So I became Safety Director of Louisiana Transit Co., Inc. in late 1975. Our Operations Manager, Byron Kohoutek (like the comet, if you’re old enough) believed in training incoming office employees as regular bus operators. No heads-up to the lead operators who did the training. You were just another bus driver-hire thrown into the mix. I learned a lot. The Operators filled my ears with tips and tricks. One such Operator, Sam Ford, impressed me with his conscientiousness. He wanted me to learn all the bus stops out on the highway before I was on my own in regular revenue service. He told me that he did it by requesting a written copy of the bus stop list from the office, in this case for Airline Hwy. Taking his own time, after hours, in his POV, to ride up and down the highway and memorize where each stop was located. He said the office did a pretty poor job of putting up bus stop signs, so you were pretty much on your own. I learned about running “hot” (early). How to signal across the street to other operators how hot you were. Sam didn’t run hot but he explained why other operators were holding up fingers across the way. I got yelled at, cursed, and threatened for not stopping my bus in the middle of the road to let people on by belligerent passengers. Drunks dribbled pieces of transfers into the fare box instead of cash. We had to roust other drunks to get off at the end of the line. I could never drive fast enough to keep the schedule much less run hot but Sam said it would come in time.
I learned that Sam was conscientious.
I also learned the office needed to procure more bus stop signs and go out on the highway and put them up.
For that, we used a pickup truck, a 6 foot aluminum step ladder, nine foot long, dark green painted steel posts with mounting holes up and down, nuts, bolts, lock washers and a very heavy, cast steel, cylindrical post driver that had handles on each side, weighted at the closed end. Oh, and a collection of narrow yellow fiberglas bus stop signs with BUS STOP screen printed in paint running longitudinally with holes drilled strategically to match the holes in the steel posts. It was a two man job. One office weenie, me and one shop worker, in this case our utilityman,TJ Howard. TJ was analogous to a blocking tight end. Big, strong, powerful, tough. He was gentle, taciturn, confident and reliable as rain in the afternoon in New Orleans. His hands were toughened from years of changing tires. I wore gloves.
The bus line with the sorriest set of signs was the Kenner Loop, a kind of bastard bus line we ran under contract with the City of Kenner. Most of the lines we operated traditionally made enough income from fare payment to cover their operating costs. The company ran charters for profit while the core transit lines covered basic expenses. The Loop was a dog. Kenner paid us $35 an hour (in 1975 dollars) to cover the meandering loop of the city with two buses in service. It was a 90 minute loop with a 45 minute headway. What little fares we collected also went to cover expenses.
I picked the Loop for the initial sign blitz because bus stop signs were few and far between in Kenner. Bus stops were spaced every other block. Sometimes we nailed them onto telephone poles and when no pole was near an intersection we drove a post and mounted a sign. One guy opened the step ladder and center positioned contiguous to the designated stop location. He then went all the way to the top of the ladder and sat facing perpendicular. The other guy placed the bottom of the post directly on the ground at the mounting point (to be the bottom), laid it down all the way, slid the post driver over the other end (to be the top) and then walked it upright to 90 degrees. At that point, the guy sitting on top the ladder took the handles of the post driver and began wanging away, up and down and up and down, using the weighted end of the post driver to drive the post down some 2 feet (1/2 inch at a time) until it was properly set. You had to leverage your feet on the steps to generate torque. Then opposing signs were mounted on the post and the screw ends of the bolts damaged to prevent removal.
Anyway, by the time we were some six or seven blocks down 32nd Street in Kenner, having driven three or four posts with signs, the first one was clanging its way past our location, being dragged behind a pickup truck on a length of steel chain. Somebody didn’t want the stop near their home and was giving us the finger as he drove by us pulling the sign behind his truck. At this point TJ began to jump up and down and scream. He ran into the street and began to de-pants himself, slapping his thighs and sitting down in the street to remove his boots so he could get his pants all the way off. His legs were crawling with red fire ants. We had driven a post into an area with resident fire ants and they had crawled into his pants while he held the post steady. The bite of one fire ant brings tears to the eyes. Did we quit? Did TJ say “enough?” Was it hot? You bet. Was TJ hurt and embarrassed? Yes. Did it slow TJ down? No. We proceeded to cover every bus stop sign on the Eastbank of Jefferson Parish over the next few weeks. I had to purchase dozens more signs. Signs disappeared at a rate of one or two per month from each bus line (souvenirs?) so we had to stay the battle but soon we added a column to the bus stop printed list. It was headed: “Posted” with brackets for a check mark.
For one brief shining moment in 1976, all the brackets bore check marks:
Check mark = TJ
TJ =The Man
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