Walt Stewart

Yesterday morning’s dream was about bus-driver Walter Stewart.
As one who drove transit bus 16&1/2 years, I find myself dreaming about bus-driving often.
Usually it involves driving into someplace I can’t get out of, in which case people tell me I’m stupid. Driving into someplace I couldn’t get out of was the thing I feared most.
Retired bus-drivers among my readers will know who Walter Stewart was.
The fact I became friends with him surprised me, since Walt and I were so different.
I’m a Democrat (Gasp!) and Walter was probably REPUBLICAN.
Our values reflected that. I’m pretty much a bleeding-heart liberal (double-gasp!), and Walt was CONSERVATIVE.
But Walt was a friend of Art Dana (“DAY-nuh”), and so was I.
Walt and I used to drag-race our buses. Walt relieved a bus at Main and St. Paul in Rochester (NY) the same time I began a trip south to MarketPlace Mall and Rochester Institute of Technology.
We’d leave Main and St. Paul together onto South Ave., and end up side-by-side.
Walt was in the left lane so he could turn toward S. Clinton, me in the right lane so I could turn on Mt. Hope.
We’d pass the Library flat-out, pedal-to-the-metal.
I’d have a Park-and-Ride bus, and they were usually faster. But Walt usually had a new city-bus, and they were fairly strong too.
We’d swoop through some expressway ramps, and come to the stoplight where Walter turned.
Who got there first was usually a function of traffic. But if we ended up side-by-side I’d open my left side-window, and Walter opened his door.
We’d exchange snide remarks.
This was much better than another driver who’d get angry if I beat him.
The dream was showing Walter the run I had, a package.
Packages were pieces of work arranged into a run — a package — usually hours apart. A package often covered both rush-hours. They usually payed better because you were working over a longer day. Anything beyond 10&1/2 hours was overtime, even if you were off-duty for hours between assignments.
A package totaled about about eight hours, but if you were on-duty 10&1/2 hours after you started, it was overtime.
Walter had picked my package; he was ahead of me in seniority.
My first assignment was school-work: pick up kids along a bus-route and take them out to a technical high-school on the city’s west side.
Our bus-company got the contract to cart these students. Yellow-bus operators tried to invade, but always failed. For whatever reason Transit always succeeded. It might have been they could easily couple a school-trip with a later rush-hour trip.
My students all loved me. It was always me, not some extra-driver who didn’t know his passengers.
And as a bleeding-heart liberal, if I saw a student running from the Projects, I’d stop and let him on. I wanted them to be able to go to school; I wasn’t being a jerk.
But I was a stickler about bus-passes. It was my old rule: “ass, gas, grass or pass; nobody rides free.”
I remember driving bus through the Projects to that high-school all year. I started with a full bus-load, maybe 45-50 students.
But come June I was down to about 20.
What happened? Drop-outs, prison, in the grave?
This wasn’t the package Walt had picked, but it was carrying students to that high-school.
And it was tricky. After picking up your students, you turned off the bus-route toward that high-school.
You had to go under a railroad overpass, and getting to it was right then immediate left.
Walt was driving, and I was riding shotgun. We missed the underpass.
But there was another farther along next to the bus-route, so we took it.
Then we negotiated a traffic-circle where we were supposed to turn left.
Walt was going straight. “Left, left!” I shouted. Walter heeled the bus way over as we suddenly turned left.
We made it to the high-school despite missing that railroad bridge.
At which point we were supposed to give a passenger-count to a Transit road-supervisor. “Just make it up,” I told Walt. “I always did.”
So now I wonder if Walt is still alive.
I’d heard he died of cancer, and he smoked.
But it wasn’t lung-cancer, in which case I’d say “another smoking victim.”
It was something else, in which case I’d say “cancer victim.”
Thankfully I don’t smoke, never have and never will. My father might have killed me if he caught me smoking.
Dana didn’t either, and he’s gone too.

• For 16&1/2 years (1977-1993) I drove transit bus for Regional Transit Service (“Transit”) in Rochester, NY, a public employer, the transit-bus operator in Rochester and environs. My stroke October 26th, 1993 ended that. I retired on medical-disability. I recovered fairly well.
• “Park-and-Rides” were trips from suburban or rural end-points, usually through Park-and-Ride parking-lots, where passengers would park their cars, for a bus-ride to work in Rochester.
• A “road-supervisor” was an official of the bus-company that rode around in a supervisor-car, supervised bus-drivers, and settled arguments with bus-passengers. They also attended bus accidents.