We just watched A Kind Of Murder, in which an architect becomes a suspect in the murder of his wife. The couple live in a midcentury showplace of a home of the type realtors call “architectural”, and it’s clearly near NYC. The year is 1960.
Early in the film, the husband is seeing his wife off to Saratoga Springs at the bus station. We see her boarding the bus, and instead of a Scenicruiser or other typical intercity bus of the period, it’s a Crown Coach! For those of you who didn’t attend public schools on the West Coast, Crown was best known for manufacturing school buses like this one. These were larger than typical school buses and featured a rear-mounted engine, eliminating the typical “snout” front of smaller school buses. The largest variant of the Crown Coach had two rear axles, like most intercity buses today. The bus in the movie looked just like the one in the first photo, apart from the fact that it wasn’t marked SCHOOL BUS or painted bright yellow.
We see the bus interior as the woman boards and takes her seat. There seems to be an overhead luggage rack along each side, but otherwise the interior has the typically Spartan arrangements of a school bus; the seats have no arm- or headrests and do not recline, and they provide minimal legroom. School buses are built for capacity rather than comfort. There’s even the brushed steel grab-bar atop the back of every seat.
Like many of its postwar predecessors, this 2014 neo-noir gives us the impression that the only transportation in existence between any two cities is the bus. Nobody ever drives their own car. Nobody ever takes a plane or a train; they always go by bus. Later in the film the wife goes to Saratoga again, once more by bus. The specific departure time is mentioned, as in “the six-fifty bus”, as if everyone is familiar with the timetable of buses to Saratoga Springs.
We learn nothing of the couple’s financial situation, but to judge by the house they live in they are presumably quite comfortably situated. ISTM that it’s bending the truth to suggest that either one of the two would travel by bus at all. Wouldn’t there have been reasonably frequent rail service between NYC and Saratoga Springs? And even if they did travel by bus, wouldn’t the bus have at least been more comfortable, like a Greyhound or Tralways bus of that time? Were there small regional bus companies that did operate “school buses of another color” on their routes?
Steel grab-bar? Luxury! Our schools used Gillig coaches with no such grab bar. The seat backs were green vinyl over some kind of internal frame. They looked like:
The Wiki article on the Gillig Transit Coach does mention use as motorcoaches, though without many examples. It only shows one used as a tourist bus:
Similarly with ours. We didn’t usually have the grab-bar either. But when I saw it in the movie its unyielding hardness seemed to fit in well with the hard-edged-ness of school bus interior design.
It would seem to me that a well-off resident of NYC in 1960 would likely have taken the Laurentian on the Delaware & Hudson Railroad to travel to Saratoga Springs.
I’m not sure about intercity buses but here’s a photo of a NYC bus from the 60s , and some buses from an East Coast bus company. It seems the rear mounted engine was also pretty common in the 60s and I’m wondering if the Scenicruiser style was mainly used for longer rides - NYC to Saratoga Springs is about 4 hours.
I can’t speak for the specific bus type, but the 1960s is when passenger rail started collapsing hard, to such a degree that by the end of the decade it was in shambles and Conrail/Amtrak was formed in the mid 1970s. While buses weren’t quite the “new hotness” anymore, they were still perceived as more modern. Driving ones self long distance was certainly starting to become a thing at the time, but old habits, unimproved roads, and cultural norms (a woman drive herself? Pshaw!) play a role. Also, you say he’s seeing her off, so if she took the car he’d be left without. Heaven forfend.
Few households had more than one car in 1960. If a family member was traveling alone to another city, taking the one car would severely inconvenience the rest of the family.
That reminds me - even today in NYC it’s not unusual for a household to have no cars, for adults to not have a drivers license or even know how to drive. It probably would have been more common in the 60s.
They did away with the hard grab bars in buses because of the safety factor. If the bus stops suddenly, passengers are thrown forward and could get hurt if they hit the bars. So seat backs were covered with padding. I don’t know exactly when they decided to do this, but I think late 60s or early 70s.
To an extent that’s true. The bi-level GM Scenicruiser was exclusive to Greyhound and was their flagship, as it were. Only about a thousand were ever put into service.
Rear-engine flat-front school buses were being used when I was in elementary school in the 60s, and I recall some public busses had the old front engine type but those seemed to disappear rapidly. I’m not sure if I have a real memory of seeing an old front engine ‘step-bus’ around 1960 or just a picture, but I’m sure you’ll find pictures of them in use going pretty far back in time. Here is a picture of a Greyhound bus from the 1934 movie It Happened One Night.
