Let's start this by flashing back to long after my childhood — to 1994 and the movie Speed, which starred Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. You may not see where I'm going with this but just trust me. This website is free and you have nothing better to do for the next few minutes so watch this clip. If you never saw Speed, there was a lot of this in it and if you did see it, it'll refresh your memory. Here we see Keanu and Sandra and a whole pack of innocent people trapped on a bus that will be exploded by a hidden bomb if the speedometer drops below 50…
Got it? Okay, now let's flash back to the mid-fifties and begin working our way forward through that bizarre childhood of mine …
My first school was of the Nursery variety. Every morning, a private school bus service would pick me up and take me to a building on Overland Avenue for a few hours of stories, play, drawing, sandbox, swings and just kind of learning how to be in school and around others. When I started at Westwood Elementary, the same service took me to and from classes for my Kindergarten years and the first few grades there I didn't skip. Around fourth grade, I began walking to and from school.
I graduated Westwood and moved on to Ralph Waldo Emerson Junior High School for grades 7-9. My father drove two other kids in our neighborhood and me to Emerson on his way to work each morning. The mother of one of those kids picked us up and drove us home at the end of the school day…except that Tuesdays and Thursdays, I often chose to walk home. Why? Because Tuesdays and Thurdays were the days that the new comic books came out. If I walked, I could stop at Parnin's Pharmacy on Westwood or Pico Drug on Pico, both of which had fine comic book racks.
I spent grades 10-12 at University High School, which was too far away for walking. In the morn, my father would drop me off on his way to work. In the afternoon, I took one of two buses home, both of which were operated by the Santa Monica Municipal Bus Lines, whose buses drove all over West Los Angeles, not just Santa Monica.
Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I took a special bus that was in operation only on school days — once going to school, once taking us home. It connected University High with the area in which I (and some other Uni Hi attendees) lived. On the front, over the big windshield, the window that identified which bus it was said SPECIAL.
Tuesdays and Thursdays, I would walk around a half a mile from the school down to the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Sawtelle Boulevard and then I'd take a different, non-special bus home. If you're wondering why I did that…well, you should know me better than that by now. Between Uni Hi and that corner, there were two shops that had good comic book racks.
There was also a second-hand bookstore that sold old comic books. It's where years earlier, I'd bought all those Charlton Comics I wrote about in this post. There was also a very nice public library that came in handy at times. I liked going to all those places and I liked not taking that big blue SPECIAL bus. Some days, it was driven by a maniac…
…and now maybe you've figured out the connection to the movie Speed. The bus Sandra Bullock was stuck driving in that film was a big blue bus of the Santa Monica Municipal Bus Lines.
I'm not 100% certain of the name of the man who drove the SPECIAL bus most of the time but I think it was Henry. By any name, he was a disgrace to the honorable profession of bus driving. Henry (if indeed, that was his name) drove wildly and unsafely because he thought it was fun to get a reaction out of us passengers…like he was operating a thrill ride at an amusement park. And if there was a cute lady sitting near the front — and remember, we're talking high-school-age students here — he would have his eyes on her and not on the road. He'd literally turn around and flirt with her while the bus he was driving was in motion.
He probably deserved to be fired just for commenting aloud, as he did whenever she boarded his bus, on the impressive ongoing growth of the lovely bustline of a student named Bonnie. But he should definitely have been fired for reckless driving. Henry was endangering lives — his, his passengers' and those of other drivers or pedestrians along the route.
A lot of my friends who took the bus felt the same way. A couple stopped taking the SPECIAL. Most of us could get home via other Santa Monica Bus Line buses — and sometimes, we did — but that involved transfers and waiting for another bus and way more time. And as with the bus I took home Tuesdays and Thursdays, they didn't take the heavily-discounted student bus passes.
One day, when Henry was especially outta-control, I made it home in one piece, then called the office of the bus company and told whoever answered that they needed to do something about that driver. "I'll look into it," that person told me…and I have no idea if he did or didn't or if so, what transpired. All I know is that the next time I got on the SPECIAL bus, Henry was at the wheel. And if anyone had told him to knock off the wild driving and horny comments, he hadn't listened.
There was a girl named Alice who often sat with me when I did take that bus. She was pretty concerned about Henry for the same reason I was, plus the fact that he sometimes told her how good her butt looked in the skirt she was wearing. That day, Alice and I both got off at her stop and went to her house. From there, I called the bus company to complain again, then we waited five minutes and she called them to complain for the first time.
Again, nothing changed. So I went to Radio Shack and purchased a speakerphone which could be plugged in at Alice's house and use her phone line. With, of course, her permission.
The next time Henry was driving the SPECIAL, we rounded up five friends who felt like we did and we all went to Alice's and called, one after another — seven of us spaced out over an hour or so, telling the same guy each time how awful Henry was.
I went last and when it was my turn, I made a point of getting the name of the person to whom we were all speaking and then I told him that I was writing an article for the school newspaper and I'd like a quote from him, as a spokesperson for the Santa Monica Municipal Bus Lines. "What does your company intend to do about this driver?"
This was on the speakerphone so the other six folks in the room, all of whom had just made their calls to complain, heard this man at the bus company office say, "I'll look into it. Yours is the first complaint we've had about him."
He may have heard them gasp. He certainly heard me say, "Mr. [Whatever-His-Name-Was], you're lying. There are seven of us here and I'm the seventh person to call you in the last hour and complain. Right, guys?" And he heard them all yell, "Yeah!"
To be honest, I was fibbing a bit. I didn't write for the school newspaper…but I could have. If I'd written that article and submitted it to the group that put it out, they might have printed it. So I said, again addressing him by name, "Is there anything else you'd like to say for my article?" He hung up on me — and for as long as we attended University High School, someone else drove the SPECIAL bus.
I have no reason to believe they fired Henry…and indeed, a friend told me much later that he thought he'd seen Henry driving the Santa Monica bus on Olympic. The friend wasn't certain because this driver had behaved himself. They probably just transferred Henry to other routes with maybe a little scolding and a warning that began, "If we get any more complaints about you…" Today, I'd like to think that sixteen-year-old Alice or seventeen-year-old Bonnie telling them that their driver was critiquing their body parts would have prompted them to at least look into it sooner.
That's basically the story but when I saw Speed, with that Santa Monica blue bus careening madly down the boulevard hitting cars and objects and almost hitting people, I had to think of that episode in my life. And when I heard they were making a sequel, I almost asked my agent to get me a pitch meeting with its producers. I would have started by saying, "Now, if you really want an incredible story involving danger and crazy people…" and then I would have told them about Henry.