Gordon Keith
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School bus of my youth was full of characters
12:00 AM CDT on Friday, October 10, 2008
Editor's note: The following column was first published earlier this year. Gordon Keith will be back with a new one next week.
"Are you sure?" she said. She had her dark hair in rollers, and her eyes looked at me from under the hair dryer dome in the beauty parlor.
I hated the beauty parlor. It was in a double-wide trailer outside of town with worn linoleum and wrinkled women's magazines that I wasn't allowed to look at. But when you are 10, you go where Mom goes.
"Yes. I think it will be fun," I said over the noise.
"OK. We'll ask your dad," and her eyes went back down to her Redbook and I went over to the window and sat, happy and silent, looking out at the pines.
I may have been the only kid in America who actually WANTED to ride the school bus. Everything about it appealed to me – the magical door crank, the green vinyl seats, the bumpy, hypnotic ride. My drivers were all characters.
Coach Franklin was about 6-7 and as nice as a picnic. I remember watching his knuckles grip the thin steering wheel and work it back and forth like a cross-country skier.
Coach Franklin was all smiles and big laughs until some kid crossed the line and his eyes cut up to that rectangular mirror and narrowed. Then he would thunder "I'm gonna beat your butt," and every kid shut up. When a guy looks like Patrick Ewing, you don't want to test his follow-through.
Calvin was my second bus driver – 5-8, 95 pounds, and gayer than a parade. I guess I don't really know that for a fact, but he wore Elton John glasses and sported pink fur coats behind the wheel.
Calvin's sworn enemy was a project kid named Miles who always made sport of Calvin and his "boyfriends." I always thought Calvin gave him pretty good lip back, until one day Calvin dropped Miles off in the middle of nowhere and told him he would never ride his bus again.
My last memory of Miles was of him giving our entire busload a two-finger salute as we drove away from an old lumberyard. Calvin didn't drive us anymore after that.
My last bus driver was an old white woman named Inky. She was diner-waitress feisty and smelled like she had just plowed through a carton of Winstons.
Her face was gray and wrinkled, and she loved me. She called me Mr. Natural because I sang a song that had a million words in it and those were two of them.
Inky died late in the school year and I stopped taking the bus, but I always missed it. Beauty shops, Blue Bird buses and pine trees through windows are the scenery of my youth.
Hear Gordon on "The Ticket" KTCK-AM (1310) weekdays from 5:30 to 10 a.m. Catch him on TV on The Gordon Keith Show, Thursday nights at 12:35 a.m. on Channel 8. E-mail him at gordon@gordon keith.com.
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