| CONTENTS Introduction
WTH = W. Thomas Huyck CM = Christopher Moore |
8 - TransportationCM: Our first bus company was Checkerway, and it was a Chicago-Milwaukee outfit, and they had about the best deal that we could find with drivers that we liked for tours. So we worked with Checkerway for a number of years. Checkerway went bankrupt precipitously. It went bankrupt on a day when a tour was going out and when a second mini-tour was going out the next morning. And the Checkerway guy here in Chicago called us to say, you know, "You're not going to believe this. You're not going to like it. I've got a hunch as to what we might be able to do." And they had contacts in that transportation field that led us to a second company. And it's the company that we're still with for long distance work -- Central West. But that left us nowhere with our local transportation. Well, that company went out of business, as I say, on a certain afternoon in the '68-69 season, I guess it was fall of '68, and was then replaced by Central West. We then did quick nosing around to find a company that could handle some of our local rehearsal transportation needs for our Urban Gateways kids, and we ran across a company that had formed in Woodlawn. It was two local people who'd put themselves together a little bus company. They'd been drivers. They knew what they were doing. And this company worked with us for several years. And they had that same quality of realizing what was at stake for the kids and taking care of a variety of situations as sort of adjunct staff by being bus drivers for us. WTH: What sort of buses did they have? CM: They had ordinary school buses, which more or less stayed in repair. The only problem was that they developed some problems within themselves and maybe some problems of over- expansion and not enough money to keep the equipment quite as would be desirable, and during a very bitter winter cold stretch, they came to a standstill with their equipment unable to roll, and that was one of the precipitants of the company coming apart. And so we then had to go shopping around again and we took their suggestion first. The only problem with their suggestion was it was a company that was utterly reliable for transportation and utterly unreliable for transportation that involved kids otherwise unsupervised -- in other words, where you had to expect drivers to, in fact, be adjunct staff. You had to develop a rapport with the bus crew and those being transported. You just didn't -- it couldn't and didn't work. WTH: What was the name of this Woodlawn company? CM: I'm just trying to remember. Well, the key guy --the guy we saw -- was a guy named Grady, but there was a name, and we'd have to go looking through the files for it, I think, because I don't recall the name of the company. I recall the men involved. [It was the Bradford Company - Ed.] WTH: Now, was there one winter where you were sort of left to your own devices? CM: That was it. That was spring of 1972. That was the winter of '72 when Grady and colleagues collapsed. That was the second bus company that collapsed under us. But they just didn't -- they just didn't have the maintenance that would keep the buses running through a heavy period of subzero cold, and in the process, their company collapsed. WTH: Was there some period when the transportation of these kids was -- it was like your office staff and you, the conductors and so on had to fill in to help transport the kids? CM: Through the mid-60's this was very much the pattern. Some special projects would allow us to put a bus on, but the first few years of the OEO contract we did not -- we had part of it done by me, sometimes with borrowed cars to get something that was large enough to do it. And that was what finally forced us into finding the funds to do busing. It was too hectic. It wasn't, strictly speaking, safe. It wasn't an insurable and well insured operation. There were just too many vagaries to continue it, let alone expand it. WTH: Apparently in this 1974 or 1975 period, you acquired a minibus, a gift of the Unitarian Universalist Fund for Racial Justice. CM: And that permitted us to try experiments in transporting the youths in Music Workshop from their schools to Ray and to get kids from various distances -- Lawndale et al. -- over here for rehearsal on time. A liberal religious youth friend that sung with our alumni, who was from Wisconsin and was just kind of hanging out, figuring what he was doing next, came on board as what turned out to be a combination manager/ bus driver, and we got a CTS student to share the bus driving with him -- a gal who had been a professional bus driver among the many things that she'd taken on. |