I mentioned last week we might make a stop on the way to the next car, proper, and here we are—before I get too old in this rough chronicle to ride the school bus.
We moved to Denver when I was four, and it wasn’t long before I was enrolled at a preschool poshly called The Willows Child Learning Center. There was classwork in arithmetic and reading-readiness, there were swimming lessons and a playground, and there was what seemed like a vast network of giant-scale (i.e., sized for kids rather than hamsters) Habitrail tubes and chambers.
Snacks and Quiet Time, too. Y’know, preschool stuff. Most memorable to me, and of greatest relevance to the main stream of this morning’s symposium, were the field trips. We went to the Red Seal potato chip factory and to the Pepsi-Cola bottling plant and other places like that (pandemic aside, are trips like this still a thing?), in 15-passenger vans. They were all Dodges—I remember because of the language their starter motors spoke. They had CBs for the staffers to keep in touch with one another, and top-hinged side windows with these kinda frog-shaped latches down at the bottom. By design, they were intended to be held closed by the potmetal body going overcentre, and held open once lifted and pushed by the potmetal’s weight. A fine theory during most of the warranty period, perhaps, but they grew loose and sloppy and tended to self-open or self-close with road bumps.
The adults always made sure we used our seatbelts, but sometimes there weren’t enough seatbelts for everyone to have their own, then two or occasionally three of us little ones would be told to share a belt. In 2021 that idea will make any safety expert or in-house counsel (or, um, parent?) throw up, but in 1980 it was considered better than nothing. Street View informs me the The Willows is still a going concern, now with two additional locations, and there are still 15-passenger vans in the car park. One of them’s even a Dodge; the other two are Chevs or GMCs. I’m sure every kid gets their own belt now, and that’s about enough about that (does any of those trees look like a willow…?).
Not long after that, school buses came into the picture. Actual, real, yellow big school buses. My school district owned and operated its own bus fleets, which was pretty standard at that time, and they always only ever bought 65- or 66-passenger buses built by Blue Bird. The first one I rode was a 1974 or ’75 International Loadstar 1800 with a manual transmission. The driver’s name was Ed Simmock, and—especially with a cigar in his mouth—he looked like this happy character, only with white hair:
Never mind all the novel experiences involved with going to school, the school bus was packed with new sights, sounds, smells, and textures. It was almost like discovering cars again, as I’d first done just a few years earlier; much like a Slant-6 Dart, nothing else sounds like an IH Loadstar with a gasoline engine. I don’t know whether it was a 345 or a 392 (or something else?) but the combination of the engine itself, its cooling fan, and its air compressor made for a unique, characteristic sound up and down through the gears—which Ed shifted via a dogleg-shaped shift stick that rose like a charmed snake near the driver’s seat.
The only decent rendition I could find of Loadstar engine sounds is this one with an automatic transmission, but we do get to hear the spitting exhaust manifold leaks these IH V8s are said to be known for:
And the characteristic sounds didn’t come only from the front; the exhaust had a distinct snap to it, sort of a 50/50 mix of ripping cloth and biting into a very good sausage, perfectly cooked. I guess it was a product of the camshaft, its timing, and the long pipes.
For day one of first grade the next year, I got to the bus stop early. As one does. I can’t quite make out what that car is in the background; some kind of Pontiac, as it seems. Anyone?
By and by the bus arrived: a 1976 Ford B700 that year, driven by Bob Short. He mostly didn’t smoke his Winstons on the bus—mostly. That’s my sister right in front of me as we board:
I don’t know what specific gasoline V8 the B700 had, but it was quite a bit quieter and more boring-sounding than the Loadstar. I do know exactly what transmission it had: an Allison AT-540 four-speed automatic. The automatic part was immediately apparent; there was a shifter box slung under the dashboard at about a 45-degree upward angle, with an interesting upside-down quadrant: top to bottom 1-2-3-D-N-R. The lever was long and hefty enough that Bob could whack it from above just so to knock it into N during pickup and dropoff stops, then whack it from below to pick up D. It engaged immediately with enough of a Crunk! to broadcast the news to everyone in and around the bus.
Okeh, so it was automatic, but how do I know it was an AT-540? The Slant-6 Dart Effect again: nothing else sounds like an AT-540. First gear sounds like a siren, and second gear I can’t compare to anything; nothing else really sounds like this. Third was silent, probably 1:1, and fourth gear had a peculiar whirr about it, too. Here’s the closest I could come to isolated audio of an AT-540 from a standing start:
I’d call the shifts (Clack! except 1-2 is this complicated-sounding multi-stage business) no-nonsense, but that’s not true; games of What Gear Is It, Anyway? were common. You can hear them despite this ’86 GMC’s obnoxiously loud engine fan:
You put your first gear in, you take your first gear out, you put your first gear in, and you shift it all about…y’do the herky-jerky and you shift yourself around; that’s what it’s all about! Call me names, but while I could do without the herky-jerky, those first and second gear whines are musical to me; I could listen to them all day long and not get tired of it (speaking of similarity to Chrysler starters).
Propulsion sounds weren’t the only ones of note in those buses. The amber and red wig-wag lights at the top front and rear of the bus body, to let other drivers know to slow and stop when the bus is loading or unloading passengers, made noise inside the bus, too. They were choreographed and powered by a rotary switch, gear-driven by a motor. Bob would set his left thumb on the face of a plastic black round knob on the control panel, with his first and second fingers behind it. At just the right moment, he’d push the knob. That knob was on the end of the shaft of a magnetic-latching solenoid. It’s much like a starter solenoid, but manually operated.
Activating that sent power to the switch motor, which set the amber wig-wags going—along with a rhythmic “WIZZwizzWIZZwizzWIZZwizz” noise from the gears. Opening the passenger door would trip a relay on the motorised switch so it would shift from the amber to the red wig-wags. Then closing the door would cut power to the solenoid’s magnetic latch; the spring-loaded knob would pop out and the wig-wags would shut off.
The bus was equipped with an ELMO, short for Exterior Light MOnitor. It was a box above the driver’s side of the windshield, with little bulbs behind red, amber, and white lenses. These were live-action telltales for the various exterior lights. Let there be a burnt-out bulb or a wiring fault, and the telltale(s) for that circuit would stay dark. One thing it was possible to see on the ELMO that couldn’t easily be seen by looking at the actual lights: when the front lights wigged, the rear lights wagged. That is, the left front and right rear would be on simultaneously, then the right front and left rear. I don’t know why they did it that way.
And speaking of the lights (how did that happen?), those wig-wag lights look like another set of brake and turn signal lights, but behind each red or amber lens was a 75-watt 7-inch round sealed beam, hence the need for such a heavy-duty control setup. I don’t recall which school year it was—third or fourth grade—but during one or another of them I noticed the folding stop arm on the left side of the bus had faded from red to light pink, making the STOP legend hard to read. I wrote a letter about it, in shaky elementary-schoolkid longhand print, and gave it to the bus driver with a request that he give it to the bus people. I guess he did, because about a week later the bus had a new stop arm. That was my first foray into what is now my career in the world of vehicle lighting and conspicuity and driver vision.
The Ford B700s were something of an anomaly, I guess, because the district went back to Internationals for their next batch of buses: S-1800s, ’81-’83 models. Some of these were 5-speed handshifts, and those had their own interesting set of sounds. When the driver would kick the clutch at the top of a gear to shift up to the next one, you could hear the turbo’s blowoff valve: BEEYOOooo! And the shift linkage spoke of its state of maintenance. It would holler “Clake!…Clake!” as the driver shifted, gradually louder and louder as the weeks went on until, once freshly adjusted and lubricated, it would be back to quietly muttering “chat…chat”.
The automatic ones had the same AT-540 transmission as the Fords, but its musical gears were completely drowned out by the DT-466 fully-mechanical turbodiesel engine, which was really loud. This video does a fair job of illustrating, with a couple of bus nerds into the bargain:
These later-model Blue Birds had plenty of other differences to the older models. The ’70s buses had a fixed, gasketted-in rearmost side window. First a rhombus-shaped one with a rounded upper rear roof panel:
…then in ’75 or so they changed to a rounded sort of half-trapezoid with a newly squared-off upper roof corner. I first saw this kind of bus when I was very smol (as the hep young teen-agers say), lined up outside my three-years-older sister’s Quaker school. So I was two and three years old, not possibly more than barely four—still in my psychedelically synæsthetic early childhood. Which is why the shape of this rear sideglass is called a baboing, said “baa-boing”:
…and on the ’81 models the rearmost was the same as all the other side windows, an openable sash type. Most all the bus body companies seemed to make a similar evolution, from gasketted-in fixed rearmost side windows to openable ones, around the same time. I’ve never been able to find out how come; I wrote to Blue Bird, but they never replied. Maybe some structural reason, I guess.
The ’81 Blue Birds also had much taller, more thickly padded seats (still upholstered in the same dark green Naugahyde), a wider centre aisle and emergency exit door, as well as less-visible changes to comply with more stringent safety regulations that took effect on 1 April 1977. Those changes and that date are worth a moment or three’s thought: the Carollton Bus Catastrophe bus was built nine days before that date. Those new safety standards certainly would have prevented or at least greatly reduced the grievous carnage and terrible suffering. Ford and Superior Coach knew the regulations were set to come into effect; they’d participated in the regulatory negotiations and had tooled up and begun production of compliant vehicles and parts. Legally, their obligation was to comply with whatever safety standards were in effect on any given vehicle’s build date, and that’s it. Moral and ethical obligations might be a different question; I bet there was a great deal of wishing for time machines to go back and build that bus to the new standards, even if for no other reason than it’d’ve been vastly less costly than the fallout from the Kentucky disaster.
Image courtesy txstreetman on YouTube
Anyhow: ’81 Blue Birds. The ELMO was now flush-mounted rather than lashed onto the surface, and it had LEDs rather than light bulbs (except for the reversing lamp pilot lights; white LEDs were still years in the future). The magnetic-latching solenoid had been replaced by a boring ol’ chrome momentary-contact pushbutton switch, and the rotary motor-driven switch had given way to some horrid silent electronic box.
My third grade year, the driver was a blonde-haired lady named Janet. She looked very much like Diane on Cheers, and she let me and one other front-seat-dweller kid shift the bus into Neutral and pull the square knob in the middle of the dashboard to apply the parking brake (PSSSHHH!) when she’d stop to drop off passengers. Oh-ho-ho, was that ever so cool! That was another thing about the IH buses: the push-to-release/pull-to-apply park brake control; the Fords had a little toggle lever.
If the benefit of sitting in the frontmost passenger seat was getting to watch the driver shift the gears and operate the controls, there were other benefits to sitting at the other end of the bus. For one thing, there was a great big heater back there on the left side, and on cold days the second-from-rearmost left seat was the one to get; that’s where was the footrest/footroast.
Those DT-466 engines put out very dirty exhaust, and lots of it. I mean black, thick, big clouds of soot every time the bus was accelerated from a stop. I was not a popular kid (and it’s a tad chilly atop Mt. Everest, and water is somewhat damp) but one of the kids did share his pastime with me: he liked to sit in the rearmost seat and watch out the back windows, because as he imagined it there was a pipe leading not to the engine, you see, but to the driver’s seat. The driver that year was Kathy, who had high holy ’80s hair and a portable radio-cassette player perched on the dashboard that always only ever seemed to play “Maneater” by Hall and Oates. The soot clouds were tallied up: one Kathy-fart…two Kathy-farts; ooh, that was a big one…three Kathy-farts. This same kid explained to me why the back of the bus was so much bouncier over road bumps than the front: it was because, he said, of the “shock igzorbers”.
Those ’81-’83 buses held up well; they were still in daily service past the end of the ’80s. Quite a difference to the ’76-’77 Fords which were completely gone from the district fleet by 1989. Though now I think on it, maybe the district got spooked by the Kentucky event and decided to have only buses meeting the newer safety standards and with diesel power. One of the last few times I rode the school bus, it was a brand-new brown-interior 1991ish model powered by a diesel V8, which I think was related to those Navistar sold Ford for many years. Much cleaner exhaust, but to me that engine’s throbbing noise—whether from a school bus or a Ford pickup truck—is grating and obnoxious in a way even a very loud inline-6 is not.
After that, it was mostly passenger car transport for me, and we’ll start in on the lengthy story of a very significant car next week.
(I’ve maintained an appreciation for crusty old school buses, and I photograph them where and when the muse strikes.)
The Pontiac is a 67, probably a Catalina.
The similar 68 taillights are notched into the bumper.
This may be the seldom seen 2 door sedan.
Thanks! For a long time I didn’t like those frowny-looking taillights, but living as we do when every heavily-benchmarked vehicle from every maker looks like some kind of alien insectoid with anger-management problems, I now appreciate things like those frowny-looking Pontiac taillights.
Nice post. I drove 29 and 44 pax IH Loadstar buses during my USAF time – 72 and 74 models with lots of years of hard GI abuse. I’d wave the shifter on the 29 pax around like a symphony conductor until I could find the next gear. The 44 had the Allison auto and indeed it was very distinctive.
Whenever I hear the whine and bang of an Allison transmission, it takes me back to my Air Force days.
Another enjoyable read, Daniel. I remember the IH diesel sound of my school buses well.
When I was 14 I got an old Honda Express scooter, and from then on I was done with the bus. I even rode it in the winter, snow and all. I sometimes got to school wet from the rain.
No regrets. I so didn’t like riding the bus.
Mr Stern, your ability to recapture minutiae is impressive, am guessing that can be annoying to your friends/family. Am guessing that you’re likely difficult to argue with. Do you ever forget ANYTHING? (Left-handed compliment).
Thanks kindly! I strive to listen more and talk less, in accord with having two ears but only one mouth. I strive to remember that I forget, just like everyone else. And I suspect this could’ve been written about me—hover your cursor over the cartoon to see the second caption.
I’m going to guess the rear-most window change had to do with the April 1977 safety changes to school buses, and the GM vans were procured since Dodge hasn’t made vans in twenty years.
Air brakes or hydraulic brakes on the Fords with the lever? My hometown had mostly Ford B700’s and at least the 1988-1997 models had the push-pull knob air brakes.
The Fords had air brakes; you can see the toggle I’m talking about just above the gearstick boot and just below the throttle knob at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-Fy_IQJ-bE&t=5m24s .
The change to sash-type rearmost side windows…maybe it was egress-related, but I donno. I think only certain of those windows were usable as emergency exits; if I recall correctly (which I might not), the ones in the middle of the bus were mounted differently than the rest, to allow the entire framed-window assembly to be quickly removed in an emergency. And some current-production buses have fixed rearmost side glass—the Thomas Built C2, for example. But that bus has much larger side windows than the ones I grew up with, so ???
This was a fun read. You also succeeded in unearthing some long dormant school bus memories.
My school (K-12) had only 13 or 14 busses; it was a small school. Early on, new ones came every year or two and all were gas powered Chevrolets. At one point there was an experiment with two being diesel powered and two propane powered; I think these were Internationals. I was on a propane bus and it was wonderfully quiet, relatively speaking. So the district went with diesel.
During my college senior trip, one of the stops was Lambert International in St. Louis where there was a behind the scenes tour. We were all put on a mid-1960s Ford bus. That intrigued me more than seeing the caterers trailers and I remember that bus having what seemed like a few missing gears in its automatic. It would wind up really tight in first then slam into another gear in which I thought the engine was going to die from spinning too slow.
Thanks for unearthing this.
You’re welcome, and thank you for dusting off some old memories of riding in buses much older than my school district used; mid-late ’60s models, at various summer camps. One of them was a ’60s Ford with manual transmission and a 2-speed rear axle that made all kinds of clunk-crunch-graunch-hash noises.
Count me also impressed with your ability to remember details. My school bus riding career started with an early 60’s Dodge with a very rounded body, but that soon switched to the IH Loadstar also with a manual transmission. I remember watching the driver shift, but mostly I looked out the window for the two derelict 57 Chevys on our rural route and thought about how to fix them up.
Later we got into the more square bodied IH units, which were not interesting to me at all because of the automatic transmission. I rode the bus daily from 1972-1979 after which we moved to town and I could walk to school.
At least you had nice drivers, our driver was a vile woman named Mrs Whitehead who would regularly stop the bus and chew us kids out for being noisy. One day she kicked two grade 7 boys off the bus in the middle of the countryside, and she must have been instantly fired because we thankfully never saw her again.
I spotted that very pic while I was putting together this post. Wanted to include it, because that’s obviously the option-B answer to what a school bus should look like (the butterfly-hood IH Loadstar being option A), but I came along too late for these Dodges.
I’m sure the tilt-hood design of the later Loadstars and subsequent S-series IHs made for easier servicing, but the butterfly-hood design is hugely better looking.
I still marvel at your uncanny abilities to note the tiniest details and differences on the school buses. Many of us recalled mostly the typical teenager drama in the buses and nothing more.
In the second half of 1970s, I grew up in Dallas, Texas, and attended the regional day school for the deaf in Richardson, the Far North Dallas suburban. The school buses used by that school were modified Dodge Original B-Series van. They had V8 engines (no idea which V8 engine) and no air-conditioning (necessity in Dallas).
Half of the deaf students lived more than 10 miles from the school. So, the long trips could last an hour or so. Their parents were concerned about the welfare of their children in the “rolling ovens”. They brought up the idea of installing the rooftop air-conditioning units and small portable TV sets that ran off the 12-volt electrical system. They even organised the fundraising drive to buy the units and volunteers to install them. Thus, our school buses were first one in Dallas area, and perhaps in Texas, to have full air-conditioning and TV sets.
Well, as I say, weren’t many kids interested in talking with, to, or at the likes of me, so I kept to myself as much as they’d allow and took in the details of my surroundings (the bus) instead.
A/C as a necessity in Dallas: yep, that makes sense. Y’don’t want the kids spending an hour in a solar oven on wheels.
But how does TV figure in as a necessity?
I also grew up in north Dallas, and attended Richardson schools. The only time I rode the district’s school busses was in my sophomore year of high school, as it was beyond the walking distance from my house I had enjoyed since elementary school.
And I loved, LOVED the engine and automatic transmission (and blown exhaust manifold gasket) sounds of the Loadstars. Hearing it again in that clip you posted gave me goosebumps. I can also relate not being the most popular kid in school, but being very much in tune with my surroundings, particularly anything mechanically inclined. I became interested in HVAC at 12 years old, and have managed to make a very good career out of it. Thanks to the internet I’ve found there are many more HVAC geeks like me out there. Comfort in numbers, I suppose…
In the 80’s I drove propane powered church busses for a Baptist church in San Diego, CA when I was in the Navy there. I do remember them having Bluebird bodies and think they were also GMCs. Stick shift 44 and 55 passenger coaches, which were a lot of fun in hilly San Diego neighborhoods. Before my bus driving tenure ended I got to drive one of the 55 passenger automatics; that was wonderful. I wanted to take it out just to hear the bus go through the gears.
Thanks, Daniel, for another great entry. I have you up there among Paul and JC Cavanaugh as my favorite contributors to CC. Good writing and story telling is a gift, and you have it.
We’ve got a cool recursive stirred-up-memories effect goin’ on here! You’ve reminded me when I was 14 or 15, I was out on my bike one afternoon when I encountered an empty ’70s Loadstar bus with a Superior body, stopped in Happy Canyon Road with its hoods up and its hazard flashers blinking. I don’t recall whose livery it bore; it might’ve been a Denver Public Schools unit. It looked to be in fine condition except for whatever had hobbled it at that moment. The driver was peering into the engine compartment, and didn’t know what was the matter. Vapour lock, maybe, he guessed.
I pulled a business card or something out of my wallet and suggested he run it through the breaker points. The card came back to me with a black smudge on both sides, the width of breaker point contacts. The driver snapped the distributor cap back on, went in and keyed it, and the engine started immediately. He wasn’t fully onside with my diagnosis (“Huh…maybe the vapour lock finally broke”) but the bus was running; that was the main thing, and I helped.
When we first visited Vancouver about 14 years ago, we went to Stanley Park and I saw these open-roof buses, looked like school bus conversions being used for narrated tours. Then I heard them driving around: gasoline engines and AT-540 transmissions, unmistakably. It was like hearing for the first time in years from a long-ago friend. I kept meaning to contact the tour company and ask about buying an unnarrated ride on an empty bus just to record sound effects for an eventual post like this, but never got around to it, and then came the pandemic, and I’m not even sure if the tour company are still around.
And thanks for the high compliment! There are some steep climbs ahead—we’ll have to see how many chapters it’ll take to cover a vehicle that was in my life for three decades and many major events—but I’ll carry on trying to maintain the same standard of wordsmanship. I thank my father for my storytelling abilities.
Like you, I spent my school bus-riding days trying to sit on the passenger side as close to the front as possible, so I could see the driver shift gears.
I only remember one driver; he was from my middle school years. Kids all called him “The Cowboy.” An anomaly in the in the Philadelphia suburbs for sure: He wore a cowboy hat, had longish sandy hair, spoke with a slight Southern drawl, and greeted everyone by saying “Hey y’all!” Oh, and drove his Blue Bird like it was a stock car.
He took corners fast, sped down straight roads, blew his horn at annoying drivers, and even passed slower cars on the wrong side of the street. Even as a kid, I wondered how he kept his job, but I loved riding with him, as did most of the boys. Girls, on the other hand, generally shrieked when he took a fast corner. I’d always feared that one of the goody-two-shoes girls would complain to her parents and get The Cowboy fired. Turns out The Cowboy did himself in instead.
Our middle school had two semicircle driveways where the buses would pick up and discharge kids. One day after school, our bus was the last in line, about halfway through one of the semicircles – and the bus in front of us wasn’t getting underway for some reason. This delay got The Cowboy’s dander up, and he decided to BACK UP our bus through the semicircle (quickly, of course) so he wouldn’t have to wait any longer. Unfortunately, he wasn’t 100% accurate with his quick-reversing technique, and he hit a bollard. The bus jerked up, and the bollard became wedged underneath the big metal rear bumper. No escaping from that mess!
The school officials had to call for a replacement bus (& driver), and we got home late. And we never saw The Cowboy again. The bus bumper, however, was never repaired. For years, I’d see a bus with a dented rear bumper, and I’d know exactly how that dent got there.
Wow. The Cowboy sounds like a real-live version of Otto (bus driver on The Simpsons).
You should write a follow-up letter to BlueBird, of course referencing the original un-responded to communication…
I somehow escaped riding the bus to and from school, but field trips in the LAUSD were always on the mighty Crowns, the only school buses familiar to most LA kids. Lots of sound and fury (and smoke), but an enjoyable ride once up to speed and on the freeway without any sort of restraint devices whatsoever.
Eh, I tried twice, separated by about a year. No response either time. I’m still curious, but it’s low enough on my priority list that I don’t imagine putting much more effort into it.
I would like to have experienced a Crown bus, other than once in awhile in traffic.
I worked for an Industrial Designer right out of college (I have a BSID), and one of our customers was Blue Bird. I was assigned to redesign the dash for their Wanderlodge line of RVs, which had a high failure rate (and high cost of repair) for the electroluminescent lighting used in the then-current dash. The redesign was to use fiber optic cables acting as light pipes. Don’t recall whether it was ever put into production (been 30+ years now).
Blue Bird graciously loaned us a Wanderlodge for about a month, which became my office for the duration of the project, including running to Fuddruckers for lunch with my coworkers on several occasions.
Hey, cool! I’ve got a friend with a ’79ish Wanderlodge, and a keen appreciation for industrial design.
And I remember Fuddruckers.
We still have Fuddruckers here in Tempe, AZ
Crown Buses were an icon here in Los Angeles for decades .
Most were Diesel powered but some had huge and powerful Hall-Scott gasoline engines .
One of my gear head buddies was a bus driver when young and loved driving those, he once made a bootleg turn in one on South Raymond Ave. .
It was empty of passengers and he didn’t hit any curbs .
Another buddy got his first job out of high school riveting on the body side panels .
Boring as could be but MONEY .
-Nate
I, too, always vied for the front seat behind the driver, mainly because it afforded some sense of protection due to being horribly shy and often picked-upon by the ‘back-seaters.’
True ‘pole position,’ however, was getting to sit on the engine cover (facing rearward) when our driver drove a flat-nosed bus (this was the 1970s after all). In Middle School, I fell on a piece of glass that required a number of stitches in my knee, and had this prized seating position reserved for the duration of my time of healing.
I took bus driver training my last year of High School – thinking back, I can’t imagine what they were thinking; putting 16- and 17-year olds behind the wheel of a school bus full of rowdy kids. I passed the written test, but ended up taking a job at the local Bi-Lo and never got my bus license.
Bus driver training…in high school?! Yeee! I can’t imagine either, what they were thinking.
I remember them showing photos in one of the training classes of a burned-out bus. Drivers parked the busses at their homes (no ‘bus barn’), and being young high schoolers, off-the-clock joyrides were known to happen on occasion.
Apparently, the driver of this particular bus couldn’t get it started, and was using a cigarette lighter to try to see down the gas fill neck to determine whether it was out of fuel or not (these were old busses and breakdowns were frequent).
Of course it went ‘poof!”
My Dad ran the VocEd school, so I pretty much had the run of the place when he’d go in on the occasional weekend to catch up on paperwork or whatever he did. The school had an ancient shorty school bus (which may well be the bus in the attached recent photo), and I put a few miles on it driving around the school property. The gearing was very low, and it had that whiny transmission sound as you ran through the gears. I did my first engine swap there over Christmas vacation, taking the freshly-rebuilt/sleeved engine from my Dad’s wrecked ’73 Vega Kammback and installing in my ’71 notchback. Dad later rebuilt my 71’s engine (for the second time) and put in the ’73 along with a front clip.
Fun days.
A cigarette lighter. To look down into the gas tank.
I…got nothin’.
The thought of having 17-year-old bus drivers is hilarious.
About 20 years ago, the father of a friend of mine decided to get a school bus endorsement on his license so he could drive a bus in his spare time. He was a semi-retired iron worker and crane operator, and had driven just about every type of heavy-duty vehicle imaginable, so he thought it would be a good fit for him.
He passed the test, but then got to thinking that his somewhat gruff personality might not be the best fit for that job. Thankfully for him, he reconsidered his plans and chose to do some other part-time jobs instead.
But what? A gruff personality was exactly what was needed to keep us kids in line! Maybe things are different now the kids are likely too lost in their phone screens to squabble much.
Those were the days.
In my state (CT) a school bus license is a form of CDL, and applicants must be at least 21 with at least 3 years driving experience. The application process is burdensome, with background checks, fingerprinting, a physical, and a driving test, followed by random drug testing once employed.
So many great observations. I remember mostly the aesthetics of these beasts and, in particular, my amazement when I first boarded a bus that it wasn’t yellow on the inside too. What’s the story behind the ubiquitous olive drab Naugahyde and mint green ceilings? And that *smell*. At age 35 I got to ride a school bus for a work-related trip and when that plasticy/rubbery/waxy smell hit me, I was instantly transported back in time. Ever notice sawdust grit on your seat then suddenly realize you’re sitting in a “Barf seat” that had been cleaned the day before from that bag of O-O-O-P-S the driver kept under the dashboard?
No, I never had the sawdust experience. The aroma I most strongly associate with school buses is that of raw diesel. It’s difficult to dig past that, but in the previous gasoline-fired school buses I faintly recall a bouquet of window caulk, polyurethane foam, Naugahyde, synthetic rubber, and wear. That memory did flare up a bit, now I think about it, when I went pokin’ around those crusty old buses in my photo collection linked toward the end of the post.
Interior colour: you know, that’s a really good question. The exterior colour—called National School Bus Glossy Yellow—is defined and prescribed by U.S. and Canadian federal standards, but there’s no requirement for interior colour. From what I saw, until browns took over (echk, why?), green was overwhelmingly common. Different body companies used different green paints in different years, ranging from sorta medium furnace green to pale iceberg lettuce green (including the minty green you mention), but everyone seemed to use the same Naugahyde. I don’t remember it as olive drab, but more of a…green. Just green. Green-crayon green. Maybe “Pine” if we’ve got the de luxe 64-box and that’s an option; otherwise just green.
But not all of them, and not always. I remember a mid-late ’60s bus in worn original condition with a particolour effect inside: a mix of blue, red, orange, and green seats. They seemed to have come that way from the factory; there was no apparent evidence of any kind of refurbishment or reupholstery. The only explanation I can come up with is…mid-late ’60s!
Your letter about the faded red arm was hilarious! Isn’t it a trip how our future careers are often previewed early on?
I hear ya’ about the distinctive sound of gas V8 Internationals hard at work. I normally never rode a school bus, but in my last year at HS I had an after school job at Towson Ford, and rode a bus that went near there. The driver was no-nonsense compact middle-aged woman, and she revved that thing right to the max on every shift. Well done!
I drove a Loadstar dump truck for the county a couple years later, and yes, the long curved shifter was a rather wobbly affair. But with a little practice, I was shifting every bit as hard and fast as that woman bus driver.
There was more to that letter than just “Bus number 1027 needs a new stop arm. I think I went on at both sides’ length of a legal-size yelllow pad page about…oh, who knows what-all. They probably got a few laffs about it. Maybe they posted it somewhere for walk-by chuckles. But the bus did get a new stop arm.
Totally agree: max revs in every gear, otherwise y’don’t get the full sound effects.
But I never got to drive one, and don’t guess I ever will. :-\
I started riding school buses when I went into 7th grade in the early-70s. All the drivers were bored housewives who shifted the manual transmissions like they were slowly stirring a pot of stew on the stove. One day, though, too many drivers called in sick and a grizzled old bus mechanic drove us. He snicked that four speed back and forth like a race driver, or at least that’s how it seemed to my 12-year-old mind.
I have no significant school bus experience, having belonging to that now nearly-extinct club of those who walked to school. I rode one occasionally on field trips, but never paid much attention to them in terms of mechanics.
But that IH V8 sound sure landed with me, as I recall a time when my father borrowed an old IH dump truck to get a load of dirt or something that he needed for the yard. The total sensory experience of riding in that old truck came right back on playing the sound file.
Likewise, my sneakers were my ride to school, and my only bus rides were for field trips and high school sports away games. The uncomfortable seats, lurching ride, diesel smell, noises caused by the engine, wind, rattling parts, and of course my compatriots, turned me off to the experience.
I am a teacher now, and have been on a small number of yellow bus rides for trips (we more commonly use coach buses when the budget allows) and still find the experience unpleasant.
My son rode the bus in elementary school (he now goes to my school and rides with me, having recently become my driver) and I remember the excitement on the first day. We had talked about the bus quite a bit beforehand, and even had a practice ride a few days before his first day of kindergarten, and the excitement was palpable.
At first, bus 4 was like a magical chariot that showed up and whisked him away, only to return him in the afternoon. We had many conversations about the events on bus 4. He was more interested in the kids than the machine. We’re a bit different that way.
Eventually he grew less enthusiastic about the bus ride. He liked seeing his friends and getting to know where people lived, but found it noisy and unpleasant for the same reasons I did years ago. He is now 16, training to be my chauffeur.
Great stories .
I was car crazy as a little kid too but I can’t recall what the buses I rode on in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s were ~
Noisy but warm in Winter, that rear heater was under the left rear seat that also had the rear wheel kickup .
Way out in rural New England I don’t recall ever going very fast , certainly no highways were ever taken then
-Nate
This was well written and well enjoyed! My Dad drove school buses for 20 odd years so I have up close and personal memories.
From backing a 72 passenger down behind the garage as a teenager to wash to the kids figuring they can’t touch the driver BUT his kid rides the bus… Hmm🤔
This will keep me smiling for a while. Thank you Daniel.
“One thing it was possible to see on the ELMO that couldn’t easily be seen by looking at the actual lights: when the front lights wigged, the rear lights wagged. That is, the left front and right rear would be on simultaneously, then the right front and left rear. I don’t know why they did it that way.“
The industrial switches and relays that make up something like this are usually built with a certain number of sets of contacts. Each set usually consists of a common, a normally open (NO), and a normally closed (NC) contact. When the relay or switch changes state, the NC and NO are alternatively connected to the common. When designing the light controller, they probably saved a buck or two by utilizing both the NO and NC contacts instead of paying a little extra for a relay with an additional set. It keeps things a bit more compact as well. (I’m a marine electrician.)
Anyway, thanks for the good read!
You know, I bet that’s it exactly. That explanation makes perfect sense. Thank you.
“Nothing else sounds like an IH Loadstar with a gasoline engine. I don’t know whether it was a 345 or a 392 (or something else?)”
In the early nineties I worked at the Cherry Creek School District bus barn, which included some Blue Bird conventionals using the last of the IH gas powered V-8s. As I recall, they were built around 1984, and displaced 345 CI.
They had been converted to natural gas so the district kept them around to meet their green fleet goals. International still stocked parts at that point, but I recall waiting a few days for the dealership to ship certain orders.
It’s possible some buses used the bigger 392, but I imagine most buyers chose the 345 to save on fuel.
Y’don’t say! In fact the buses I wrote about in this post all had CHERRY CREEK SCHOOL DISTRICT № 5 down each side.
I don’t immediately recall any spark-ignition IHs newer than the ’75ish Loadstars I mentioned, though the more I think about it, the more a faint memory tries to bubble up to the surface. But I surely only saw a relative few of the Cherry Creek buses. The district was big enough to have two fleets—I remember the drivers having to specify which base they were calling into: “Eleven-seventeen to Cherry Creek base”, “Ten-oh-eight to Cherry Creek base”, “Ten ninety-two to Smoky Hill Base”, etc. I went to schools served by the Cherry Creek base; maybe the buses you describe were over on the other side. That Ford B700 I mention was 1117, long gone by the early ’90s. Surely so were 1092 and 1093, which were the last two Loadstars in reserve service. Some of the other buses I rode were probably still in service: 1004 was a manual DT-466, 1021 and 1027 were automatic DT-466s…I want to say 1038 or 1039 might’ve been the new brown-interior/diesel V8 item I mentioned. I’m sure the unit numbers were recycled.
That 345 must’ve had a hard time keeping up with a full load up at 5,500 feet.
When I began my career in the Civil Service the fleet still had lots and lots of IHC medium and heavy duty trucks, all hav gasoline powered V8’s because cheaper to buy initially .
The reason all those great engines always had exhaust leaks was because IHC decided they didn’t been exh. manifold to head gaskets because the tolerances were so tight .
I installed many many gaskets sourced from the NAPA contract store .
When I talked o the IHC dealer they said “oh, you need new exhaust manifolds, they’re warped” .
Back then IHV only used black wires in the entire wiring harness’, supposedly there were tiny white numbers printed to mark which circuit each wire had but usually there would be a bunch of mixed black wires and I had to figure what went where my self .
-Nate
No gasket in it as built, eh? Cool. That sounds like a GM trick, but I guess that kind of thinking knows no particular corporate boundaries.
Only black wires…groan…
Quite a few of the IHC’s were slurry seal trucks and the entire rear end would be coated in dripped slurry seal, black gooey nasty stuff that creeped into everything including the taillights and harnesses….
No one else wanted to touch those so I, being the newbie, did dozens if not hundreds of them….
Sometimes I had to make new rear sub harnesses .
-Nate
Ugh. If slurry seal is anything like Ziebart and Krown and all the rest of those oily/waxy/greasy/gooey/stickey gunkums people pay to get applied to their vehicles in rusty parts of North America, I envy you that work about as much as I miss living in that climate, which is to say not even a little bit!
Slurry Seal is that black gooey stuff they hot spray over old asphalt….
It’s nasty stuff indeed .
I was lucky (?) to have learned to row a manual box on a non synchromesh tranny ~ the older ones were pretty wide ratio and that made it easier .
There’s a reason they call them “Crash Boxes” .
Part of learning to drive for me was also learning how to shift sans clutch without grinding the gears ~ that came in very useful during my career as I’d often run in vehicles with failed clutches…
I once did this in rush hour traffic beating my girlfriend and buddy’s wife in a modern V8 / automatic powered car .
Times have changed ~ I can’t well shift a modern tranny sans clutch and i don’t do bootlegs and all that other cool stuff the kiddies do eyes closed .
-Nate
The IH wiring harnesses were not all black. They were color coded, unfortunately by gauge, per SAE standard of the time.
10 ga blue
12 ga red
14 ga white
16 ga black
18 ga green
They do have the circuit number printed within an inch or so of any terminal, white on the black and green and black on the other colors. The nice thing is that the circuit numbers were used across all truck lines.
1 is the charging system turn on wire
2 is the charging system out to ammeter/junction block
14 is battery charge
51 Headlight sw to dimmer
52 High beam
53 Low beam
56 Left turn
57 Right turn.
They also used suffix to denote different portions of the circuit like 56 is rear L turn and 56a is front.
Now the modern Freightliners they use all white wire regardless of gauge or application, again with circuit numbers printed on the wire, though more frequently than just on the ends.
I do love circuit numbers on the wires at least when you have a the chart or deal with that brand frequently enough to know the key numbers.
That’s nice but you weren’t there and I was, all wires were dead black .
We didn’t have any Scouts, pickup or other light duty IHCs .
Repairing under dash fires was a nightmare .
-Nate
My bus riding days spanned the 60’s, mostly Dodges. The one constant was Sid, the perpetually elderly driver. On the going home trip one spring day Barry, destined to be a delinquent, tore the pages out of a Newsweek and tossed them out the window. Wasn’t too secretive about it either. The bus immediately pulled on to the shoulder and Sid tossed Barry off the bus five miles from home on state hiway 13. Never heard that Sid got in the slightest bit of trouble.
Good for Sid and the supervisors who backed him up!
Well done. Daniel! The memories flooded back..
I rode in 1960’s and 1970’s Loadstars as well. They were Superior-bodied, unknown whether 345 or 392, 5-speed with 2-speed rear axles. I can still hear that distinct exhaust note, at idle and wrapped up tight before an upshift. Loved to sit up front to watch the drivers row through the gears and otherwise see how stuff worked. I can also still hear the sound of that flasher! (The short-route back up bus was a raggedy old Dodge like the picture DougD posted.)
The newest busses were assigned to the longer routes, so I only rode on the newly-compliant high seat busses for out of town band trips. They were the first Loadstars with the one-piece fiberglass hood instead of the clamshell, a feature no doubt appreciated by the guys at the bus garage. I was long past high school when the district stepped up to diesels with Allison’s.
Reading the comments, I’m similarly puzzled how the seats were always that beefy green naugahyde, regardless of body company, and had forgotten the various shades of green interior paint. Many years later, probably for a tour of something or another, I rode a school bus with brown seats. Brown seats are just wrong in a school bus!
Thanks for the nostalgic bus ride!
You talk about cool school buses, my first few years in elementary school, 1965, a man in our neighborhood bought a 1948 Dodge school bus, with a flat head 6. Charged a dollar a week to take us to school and back home. Some days in the winter, when the thing wouldn’t start, his wife would have to pick us up a few at a time, and take us to school in their ’64 Falcon!
I’m Australian. and American school buses were completely unknown here, only ever seen on movies and TV. I remember starting primary school in 1961 and being very disappointed that my school bus was just an ordinary public bus that the state government provided for school runs. We even had to pay fares, 5 pence each way (about a nickel). The buses were all built locally on English chassis and running gear, usually Leylands. Always diesels, mostly in line sixes, mid-mounted under the floor. The older ones dating from 1948 had front engines and pre selector gearboxes where the driver moved a fairly long lever mounted next to the steering wheel in a metal quadrant, and then stomped on the clutch pedal which actually changed the gears. Later models from the late 50s and early 60s had no clutch pedal and were pneumatically operated by a floor shift, again in a hefty metal quadrant. 4 speed I think. Still later models had the same arrangement but with a small quadrant on the dashboard with a tiny gear lever that just clicked into each position. By the 70s they were fully automatic, but with extremely slow and jerky gear changes. But my best memory, was a bus we once used on a school excursion. It was probably built in the early 50s, and had a crash gearbox. I got to sit right behind the driver, and was fascinated to watch him double clutch and move a very long floor mounted gear lever. He even blipped the throttle on down shifts, and I don’t recall him crunching the gears once. He was a fairly old guy, and had probably been driving trucks and buses since the 1930s. I was very impressed and since then have always wanted to try a vehicle with no synchromesh, but, alas, it has never happened.
Though I started out going to parochial school by bus in 1st grade, we moved the next year and had to walk about a mile to/from school in Burlington, Vt, ended up being 4 times per day as we had to go home for lunch and return. Of course it was tougher in the winter, since the snow precluded us from riding our bicycles plus of course the cold..and after school activities often meant we were walking in the dark, both early and late.
Moved again in 6th grade; there was a bus but it took awhile to get to school and it was actually a shorter walk than I was used to in Burlington…plus this was in Manassas, VA, quite a bit warmer. When I went to High School went back to taking the bus, more due to the walk which involved crossing some busy roads (taking bus was like putting on suit of armor, or at least sheet metal).
Well, last year of High School my Dad’s job transferred him back up to Vermont, but we lived in Shelburne, south of Burlington, and we went to a consolidated high school that 5 towns fed into, even though I had my license by then, didn’t have a car, so I took the bus. Really nice bus driver, he would even drop us off in front of our house rather than at bus stop when weather was particularly bad, the bus had a radio, which he tuned to stations that the younger crowd would enjoy (maybe he did too, but he was 50-60, younger than I am now, but assumed he’d prefer different station). The bus also had an automatic transmission, which was novel to me, as all previous busses I rode in were standard. It groaned up the hills on the way to school, but made it up, snow or otherwise. The next year I was a commuter student into Burlington (story for another time).
I did enjoy not having to drive a bit, getting to veg out and plan my day without having to concentrate on driving…even though with the low amount of traffic the stress was more having to do with driving in slippery conditions than on avoiding other motorists. It came back to me a few years ago when I started taking the city bus to destinations instead of my car….takes more time, but if you have it you arrive more relaxed, and you get some exercise walking between destination and the bus stops. Haven’t resumed it though since COVID-19 cautions started, but hope to once things seem safer
FWIW ;
When on vacation it’s often much fun to take the local bus, it’ll take you places you’d never see other wise .
Of course, you should pay attention, I failed to a couple years ago and took the Ghetto bus across Los Angeles, it stopped at most of th projects and more than a few black folks were seriously pissed off that i was riding “their” bus….
Hawaii in particular was really neat to see by local bus .
-Nate
Thanks for using pics from my videos–please be sure to credit your sources, even if they are screenshots.