Dad, the School Bus Driver

My first semester in First Grade had been pretty good, with possibly the best teacher I ever had, Mrs. Crunk.?Seemingly ancient, and therefore grandmotherly, and therefore very OK, Mrs. Crunk had a gentle, organized way of doing her job and getting us to do ours.?That was easy for me, because the school was such a wonderful place.?It was old, very old, as old as Mrs. Crunk.?It was made of wood and plaster and brick.?The floors had been freshly varnished over the summer, and it smelled wonderful.?

I had never been with so many kids before, almost all kinds of kids.?There were no kids like Robie McKnight’s grandkids, children of his son, Frank. That would not come until I reached the 10th Grade, but change was coming.?The elementary school I attended was in Nixon, Texas, 11 miles from Leesville and was, as you know, accessible for pupils by rickety old school bus.?The school house and its various annexes were indeed old, inside and out, and with a kind of Texas landscaping aesthetic that was a holdover from the previous century, which is to say, none.?Gonzales County is composed geologically of flint, quartz, sandstone and red dirt, as was our playground and the entire grounds surrounding the school.?Oh, there may have been a few bushes, looking as scrubby as tumbleweeds, which were not indigenous to our region.?Just an image.?Pyracantha bushes were popular, with or without lawn of any kind, as at my Grandparents’.?So, the school may have had one or two of those. ?There was mostly dirt, and dirt clods, and rocks, ready-made missiles.?Two swing sets, large and small, a carousel under which it was possible to get stuck and dragged while the thing was being pushed round and round at high speed, a see-saw, what I remember as an enormous set of ‘monkey bars,’ as high as a small sky-scraper, the nurse’s office in a sort of Quonset hut, and the school lunch room across a little street?where we were also allowed to go and buy a snack at afternoon recess, which I did, provided the infamous West Brothers gang had not relieved me of my nickles and dimes.?A lot of kids there didn’t have nickles or dimes, or much of anything it seemed.?And we were all lily-White mind you, so God only knows how rough the other kids at those other schools had it, wherever those other schools were.?I never knew.?I saw blinding poverty in that school.?I remember the girl cousins of the West Brothers, who never smiled and whose faces and heads reminded me of that of a mummified Indian infant then on display under glass at the Whittey Museum next to Breckenridge Park in San Antonio.?Their dresses, made from flower sacks, the same material my mother used for sewing aprons, were so thin in all weather, even when a blue norther was blowing. ?I guess that’s why Mrs. Crunk let the poor girls sit together at the same desk in the back, near the radiators, on which other kids were always melting the remnants of crayons.?We didn’t see their house in the morning, because they were waiting for the bus on the other side of the road, but in the afternoons, on the way home, we saw that it was a shack covered with tar paper.?Ashamed and angry, the girls jumped off the bus and ran into the house and disappeared until they had to reappear the next day and live the same humiliation over again.

I think the bus had already dropped them off the day it broke down.?We lacked just a couple of miles before the turnoff for our lane.?Mr. Gillette, our school principle, the driver, his pipe clenched tight in his teeth, his jaw set, turned and shouted at us, “Y’all be quiet!?I’m gonna go to that house over yonder and make a call.?Nobody get off the bus!”?Nobody got off the bus, but we were not quiet.?

Phones in rural Texas in 1957/58 had one feature that our Smart Phones today lack.?Now, we must manually patch others into a conference call.?Then, the conference call was ready-to-hand.?It was called the Party Line, nothing political.?Texas was solidly Democrat in those days anyway.?As the World Turns, Secret Storm and, from 1955, Queen for a Day were indeed popular, but the TVs didn’t work half the time anyway, probably because most of the husbands of most of the wives who enjoyed those programs (“my programs,” my Mother always called them) insisted on tinkering with them, as though they were a Ford or Chevrolet.?Our Munson hardly ever worked for that reason.?But, on the party line, all you had to do was to pick up the receiver and be real quiet in order to hear and enjoy the delicious gossip that was going around.?Mom’s best friend, Lois Schmittekamp, used to ring her up directly in the afternoons and say so loud I could hear, “Flora Mae, you should hear some of this s#@%*t they’re sayin’!”?“Girl, I don’t have time for that!?I’m canning plums, and I’m sick and tired of it!” Click!??If the operator up at Hugo Littlefield’s general store caught you doing that, she would be upset and threaten not to put your calls through.?

Mr. Gillette understood all this, and so I am sure that he did not bother ringing up or talking to anybody in particular, but that he spoke into the neighbors’ crank telephone as though it were a PA system, which it in fact was.?Giving out our coordinates, ‘half mile north of the tar paper shack, and just past the big prickly pear patch,’ help soon arrived in the form of my Dad, just home from working first shift on the San Antonio Light.?His pea-green Dodge pickup with the white bumpers looked a lot better than the old yellow school bus, and we all piled in, a-whoopin’ and a-hollerin’.?He brought everybody home, my Dad, and I was so proud.?Tag must have thought I pulled a fast one on him that day, but he showed up at the house as soon as he heard my voice.

Then came Christmas and the Christmas holidays, and then came the strange news that none of us were going back to school.?A building inspector had determined that the roof might cave in on us, specifically the roof over Mrs. Crunk’s classroom and me.?My Grandfather, Pappy, was awarded the construction contract and when we came back our classroom looked very strange, with massive timbers bracing every which way.?Never having been inside a Gothic church then, it occurs to me now that that is sort of what it looked like, right down to the flying buttresses outside.?Our classroom smelled of the new wood, and Mrs. Crunk got out a big can of those wax flakes used on dance floors and roller-skating rinks.?She sprinkled the wax while we her first-graders pretended we were a train with all the sound effects, working the scented wax into the hardwood floor all over that large room. It smelled almost as good then as on the first day of school.?Pappy had other work that had to be done on Nixon Elementary as well.?And yet we were able to start back to school in about two weeks past the official beginning of the semester.?But there was a catch.?

Today they are called ‘contact hours.’?In 1958 they were called ‘Who killed Mighty Mouse?!’ We had to go to school on Saturdays—on Saturdays!— to make up for those missed days, every last one of them.?But there was a problem that I never understood, namely, the school bus, our school bus with the principal driving it, did not run on Saturdays.?I now wonder if Mr. Gillette was even at school on those Saturdays. ?Perhaps he was home eating his Kellogg’s Sugar Smacks and watching Mighty Mouse.?The thing about our bus route, the route to Leesville, was this.?The only motorized transportation a lot of the families living near us had was a tractor, if that.?But here my Dad came again, to save the day.?And Tag got to ride on his pickup-bus.?In fact lots of dads and moms could be seen driving their kids up to school and taking them home on those Saturdays that never seemed to end.?But Dad had his pickup, and our friend and neighboring farmer, Donno Soefje, had his too, a bigger one that was really a small flatbed with sides on it for hauling hay, melons and such and everybody got to school and got home from school OK, and we had so much fun on those rides that we almost forgot it was a Saturday.

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?Guy Christopher Carter, 05/04/2023