Going to school
By Linda Craiger House
Parents would line up in their cars to pick up their children at Erica’s school. The Lower School Headmaster had the children gathered and would yell, “ERICA HOUSE TO THE YELLOW LINE!” when she recognized a parent in the car queue. She was picked up by me in my Volkswagon Rabbit, her Dad’s secretary in her smoke-filled car, my boyfriend in his red Ferrari, or my boyfriend in his police cruiser.
By great contrast, I rode the yellow school bus to my rural elementary school, a few miles from home. Part of the time, the bus driver was an Old Regular Baptist minister (the same one who married Lennie and me in 1973, under the plum trees on my parents’ property). He would drive on the wrong side of the road when going around steep curves, loudly blasting the horn. I prayed not to encounter another vehicle on one of these curves.
For high school, all of the rural children rode a yellow school bus to Whitesburg High School. That is, all of the county students except the ones of us who lived on Cumberland River, the other side of Pine Mountain from the high school. We rode two Cumberland Coaches the fifteen or so miles to Whitesburg. They were passenger buses, similar to Greyhounds, with cloth seats and high seatbacks. They came from Cumberland, a small town in Harlan County. We lived closer to Cumberland than Whitesburg, but had to go to school in Letcher County.
I remember being terrified many times while going over that mountain. I feared that the bus would roll off the road and over the mountain, where we would all perish. There were a few guard rails, but they looked too flimsy to support a heavy bus. There were no guard rails at all in most places.
We had some colorful bus drivers. One had a lone, unusually long tooth. We called him Hambone, but I don’t know whether he told us that was his name, or if some of the students named him that. Once he pulled the bus over to the side of the road at the top of the mountain, the only spot wide enough to pull over. Smoking on the bus was forbidden. Hambone stood up and faced us, saying, “I have clear evidence that they’s smoking on this bus.” No kidding. There was such a haze of smoke in the back of the bus that it was hard to see through it. “Now I want to know who’s smoking,” he said. No one answered and we went on.
That was not the only illicit activity on the bus. The freshmen boys were taken to the back of the bus on their first day of high school by the upperclassmen. Some of the boys would hold the boy down while another boy pulled up his shirt and slapped him repeatedly. He was then told that he was “a member of the red belly club.” My brother, Jimmy, told me that the prank got even worse when a boy was dragged to the back of the bus, his pants pulled down, and a girl was invited back to see. I won’t even say what the girl supposedly did to the poor boy. I was very glad not to be a boy on that bus, and I sat as close to the front as I could.
Another bus driver, Clinton, liked his whiskey and carried a bottle with him. Once when the roads were particularly icy and we were scared, we begged him to take us home. He said that if we would take up enough money to buy him a pint, he would take us home and then call the school from the bus garage to say the roads were too slippery to get us there. We dug into our pockets for our 20 cents for lunch money and handed it over to him. Once the bus slid into a ditch and the students walked off the mountain.
Jimmy was two years behind me in school. I had already graduated when he told me of being on the bus when Clinton became agitated when cars would be lined up behind the slow bus, trying to pass. He would speed up when they got to a place to pass, to keep them from passing. When a motorist dared to pass him, Clinton pulled out his pistol and fired shots at the car. The buses continued to be in disrepair and would break down, stranding the students. When the students were finally fed up, they went to the principal and demanded safer conditions. In Jimmy’s last year of high school, he got there by a yellow school bus
