On 9/11/01 I was running the Chicago branch of a school bus contractor. I had 275 buses in two locations - north and south. My office was on the south side, near 91st off the Dan Ryan. I had to go to see the north-side people and had a meeting scheduled with a principal and all the drivers that ran routes at her elementary school - 12 drivers if I recall. School had just started, we were new at her school and we all wanted to make things work right.
As I left my office on 91st St., I turned on the newsradio and caught the reports of the first plane hitting. It took most of an hour to get to the north side branch, where there was a TV. I was able to catch some of it there before I had to make the meeting.
By the time we met with the principal, everyone knew the world was a different one than the one we woke up to. I was on the phone with my CPS contact, waiting for the word we expected, telling us to bring kids home.
Now, you have to understand the problem here. After we drop kids at school in the morning, our drivers go home until they have to come back in the afternoon. An emergency mid-day release would suck. Badly.
One of my customers was the hospital complex near Roosevelt and Ashland. I had to stop there and see my contact to drop off a check, and get my free t-shirt for sponsoring a portion of a charity walk. While I was there, I got The Call. It was maybe 10:30 - 11 am.
I called both of my ops managers, who had already started making phone calls to drivers. As drivers came in, we just handed them routes and sent them to schools. There were two tiers of schools then - the early (7:30 - 1:30) and late (9:00 - 3:00), and we were told to get the 7:30 ones home first. Now, there was no way to know what drivers were coming in and when, so most of the drivers that day just showed up at schools, announced which route they were and took kids home. Doing routes they had never done before, which in the city was not an easy thing.
It was a fast-paced afternoon, and all through it, the TV was on in the drivers room, and no one was saying a word. No trash-talking, teasing or arguing that is the staple of bus drivers. My drivers would show up, take what was handed to them to do and leave without argument, or crying about having to do something different for a day. They’d finish their first route, we’d tell them which school to go to next, and fax the route to the school so they’d have it when they got there.
Only about 75% of the drivers came in before they would normally have reported, but the ones that did were huge. Some did 3-4 routes, no one refused anything and no one that came in left until all the kids we had to take home were home.
Finally, it was around 3 pm or so and nothing was left to do. My ops manager on the south side and I were the only ones left, watching TV and not talking. We left and I started driving home. The week before, my then-boss and I (he was new, replacing a former boss that was great to work for) had had a huge fight over nonsense issues. He came from a semi-rural area of Missouri, and knew nothing about the city, let alone trying to move school buses through city traffic.
Because pretty much the whole city had gone home early, the Ryan was deserted, and so I decided to take that way home instead of west to 294 like I usually did. As I was driving up the Ryan, my cell phone rang, and it was a number I didn’t recognize. It was a VP from a different bus company, one of my competitors. He had gotten my number from my ex-boss and wanted to know if I was interested in talking about a job replacing a manager he had that was falling on her face somewhere else.
Yeah. The day that all this was happening, and this guy’s world was so bad he was calling me about a job.
We talked, I agreed to meet him and finished driving home. The Kid was there, watching TV with her mom and just dazed, looking at pictures we had taken just the summer before from the Towers when we visited Manhattan. We went out for pizza, were almost the only people in the place.
I ended up taking the other job, which put me in rigs’s neighborhood. Here’s how bad things were where I walked into: The local paper on 9/13 had the entire top of the front page devoted to busing problems at the local high school and elementary schools. The bottom of the front page was about clean up at ground zero.
