“We drove schoolbuses and got our kids safely to school.” That’s what Sandy McDermid, now 76, and her husband Archie, now 83, both told me they had done for a living – both now retired. Archie took on all the many responsibilities of driving a schoolbus for the Bellows Falls school system starting in May, 1979 – that’s 45 years driving the tar and dirt roads of Westminster, Rockingham and Bellows Falls picking up, dropping off schoolage kids. Sandy started in 1986 and drove bus for Fall Mountain High School, driving the roads of Walpole, Acworth, North Walpole and Langdon for 14 years and then switched in 1999 to drive for the WSWMD for twenty-five years. 45+36=81 years between them driving kids to and from school.
I interviewed the two of them as we sat at a picnic table just off the south side of the Walpole, NH Library. They had driven down from their home in Alstead to talk to me while a catbird sang nearby for a good part of the hour and a half we talked.
Archie was born in 1941 in Worcester, MA. He studied for four years at the Worcester Boys Trade School studying automotive mechanics and welding. The day after graduation he took a job at Worcester Sand and Gravel where he was soon driving a chain-driven “pit-truck”, a Sterling dump truck/tractor trailer. The watch fob on his belt he was wearing the day I interviewed him depicted that truck from 1944. The cap he wore simply read “Bucyrus Erie” (an American underground mining equipment company founded in 1880 and sold to Caterpillar in 2010.) He went on to drive for Direct Motor Freight in Worcester, then opened his own garage in Shrewsbury in the 50’s, moving to Bellows Falls in 1965 where he hauled milk for Rouse and Gleason, working from 10:00 PM to 10:00 AM.
In May, 1979, Ed Soboleski hired him to drive schoolbus for the WNESU. Ed told Archie, “You’ve got a good temperament. You’ll stick with it. I know you will..” He did up until 2022.
His wife Sandy, also destined to become a schoolbus driver, was born in 1948 in Bellows Falls and grew up in Alstead, NH where she went to high school. She worked for awhile at the APW papermill in Brattleboro, “and then I made ball-bearings and shafts for machinery at MPB in Keene, then Basketville, Vermont Medical, Avon and Stanley Products…... But that all changed and settled down.
“In 1986, I started driving schoolbus for the Fall Mountain School system – Walpole, Acworth, Langdon…. The kids were awesome and Jane Stansberry was the best boss EVER. I retired from that job after 25 years, married Archie in 1999 and moved over to drive for the WNESU which I did for eleven years.”
43 years at the wheel for Archie; 36 years for Sandy = 79 years combined. They both started at around $4.00/hour. In the 80’s they went up to $7.00/hr. Towards the end they were earning $25/hr. “but we had to pay three-quarters of our health care costs.”
In the early, 2000’s, Archie and Sandy attended the Driver’;s Appreciation Day for Vermont schoolbus drivers in Fairlee. Around 100 drivers attended. Sandy told me, “Among many, many tests we had to pass, we had to take many bus parts with us and be able to show how they worked. I took a set of bus brakes and when we saw Archie was doing really well in the competition that having to demonstrate how the set of brakes shoes would really help Archie’s presentation, I gave him my brakes. He won top honors.” (In 2011, the Fall Mountain School District gave her the “Safe Driver of the Year Award” with acknowledgement that in all her years there, she never once had an accident.)
Sandy added that “There was a driver there from Bristol who had driven for decades. She spoke to us all about her experiences. She was a little bit of a thing and 90 years old!”
So what about all those kids who they drove over all those 79 years? “There were some kids that were terrible to us. We got called all sorts of names; once a kid tried to set fire to a seat. One grammar-school kid had a pistol but fortunately it wasn’t loaded.”
Both Archie and Sandy told me SAFETY is the number one issue for all schoolbus drivers. “Our number one job is to get kids safely to and from school every day. We train for emergency evacuations, and now, with cellphones and instant emergency backup, we feel much safer than we did all those decades ago. Buses have swing-out lights to stop traffic, flashing amber lights back and front…. But even then some drivers drive their cars right around us even when we’re stopped to let kids off.
“And because the busses are so much bigger now, we sit up high and can look down on drivers coming toward us. You wouldn’t believe the number of people texting and on cellphones WHILE driving. And EVERYONE seems to be in such a hurry! It’s scary sometimes.” Sandy told me that if schoolbus drivers see five or more cars behind them, they are required at the next safe spot to pull over to let those cars pass. Even in “no-pass” sections of road, cars will zoom past us. It’s scary.”
We as readers of this profile need to take this profile to heart when we find ourselves sharing the road with schoolbus drivers. Those are people, fellow human beings like Archie and Sandy, who have taken responsibility for transporting our children safely to and from school. They deserve respect.
Once we had covered the bases in our interview, Archie and Sandy had to leave on the spot. Their granddaughter, Emily Britton, who had been on the Dean’s List every one of her eight years of studies, was receiving her degree as a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine from Oklahoma State University. They were going to watch the transmission of the ceremony at their daughter’s house in Walpole.
In closing: I got word that Nicole Barnett, now secretary to the Superintendent of Schools for the Windham NE Supervisory, had a story about Archie. I called her: “My mother was a driver with Archie in the 70’s. My daughter Nicole graduated from Bellows Falls HS in 1993 and Archie drove her to school. Nicole has three children. Archie drove all of them to school. Everybody loves Archies. His eye sparkle with joy.”
This is one of a series of some 30 profiles of working people from southern Vermont and adjacent New Hampshire that I wrote and then published in the Brattleboro Reformer newspaper every Friday from Jan 1 - May 30. Do the same with your local newspaper.