stuck block of metal from the forest, through the trees, up a hill.
All, however, is not lost. The scrapping never happened, for whatever reason. Peg passed away over a year ago, and a family member bought the house. Who knows what time will bring for the bus, but for now, it’s safe in its forest haven, returning to the dirt from whence it came, many years ago. This is good news for me, as there’s a personal museum a few hundred yards back into the forest that I can visit when the fancy strikes me. Although this bus may never again see the road, sometimes art possesses as high a purpose as pragmatism, and I’m happy that this particular example is rusting away in peace.
Lovely read. For some reason, this thing ought to remain where it is, as it is. Few things are more fun than discovering something like this when walking in the woods. How nice that it’s still in the family.
You couldn’t pay me to enter it in the summer though — nothing freaks me out more than wasps, hornets, bees, etc.
“…with a bingity-bang like a thousand tin cans…”
So that’s what happened to good ol’ Buseby, the Bingity-Bangity School Bus.
What a fantastic old bus. I’d agree that it isn’t a reason restoration project but that front grill and fenders could be the start of a hot rod.
Twenty years ago, my brother in law had a bachelor uncle who lived in the farmhouse where he was born. He was a bit of a hoarder, and when he got done with a car, it would get hauled out into the woods and left there. I wish I would have paid more attention to them. He eventually died, and all of his stuff got auctioned.
The only cars I remember were a 36 Plymouth sedan in the woods and a 71 Chevy clamshell wagon up by the house that he used as a sort of storage container. There were quite a number of old cars, trucks, tractors and old implements out in that woods.
It is sad to think that this old bus was running when it was parked. I wonder if the old guy really knew that this would be the bus’s final resting place, or if he intended on doing something with it “one of these days”.
He wasn’t a “one of these days” kind of guy. It outlived its usefulness, so he parked it. He probably thought it wasn’t worth much at the time, and it would make a good playhouse.
anyone === PLEASE HELP ME;;;;;;; is this bus for sale or one like it where is it thanks; will in tft worth.tx chupisalicia940@yahoo.com
1935 Wayne School Bus
9500 obo
needs restoration.
dikmickle@hotmail.com
looking to buy a old 1930’s school bus – PLEASE HELP
This one’s not mine to sell, and the family doesn’t want to sell it. Sorry…
I am restoring a bus exactly like that. Mine is a 1937 Wayne body i am missing a few side panels. Whats the odds of the bus still being there!!
my email is stosh@snet.net let me know thanks
I am not sure if you will read this but my dad and I have 2 of these. One is drivable and the other we are putting back together as a hot rod. It is a thrill to drive the one and the other should be just as fun.
Brady Oberman Ozark, Arkansas
There was a guy that lived down to road from me that was a hoarder too. When he passed away a few years back they cleared his property of brush and uncovered a ’64 Dodge wagon, a ’79-’80 Pinto wagon, an ’88-91 Tempo, and a ’96-’99 Taurus sedan, all stuffed to the gills with crap.
Ah, buses. I missed a great one the other day, by just a few minutes. It was a ’60 or ’61 GMC full-size shorty, surprisingly rust-free and with tons of personality. But I was without my camera, and by the time I saw it there was already a pair of forks piercing its windows.
A crying shame, to say the least. It would have made one hell of a camper.
What part of the country do you live in? This bus looks good for being outside for 40 years, I thought it would have rusted more by now. There are a few vehicles like this in the wood around where I grew up and most of those either had or have a hermit in them or Hippies. Yes Hippies, there is a group of them that played the system to their advantage, quit the rat race, ripped off their clothes, and ran off into the woods to live in old buses, campers, and other dwellings. They are somewhat (in)famous where I come from, but we do not talk about it much since the Hippies like their privacy.
I remember the Scrap Dash of 2008. All the rusted out and/or crappy domestic vehicles and foreign vehicles plus anything worth money being dashed to the local scrapper. I saw cars being towed with rope up and over hills, cars with no plates and no insurance being tailgated (so the cops do not see the lack of rear plate) and sometimes pushed by a friend in a vehicle that had plates and insurance. One of my classmates wised up and just put a random license plate on the rear of whatever vehicle was being got rid of. I did about 6 scrap runs in 2010 and only got 20-30 dollars a load, but the next year similarly weighted loads could have netted me about$60. Oh well, the junk was cluttering up the yard and mama was really getting tired of it all sitting there.
We’re in mid-Michigan. I think the bus is worse than it looks in the pictures. Lots of thin sheetmetal.
Where at?
I love running into old vehicles in the woods. When I was a kid in Iowa, they were everywhere. Seems like that’s just what country folks mostly did with their worn out vehicles.
Fighting the forces of entropy is an endless war, and we need to pick and chose our battles wisely; like you have.
Saving everything would be exhausting!
I still find a lot of old vehicles hidden away in the Iowa wilderness. Most of them pop up when I’m hunting pheasants, as that activity requires plowing through the edges of fields and ditches; pheasants and old steel gravitate to the same places.
An “urban wilderness” was just bequeathed to my city by an elderly woman. After much lobbying, it was designated as a conservation area by the state government, and thus made untouchable by development. Because I had long ago hiked the woods, I knew that there was a ’57 Chevy sedan half buried deep in a ravine on the property. I went back to hike again a couple weeks ago (legally this time) and sure enough, down among some scrubby pine and oak trees, the Chevy was still there. As it sat about halfway down a steep hill, I assume it outlived its usefulness and someone just pushed it off the edge. It would be totally unfeasible to rescue it due to it’s condition and location, so I assume it will stay there forever, slowly rotting into the ground. The thought comforts me.
Going by the grille its a 35 model, it could be saved its no worse than some other things Ive seen restored but those were much more rare 35 Fords arent exactly valueable to the order of what a rebuild would cost in time and effort.
In my junior-high-school years our school district still was operating a 1937 Ford bus as a fill-in vehicle. Since it was quite a bit shorter it had less capacity for passengers, and a lot of us would end up standing in the aisle. I remember the flathead working pretty hard under load.
For a few years Harold LeMay used a similar bus for transporting people between venues for the last-Saturday-in-August annual open house, along with a couple of old London double-deckers.
My favorite woods find, next to an old, forgotten cemetery just off Cedar Mountain Battlefield in Culpeper, VA.
An interesting read.. I can appreciate the fact that you never have to say goodbye to your old machinery when you’re land rich.
Great story… I mean another great story. I look forward to your next one!
Thank you for the compliment…
I bought this 59 chev (26foot/viking body) from an old farmer in Kansas. He had been hunting in northern Texas when a piston broke. Several quarts of oil later he got home and parked it. One heart attack later he sold it to me for $500. I replaced the six with a 350 and enjoyed it a lot for 2-3 years. Pass anything but a gas station and gearing/torque enough to pull down medium sized trees (I expect).
Teaching is adequate pay but not the best. Couldn’t afford it and wound up selling it last year to someone who wanted a camper. This was the last view of it as it left my house on the hook. No air in those tires and it still didn’t look flat.
It’s last few years with me it was a storage building so I think I did well to sell it. Looks much better now.
please help”””’ I want buy a vintage bus like this one will bray = prefer call 940-395-7222 or chupisalicia940@yahoo.com
Don’t get rid of it or let someone turn it into a hot rod. VERY FEW fully restored or running unrestored and period-accurate school buses are out there. Lots of city buses and coach buses, but no love for the school bus.
The engine and transmission can be saved, no problem. Several treatments and hammering with some motor oil and diesel dumped into the cylinders will unstick it. The diesel will eat away at the rust and grime, and the oil will lubricate the cylinder walls, allowing it to move, and then rebuilding can be possible.
I would like to buy the crank pulley from the bus engine if it’s available I’d make it worth while.