Mrs. Hudgens
I grew up in the South, specifically in the southern suburbs of Atlanta. However, in the late 1960's, the area where I grew up was still fairly rural or small-townish - "the sticks" as it was called. I attended a small elementary school with perhaps 275 students compared to the massive elementary schools that are prevalent that look more like penitentiaries with with upwards of a 1000 students.
The first week of my first grade year my mother drove me to and from school. My elementary school was about 20 minutes away, so she decided I could ride the bus rather than her having to get dressed early to take me to school or miss "Days of Our Lives", her favorite soap, to pick me up. Penny, the neighbor girl who was two years older than I, committed to making sure I found my classroom until I got it figured out on my own.
When I boarded the bus for the first time, I met Mrs. Hudgens, a tiny, round little grandmotherly lady in her late-60s perched on the driver's seat with her tiny little feet barely reaching the pedals. As I climbed up the steep, black-grooved steps of the bus, cradling a spelling book and my little red patent leather pocketbook in my left arm and grasping the stainless steel rail with my right, she peered down over her bifocals and greeted me with the sweetest little smile acknowledging in syrupy sweet, southern voice that I was new on her bus. Immediately, I was put at ease. If her crown of soft, curly salt and pepper hair had been all white, she would have been a ringer for Mrs. Claus.
Once I topped the steps, I followed Penny down the aisle and sat next to her. After the bus doors slapped shut and the bus began to move, I began to realize this was not like the school bus scenes I had seen in the movies and after-school specials where the kids were chatting, playing, and generally horsing around. Everyone boarded the bus in silence in almost military precision. The girls sat on the left of the aisle, the boys on the right. The elementary school children loaded the bus starting with the front row and working toward the back filling each bench seat with three little bottoms before continuing to populate the next seat. Similarly, the high school kids boarded starting from the back row working toward the front. However, they were permitted to sit two larger bottoms per seat. By the time, we arrived at school, I had quickly learned Mrs. Hudgens' rules of the road. In addition to the loading procedure, there was no talking when the bus was stopped along the route. When the bus was in motion, conversations were permitted in low voices only. Mrs. Hudgens did not want to be distracted. Carrying on a conversation was challenging since you were constantly pausing mid-syllable when the bus stopped. In retrospect, it was probably a great exercise for focus and memory development. Nor was talking permitted while the bus was loading and unloading at the school. The bus was unloaded in silence starting with the girls first row, followed by the boys first row, then the girls second row, and so on. Once the elementary kids had disembarked, the high school students were expected to migrate to the front of the bus and fill the seats in the same manner as the elementary children. Then, Mrs. Hudgens departed the elementary school and continued the route to pick up additional high school students and take them to the high school.
The other thing that I noticed after the ominous sound of those bifold bus door slamming shut was that Mrs. Hudgens' sweet, grandmotherly demeanor instantly vaporized. Her hard brown eyes were constantly fixed to the enormous rearview mirror mounted above her head scanning the bus like a raptor hunting for any unfortunate Keds-wearing field mouse that dared to violate her policies. Uttering a single syllable while the bus was stopped, turning around in your seat to tell the kid behind you to quit kicking the seat, passing a note, leaning into the aisle to pick up a pencil, passing a lunchbox to a sibling, or standing up briefly to sort out a wedgie would elicit a blue streak of admonishments from Mrs. Hudgens. She never missed a single deviance of the Hudgens Manifesto. How she managed to keep the bus between the ditches while never glancing at the road was further proof that she was supernatural.
Mrs. Hudgens took great pride in adhering to her route schedule. A week before the start of school each fall, the school would have registration/open house one evening. In main entrance of the school, there would be a big map detailing the bus routes and the driver's name and bus number for each route as well as the approximate times posted along the route to give you an idea of when the bus would be at your stop. On first day of school, upon boarding the bus, Mrs. Hudgens would announce the precise time she would be at your stop for the remainder of the year. My first grade year it was 7:32 a.m. She would write it down on a little slip of paper for the younger children to take home. At the same time you were reminded to be at the stop no later than time as she would not wait. And wait she did not. On the first day only, there was some leniency because we had not been apprised of the exact time. However, henceforth, if you were not at the bus stop when she approached, you were left in a cloud of diesel exhaust. There were many times, a child would be flailing down his or her long driveway with 15 yards to go, the other children trying to help pleading, "Wait, Mrs. Hudgens!, Connie is coming!" Mrs. Hudgens did not give it a second thought. Her standing response, "I have a schedule to keep!! And hush while the bus is stopped!" The bus doors slammed shut like a bank vault, she stomped the accelerator with those little elfin feet, the talking in low voices resumed and the child that dared to dally was left there breathlessly standing at the roadside disheveled and slack-jawed in disbelief.
It never occurred to me that Mrs. Hudgens' rules were unusual or particularly strict. I assumed these were the universal school bus rules agreed upon by school boards all over the nation. On the very, very rare occasion that she was sick and we had a substitute driver, we still observed all the rules. We all knew better than take advantage of the situation because there would be hell to pay when Mrs. Hudgens returned.
Mr. Asonnio
My father worked for IBM as a customer engineer which meant he was assigned to a customer's data center and responsible for keeping their mainframe computers running. Consequently, he frequently had to attend classes to be trained when new models were introduced. These classes often lasted for several weeks to several months. Most of the time he attended these schools in one of the IBM manufacturing plants in the Hudson Valley. This meant my dad would be away for several months with IBM footing the bill for a flight home only once a month.
When I was in 5th grade, my dad learned he had to go away to school for four months. For some reason, he and my mom decided to make it a family field trip and we all moved to Kingston, NY temporarily to be with my dad. We closed up our house, stopped the papers, forwarded the mail, packed up our clothes and essentials in our avocado green Chevrolet station wagon including a suitcase full of grits, cornmeal and cane syrup because at that time these staples were unattainable in the north. My dad was going to drive the car whereas my mom, my brother, and I would fly. So, he left out on a Thursday morning and arrived in Kingston by Friday evening to unload the car, and then collected us from the Newark, NJ airport Saturday afternoon.
For those few months, we lived in a small, furnished apartment on the outskirts of Kingston. There was only 8-10 units, and they were all occupied by other "IBMers". Most were one-bedroom units rented by men that came without their families but there were three two-bedroom units occupied by families such as ours.
My brother and I enrolled in the local elementary school in Kingston, Harry L. Edson Elementary School. The Monday after we arrived in Kingston, my mom drove us to Harry L. Edison, had a quick chat with the principal, Mr. Sweeney, filled out a couple of forms and then left. Mr. Sweeney subsequently escorted us to our respective classrooms. My mom learned from the other IBMer moms which bus the rest of the kids at the apartment rode back and forth to school. I was instructed to find that bus after school and make sure my brother, who was in first grade, made his way to the bus, too.
At the end of the school day, I collected my brother from his classroom and escorted him to to the front of the school where all the buses were lined up. After walking up and down the rows of buses, I found our bus. When we boarded, there was no driver perched in the seat nor standing outside next to the bus per usual for Mrs. Hudgens. Once we cleared the top of the steps, my brother and I were awestruck with the mayhem in progress. Children were randomly seated here and there - boys and girls all mixed up, some seats had one child, some had two, and some children were not seated at all but standing in the seats. They were laughing, shouting and rough-housing. A few girls were giggling and screeching while kicking a pudgy boy named Herman in the head because he was crawling beneath the bus seats to look up the girls skirts. My brother and I found an empty seat and sat down together and looking around uneasily at all the chaos. We thought surely once the driver arrived, he or she would take control.
Finally, we saw an adult head appear at the top of the bus steps. We expected the other children to take notice, cease and desist the nonsense, and scurry to their seats. This did not occur. However, once this person had ascended the steps, we realized it was not the bus driver which explained the lack of concern on the part of the other children.
Back at home, all of our bus drivers were retired older people or middle-aged moms; this person looked to be in his 20s and was a what we called a "hippie" back in those days. He was a skinny Italian-looking fellow with a big droopy mustache and dark brown hair halfway down his back tied in pony tail with a leather band. He wore an embroidered, chambray shirt a la John Denver, bell bottomed hip-hugger jeans with a green and white striped ecology flag patch sewed across the seat of his tattered jeans which were cinched by a wide tooled-leather belt. It looked like he was a leftover from Woodstock which was plausible since Woodstock was a mere 11 miles away.
Bear in mind, out the in sticks, we did not have any hippies living amongst us - not one. On occasion, they loaded us up for a field trip into Atlanta to see a performance at the Atlanta Alliance Theater. As our bus made its way through downtown Atlanta, we would crane out necks from our seats on the lookout for hippies and other alternative sorts. We have learned from our conservative parents, hippies were not to be trusted. We were taught that they were generally ne'er-do-wells that lived in sinned, did not have jobs, did not go to church, smoked "pot", and looked like they were in need of a good bath. It did not begin to enter the realm of possibilities that that they would they trust a heathenish hippie to drive a school bus full of children - even these Yankee hellions with no apparent up-bringing. This was too much to fathom - even for a Yankee school system. However, once this dubious individual grabbed the shiny metal pole next to the driver's seat and swung into the seat sort of like a monkey, we realized this was, in fact, the case.
At that point, my brother and I were so dumbstruck at this hippie driving the bus, we momentarily forgot about pandemonium. Mr. Asonnio, as we later learned was his name, seemed to be 100% oblivious to it all. He got settled and glanced fleetingly in the big rearview mirror - the same type that Mrs. Hudgens used to examine our souls. Then, you could tell he took a second look in that mirror zeroing in on my brother and me. He squinted for a better look, furrowed his brow, and swung himself out the seat and navigated his way through the chaos to where my brother and I were seated. He stood looking slightly annoyed standing with his hands on his narrow hips that managed to support an enormous metal belt buckle that was slightly smaller than a VW hubcap. He studied us for a couple of seconds and demanded, "What's wrong with you two? You guys lost or something?" I was petrified. I had been never up-close and personal with a hippie to start with let alone being addressed by one that was slightly agitated with me. I could not get my mouth to formulate words. We just shook our heads. He followed up with, "Are you sure you are supposed to be here?" We both nodded silently but emphatically. He stared us for another second, shrugged, turned, made his way back to the front of the bus and swung himself back into the driver's seat and bellowed, "Aw right, you guys. Sit down!!!!". The kids that were standing in seats or wresting on the floor, flopped into a nearby seat and Mr. Assonio's Asylum On Wheels lurched forward and pulled out of the school's driveway.
Over time, I learned that Mr. Asonnio did have some disciplinarian standards. Once he cranked up the bus, he did not allow standing up or crawling on the floor and everyone had to be in a seat even if just partially. We could sit wherever and with whomever we liked. We could talk at any time. If someone, always a boy, did manage to totally cross the line (i.e., fighting or saying something disgusting to a girl), he would pull over and tell the offenders to come up front for their sentencing. They had two choices: 1) A trip to Mr. Sweeney's office the next morning; or 2) "The Handshake". Without fail the choice was"The Handshake" as Mr. Sweeney was a real no-nonsense SOB. Essentially, the "The Handshake" would be Mr. Asonnio grabbing the perpetrator's hand while squeezing hard for 30 seconds. Often, the boy would end up writhing on the floor whimpering and laughing at the same time. The defendant could always throw in the towel and holler "Mercy!" before the 30-seconds was up but it meant a trip to Mr. Sweeney. Almost all the recipients of the "The Handshake" sentence wound up wallowing on the floor but the few that were still on their feet at the end received cheers and applause from the whole bus.
My brother and I soon loosened up and got comfortable with the bus ride antics. Although we could never bring ourselves to be participants, we did enjoy the entertainment. Once in a while, I even got the chance to kick Herman in the head too.
Epilogue
I am surprised how often I think about Mrs. Hudgens now days.
Whenever I hear of a terrible school bus accident at the result of a distracted bus driver, I silently express appreciation for her rules that helped ensure our safety.
Whenever I am stuck creeping behind a school bus and my agony is exacerbated when I notice the frequency the bus sits at a stop for over 2 minutes until a child finally emerges from their home and saunters lackadaisically to the bus, I chuckle to myself, "I know a cure for that."
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