Gathering of Eagles

Left-to-right: Art Dana, Gary Coleman, ?????????, Betty Clark, Linda Covington, Murray Schroeder, Gary Colvin, Ron Palermo, me. (Others had left, and are not in the picture.)

Another pancake breakfast at Cartwright's Maple Tree Inn came-and-went yesterday (Thursday, March 25, 2010).
The pancake breakfast is an annual get-together of retirees from Regional Transit Service (RTS) in Rochester, NY.
For 16&1/2 years I drove transit bus for RTS, the supplier of transit-bus service in the Rochester area. My stroke ended that in late October of 1993.
Most there have many more years of service than I did. Many over 30.
My bus-driving was cut short, although I was tiring of it.
It paid well, but was a dangerous job, fraught with peril.
Most people have no idea how dangerous it was.
I liked driving bus, but was tiring of the clientele.
Most important was following the secret fourth rule of bus-driving, that management never knew about.
Which was DON'T GET SHOT!
The other three rules were 1) show up, 2) don't hit anything, and 3) keep your hands out of the farebox.
Management knew about those.
Crossing them was grounds for firing.
They loved me at Transit, because I followed those three rules.
Although as far as I could see, rule-breakers were in the minority.
You also developed a sixth sense that manifested itself as defensive driving.
Even if you were in the right, you backed off.
If you didn't you hit things and got canned.
Management called it “professional driving......”
Plus management, at least upper management, seemed like jerks.
Bloated fat-cats driving desks for excessive pay.
Bowing and fawning to head-honcho.
If something went wrong, it was automatically the bus-driver's fault.
One morning I went through five buses before finding one with a working wheelchair lift.
I ended up 25 minutes late.
Driver's fault, of course.
Another morning I hit a deer with my bus on the way out on a Park-and-Ride.
The deer got up and walked away, but the Sheriff had to be called.
Did they cover my trip?
Of course not!
I had to parry my passengers, what remained of them, wondering why I was a half-hour late.
Many mornings I got started late, because mechanics had to tighten loose lug-nuts I had found.
I was one of the few who checked. I wasn't having a wheel come off.
Retirees noted they were glad to be out of Transit, but many suggested it was worth working there. I noted my house was paid for by Transit, and another said he raised three families.
Most interesting to me was seeing my old friends Murray Schroeder (“SHROH-der;” as in “oh”) and David Brown (“Brownie”); also a girl named “Betty.”
I think her name was Betty Clark, but that's not the last name I remember.
She apparently remarried a few times, and first was a bus-driver herself, and then became a supervisor in the Training Department.
Brownie was middle management — I guess a radio-dispatcher in the end.
He started after me; first as a bus-driver, and then into management assigning bus-drivers.
I faintly remember him driving bus-radio before my stroke.
Doing so was parrying madness; helped by GPS transponders on the buses recently.
That way, management could know if three buses were following each other inbound on a bus-line in a blizzard.
The radio-guy also had to get replacement buses to buses that had become inoperable, plus send road-supervisors to settle disputes with our clientele.
It's amazing Brownie could do it, yet not be a jerk. Most weren't, yet some were. And that's despite being safely walled off from reality in that radio-room.
Brownie was rather straight-arrow, but otherwise a great guy. He wasn't pulling rank, like some did.
Schroeder started two classes before me, and we palled around quite a bit.
He stayed a bus-driver the whole time he was there, but also soldiered in three wars — including Iraq.
He kept noting how we palled around so much, yet after my stroke I flat disappeared.
“Yep,” I said. “That's kind of what happened. Out of commission for almost two years, and never driving bus again.”
I then went to work for the mighty Mezz, and really liked that.
A job-counselor wanted to try to get my bus-driving job back again, but I told him to forget it.
I preferred the mighty Mezz.
Murray is the one who raised three families, yet “I never completed high-school.”
Murray and I were sorta on the same wavelength.
I almost bought my first motorcycle from him, a Triumph.
But I bought a Norton instead.
It's amazing to recall I learned how to ride motorbike on that monster.
Figure-eights on small city streets.
It probably weighed almost 600 pounds.
Murray brought an old copy of my “282-News” he had saved.
The “282-News” was a voluntary newsletter I did for my bus-union, Local 282, the Rochester Division of the nationwide Amalgamated Transit Union (“what's 'ATU?'”).
I did it during my final year of employ before my stroke.
I did it with Word® on our first computer.
It was great fun, but it was a HUGE amount of work.
A compatriot passed it around to local politicians, and it thereby drove Transit management crazy.
Previously all dramas had been swept out of sight, so that the local perception among politicians was that everything was hunky-dory at Transit.
Yet here's my fabulous newsletter revealing otherwise.
“Don't read that stuff!” yelled the Transit PR guy. “Just a bunch of hot-head union activists!”
I tried to talk to him once at a party, but he ran into the Men's Room.
“Just keep it positive!” he bellowed, as he disappeared.
He was getting paid $70,000 a year (1993 dollars) to -A) produce a house-organ, and -B) keep things quiet. And I was driving him nuts.
He was supposed to get that house-organ out every two months, yet he might do it twice a year.
Yet I was getting my newsletter out once every month, and wasn't getting paid for it.
Yet he still collected his bloated salary.
I was also driving bus every weekday, eight hours a day.
I'd walk out with a fist full of blank timesheets; writing paper.
I'd write stuff during layovers, sometimes on the back of transfers, tiny strips of paper maybe an inch&1/2 wide.
I'd come home after work and key it all in.
My wife was mowing the lawn.
Then I was often up until 3 a.m. finishing it.
Next morning my wife would take the 'pyooter-files on floppies to her place of employ for printout on her laser printer.
And her Word® at work was slightly different than here at home, so copy might jump and have to be rearranged — font size reduced, etc.
She'd return with the master printouts, which we then “printed,” 400 or so of each page on the union copier.
My compatriot and I would then collate the entire mess into a newsletter, and show up at Transit at 4 a.m. to pass 'em out to drivers pulling out buses.
We had fun while it lasted.
We had Transit management going ballistic.
And they couldn't can me, since I was such a stellar employee; plus there was a lot of good in that newsletter.
But my stroke ended it.
The stuff I'm proudest of were my “Miscellaneous” bus-stories, stories of various misadventures driving bus.
Like my driving bus down a sidewalk in a blizzard.
Or the time my bus ran away on its own.
Or the time a bus dumped on me on-its-own, and the road-mechanics wondered why I had dumped it.
Other stuff were editorials, like -A) the time I rode a Park-and-Ride myself as a passenger, and it sounded like the tranny was gonna come through the floor, and -B) my daydream about picking up head-honcho with my bus.
Never in a million years was head-honcho gonna ride with the bus-passengers. “Riff-raff,” he called them.
As a safety-award we'd get day-old unsold donuts bought cheap from a local donut-shop. —Or so said the scuttlebutt. (I doubt it was true.)
That “Miscellaneous” stuff was what was appealing to management — bus-stories were getting out.
We also ran cartoons; the infamous “282-toons.”
I would write the story-line, and another driver did the drawing.
Best were -A) a bus-driver getting mugged by a passenger, and -B) the motor-cradle falling out of the back of a bus on a lift in the Overhaul Shop.
Both of these incidents actually happened, especially assaults on drivers. The fact we were cartooning it drove management crazy — before it had been hush-hushed.
Maple Tree Inn is only open a few months each year; maple sugaring season, when the maple sap is running.
Cartwright's boils that sap down into maple syrup, which they serve on homemade buckwheat pancakes.
The place is out in the middle of nowhere, yet famous world-wide.
The place was packed when we got there.
People were standing outside waiting, and parking was near impossible.
Most of the patrons were elderly — lookout for Granny driving her walker!
I've done this gig twice before, and learned you can't eat breakfast before going there.
I managed five pancakes, and two sausage patties; one pancake by mistake — I got three on reload, instead of two.
This shindig is always pleasant — a bunch of ornery Transit retirees swapping stories. More fun than my newsletter.
Afterward some of us drove to Art Dana's (“DAY-nuh”) house to try to fix his HO model-railroad running track.
Art is the retired bus-driver with fairly severe Parkinson’s Disease.
Dana was slightly ahead of me in seniority, and was a mentor of sorts. His outlook on the job, go-with-the-flow, became mine.
Dana and I have similar enthusiasms; hot-rods, trains, model airplanes.
Dana’s wife died, and he no longer drives.
Even though only 69, the Parkinson’s has him weak and frail.
He’s no longer the Dana I knew, but the old orneriness is still there.
His model-railroad is actually two running loops, one inside his original 4x8 table, and the second out onto his expansion to 5x9.
The two running-tracks were connected by a long crossover, and only the inside loop was powered.
The inside rail was positive, the outside rail the ground. The circuit is continuous.
But the outside loop wasn't powered, unless the crossover switches were thrown.
In which case, the chamfered rails of the crossover switches acted like conductors and powered the outside loop.
But if the crossover is in effect, it negates the outside loop as a running track.
Run a train on it, and it will cross over into the inside loop (or derail at the switch, if running into it backwards).
We lassoed Gary Colvin, a long-time model railroader, and retired bus-driver, who attended the pancake breakfast.
“Art,” he said; “if ya wanna use the outside loop as a running-track, ya gotta power it separately, and insulate it from the crossover.”
“Wait a minute,” I said.
“Do we even want that crossover?”
“Your call, Art.”
“I think we better do it, Gary.”
Art has two power-paks; he can do one for each loop. That way he can run trains in opposite directions at different speeds with different starts and stops on each loop.
Gary insulated the crossover.
We thereafter tried a model-railroad locomotive on it. It died after it crossed the insulated track joints into the currently unpowered part.
“Toldja,” I said. “If anyone can figure out this stuff it's me, and Art, and Gary and Gary” (Colvin and Coleman).
“Work for Transit and ya can do anything!”
(Like me Coleman has had a stroke; but his was more damaging.)

• I had a stroke October 26, 1993.
• The “mighty Mezz” is the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, from where I retired over four years ago. Best job I ever had. (“Canandaigua” [“cannon-DAY-gwuh”] is a small city nearby where we live in Western NY. The city is also within a rural town called “Canandaigua.” The name is Indian, and means “Chosen Spot.” —It’s about 15 miles away.)
• Both “ Triumph” and “Norton” are motorcycle manufacturers based in Britain. Both went defunct, although the Triumph name has been resurrected.
• “What’s ‘ah-two?’” is something my mother asked seeing my ATU (Amalgamated Transit Union) button.
• “Our” is my wife-of-42+-years and I.
• The “layover” is the end of the bus-line, where the bus turns around and “lays over” until time to depart inbound.
• In 1993 bus-transfers cost 10¢ each. They were used to transfer to a second bus. At that time, bus-fare was $1; $1.10 with a transfer.
• “‘Pyooter” is computer.
• “Dumped” is a mechanical term. The air-supply to an engine was cut, so that the engine died smothered in fuel, with no air to burn it. —Every bus had a “dump-switch” to kill the motor.
• “Tranny” is transmission. All our buses were automatic transmission.
• HO is half-O; O-gauge being 1&1⁄4 inches (32 mm) between the rails; most commonly 1:48 scale. HO scale is about 1:87.086 — 16.5 mm (0.650 inches) between railheads. O-gauge was common to Lionel Trains, but to model to O-scale would have made rolling-stock so large it would overwhelm everything. O-scale was the track scale used by Lionel Trains, but their equipment was to a much smaller scale. Lionel was a toy train;. not very realistic, but rugged and operable by children. But to scale it to real size woulda made it HUGE. Lionel also used three-rail tinplate track — hardly very real looking. I preferred American Flyer, because it was at least two-rail track; more realistic. HO track was more realistic yet; two-rail on plastic ties. And it was small enough to allow equipment scaled to size.