Friday, December 24, 1999
Lonely Texas Roads
West Texas bus drivers encounter holidays,
cow coolers
By Bill Whitaker
A strange sort of restlessness hung over the retired Greyhound
bus drivers’ Christmas party the other evening, but it was
understandable enough.
For years, the men who drove the big Greyhound buses never
got the holidays off. During the hectic Christmas season they
were always rushing off, hauling folks across the rugged Southwest
— usually travelers of modest means who desperately wanted
to get home to see family but had no wheels of their own to make
the journey.
Santa brought the gifts, the bus drivers carried the people.
“We never got Christmas off, we never got the Fourth of
July off, we never got any of the holidays off,” said 50-year-old
Bob O’Clair, who spent two decades driving for Greyhound
and now delivers mail in Buffalo Gap. “Our wives would either
have Christmas early or afterwards because we were all on the
road.”
That’s why retired Greyhound drivers try to maintain their
tradition of meeting at Christmas. This year they met at the Travelodge
on old East Highway 80. Retired driver Chester Cox hired a country
band, 76-year-old Leo Ellison made a few introductory comments
and then everybody went through the chow line.
Most had cleaned their plates and were gone in two hours —
to where, I know not — but before they disappeared for another
year, they shared some of their on-the-road memories. And, boy,
do they have a busload to remember.
Curiously, you won’t find veteran drivers bad-mouthing
the flat, barren stretches of West Texas. No matter how many times
they drove it, the land never failed to yield up new visions,
such as the craggy mountains in far West Texas glistening in the
early morning sunlight thanks to newly fallen snow.
“You fall in love with it,” Leo insisted of those
West Texas journeys. “I still love it. There’s something
about that country that just works on you.”
What, me worry?
What’s more, the drivers maintain they, too, became as
much a part of the land as any coyote or Christmas cactus around
— at least, in those days.
“It’s prettier than any postcard I’ve ever seen
in all my life,” Bob said. “And I was on that El Paso-Fort
Stockton route for years. We knew every ranch between the two
points, and if someone’s cows were out, we’d stop and
tell ’em. One of my favorite places was Balmorhea. There
was the old Balmorhea Drug and we’d stop there every day.
“The proprietor was this real nice fellow and he had an
old-fashioned soda fountain.”
West Texas was truly a land of miracles, to hear folks such
as Charles Heatherly, 77, a Greyhound driver for 28 years who
handled every route available in those parts. He certainly considers
one of his early morning trips to El Paso as at least bordering
on miraculous. How else, he says, can you explain it?
“One time just before I got to El Paso, when it was turning
pink in the east and I had been driving all night — well,
I woke up passing a truck and meeting a car — and I was sound
asleep when I began passing the truck. Fortunately, the car went
to its shoulder, the truck went to its shoulder and, without even
knowing it, I went right down the middle.
“It was just one of those things,” he sighed. “But
I didn’t go to sleep after that!”
How did passengers react to this diesel-powered miracle?
“They didn’t say a word if they were awake,”
he said. “Maybe they were too scared!”
Keeping cool
If Greyhound bus drivers skirted boredom while motoring across
West Texas, it may have involved more than scenery (which, just
for the record, is numbing for many individual motorists). For
instance, Bob sometimes found innocent diversion among his passengers,
especially those hailing from big cities.
“Every once in a while, I’d run across people from
the Northeast who’d never seen a windmill,” he said.
“They’d ask about ’em and, well, I’d tell
’em it was a cow cooler. ‘Out here in the summer,’
I’d tell ’em, ‘the temperature gets up over 100,
so farmers put these cow coolers up to create a breeze and keep
the flies off. They have these cow coolers every, oh, 20 miles
or so.’
“Well, they’d get real impressed at this and, sure
enough, every 20 miles or so, you’d hear ’em in the
back saying, ‘Oh, look, another cow cooler!’ They just
loved it. They passed that knowledge on, too, I’m sure.”
Joan Umfress-Seay, who worked more than a quarter of a century
for Greyhound in customer service, toiling out of places such
as El Paso, can testify to the merriment caused by drivers. She
regularly came to Abilene via Greyhound to visit her daughter,
Donna, a resident at Abilene State School.
Sometimes Joan drew the attention of drivers during long, nighttime
trips.
“I remember one trip where I had taken my shoes off and
just stretched out and closed my eyes,” she said. “Well,
the driver stopped at Van Horn and did a walk-through to do a
bus check. And when he went back up, he got on the horn and blared
out, ‘Joan, please put your shoes back on!’
“Well, you know, I did — and they were full of water!”
Think this left Joan mad as a wet hen?
“Oh, no,” she said, thinking back on those endless
nights across West Texas, speeding to be near her daughter. “I
never could’ve made it without those drivers.”
Bill Whitaker, who hopes animal rights activists will be
consoled with the invention of cow coolers, can be reached at
676-6732 or whitakerb@abinews.com.
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Copyright ©1999, Abilene Reporter-News / Texnews
/ E.W. Scripps. Publications
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