Horror on the Ten-Hundred line

My favorite RTS ride, trip #2105 from Fairport and East Rochester, with a 300-series artic. (Long-ago photo by BobbaLew.)

—In 1977, when I would turn age-33, my wife and I moved out of our walkup apartment into our first house. It was on Rochester’s east side.
It was originally a farm-house, built in 1865, and never improved; except for an addition on the side. The original house was two floors; the addition only one floor. A rear shed became the kitchen.
The area around it developed into a semi-urban neighborhood, annexed by Rochester years ago. The area was originally Town of Brighton.
My wife arranged the purchase, since I was unemployed at the time, and she had a job. The purchase was based on her income.
$15,000, finagled by a gumint housing program: Federal Housing Administration (FHA), I think.
Next door lived a lady who drove bus for Regional Transit Service (RTS), a public employer, the supplier of transit-bus service in Rochester and environs. Her boyfriend, who lived with her, also drove RTS bus.
I started looking for permanent employ as soon as we moved. I worked for a bank after college, but was canned after three years for not having a viper attitude.
I was totally unprepared for life. I had a BA, but was no longer interested in school-teaching.
I was more interested in writing and photography. I covered motorsports for a small Rochester weekly newspaper, and tried freelance photography, mainly sports-car racing. (I had a darkroom.)
Finally I gave up. Seven years with little income. My photography was more a tax-dodge.
I interviewed at various advertising agencies, using my newspaper stories as a resumé. One guy was interested, but no one was hiring.
My neighbor noted RTS needed bus-drivers. “Oh well,” I said; “but only temporary.”
A stupid, meaningless job for a college-grad, but it paid fairly well.
I stayed at it 16&1/2 years, during which my neighbor got fired, although Transit fired people willy-nilly.
It was pleasant at first, mainly learning how to safely operate large vehicles.
I used to say driving bus wasn’t fun unless you could put-the-hammer-down at least once per day.
We chose runs by seniority, and I picked mainly country Park-and-Rides.
My greatest joy was pedal-to-the-metal on a four-lane expressway. 65 mph in the passing-lane, all a 300-series (above) would do.
My bus-driving ended 26 years ago with my stroke. I’d made many friends, particularly other bus-drivers.
But I was tiring of it, especially our clientele. At least I never had a gun drawn on me, but I was mugged once. It taught me how to deal with complete wackos, so I was finally able to shut down my holier-than-thou father.
So now, 26 years later, I’m left with bus-dreams. Nightmares sorta. Unfamiliarity with the bus-route, or driving into someplace you couldn’t get out of without management eager to assert its intellectual superiority.
Yesterday’s bus-dream had me driving my all-time favorite city-bus, our 500-series Flxible-Flyers.
I was inbound on the west side of our Ten-Hundred line, Dewey Avenue in Rochester.
I used to say driving bus was essentially driving the back end. A bus isn’t a snake. Only the front wheels steer. The back wheels follow, but well inside the fronts.
Steer a corner as you approach, and your rear wheels clip the corner — or knock over a light-pole perhaps.
We called it “swing” = “put additional ‘swing’ on it;” that is, begin turning well after passing the corner.
Plus yer bus is eight feet wide, even wider if 102 inches. It has to be properly placed, and driven so the back-end doesn’t clout things.
Street workers placed traffic-cones totally inadequate for a bus. “I just flatten ‘em all,” a fellow bus-driver once told me. “Maybe when they put ‘em back up they get the hint.”
Needless to say my bus-dream had various fearsome insanities. Traffic-cones sent flying, and an aluminum gutter downspout crushed.
Apparently I went off-route, and found myself facing a low-clearance underpass. Could I get my bus under 10 feet 6 inches? I tried, and thankfully it was just a dream.
I had a natural-gas bus once with CNG tanks on its roof. “Am I gonna be able to get this thing under the bridge without triggering Armageddon?” —We worried about this stuff.
For me driving bus is long ago. The best job I ever had, a daily newspaper in Canandaigua, came after my stroke. It was a much better fit, but bus-driving paid more.
I always say my (our) newly-constructed house in West Bloomfield (1989) was paid for by driving bus.
But that newspaper was fun, and bus-driving no longer was.
I still attend transit retiree functions, but feel sorta out-of-it. Too many Transit friends, but I don’t think or talk like a bus-driver. I don’t proceed every spoken phrase with the F-bomb.
How many bus-drivers can recite Shakespeare’s 116th Sonnet from memory?

• “Artic” (“arr-TIK”) means articulated = bendable. An artic could seat more than the average 40-foot bus. They were 60 feet long but could easily drive corners because they were two sections hinged together by an expandable bellows. The 300s were our first bendables. They were heavy and bog-slow, but they rode extremely well. A German design, but built in the USA.
• “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.
• “Off-route” was the naughtiest of naughties. If you got detoured off-route you had to immediately radio that to management. And if you unintentionally wandered “off-route” you were in deep trouble.
• There is a railroad overpass in nearby Canandaigua with clearance above the road of 10 feet 6 inches. It decapitated many road-trailers.
• “CNG” is compressed natural-gas.
• I had a stroke October 26th, 1993 from an undiagnosed heart-defect since repaired. I pretty much recovered. Just tiny detriments; I can pass for never having had a stroke.
• Click the link readers; it’s a podcast of Shakespeare’s 116th Sonnet.