The worst night of my life

The date was probably around 1963. My dad was blind and my mother didn’t drive, so I spent much of early life riding intercity buses – usually Greyhound, occasionally Trailways or the regional affiliate.

The reason for this story is I just watched a group of videos about driving an 18 wheeler with a manual transmission. I blame my interest in this topic on radio host Bruce Williams who one day happened to mention that the clutch is entirely unnecessary with a manual transmission (other than when stopping completely). That floored me – that can’t possibly be true! So I got brave enough to try it – I eased off the gas, pushed the gearshift into neutral, waited for the RPMs to drop and pushed gently on the gearshift, and magic happened. Cars have synchronized transmissions, so none of that was necessary, but as I got better at the skill (downshifting is more difficult), I almost never used the clutch. So I was curious how different the process is with an unsychronized transmission. It turns out “real” manly truck drivers don’t generally use the clutch either.

So back to the story. We got on a bus going back to Pittsburgh (PA) from somewhere up North or maybe Harrisburg. This was before Interstate highways – The Pennsylvania Turnpike existed, but that was about it. Pittsburgh had the Parkway East – but anything else meant driving through the mountains on windy US highways built in the 1920s.

So back in those days, people just showed up, bought a ticket and got on a bus. No reservations, no TSA screening. That meant once in a while, they wound up with too many people and had to “add on a second section” – another bus with a second driver. That’s how this nightmare began. We wound up in the overflow section. Our driver was a rookie and had never driven a manual transmission. Greyhound had transitioned to automatic transmissions, so he didn’t need to know how – other than overflow sections tended to get the old worn out buses.

We were supposed to be back to Pittsburgh around 3 PM. Even if you knew how to drive a stick shift car, that’s not enough to drive a heavier vehicle like a bus. It may well have been the transmission had issues before he started driving, but by the time he was done, that bus was ready for the scrap heap. He was unable to get the transmission in gear. At least on trucks, they have a thing called a clutch Brake that you need to get into 1st gear, but if you engage it while the truck is moving, you destroy it. Now you can’t get into first gear.

So we are going up and down hills which require frequent gear changes. Going down a steep grade without being in gear is a really big problem. So this rookie is freaking out, and the passengers are getting a bit uneasy. It turns out he doesn’t know where the bus stations are or what streets to take, so he admits he needs us to give him directions 😉

So at some point, he probably broke off a tooth on a gear, so it would not stay in gear – meaning he had to skip a gear, which meant overrevving the engine and skip a gear and shift in at very low RPMs and try not to stall. As time went on, the problems just got worse and worse. By the end, he probably was forcing the transmission into first by grinding it, and just staying in first and praying he didn’t have to stop. This was long before cell phones or radios. He was on his own. Since he was an extra section, Pittsburgh may not even have known we were supposed to get there. So the sun sets on our bus that is supposed to be there by 3 PM. Eventually sanity kicks in and he pulls over at some business and uses the phone to call the dispatcher and tell them he has a problem. The transmission is so damaged that even an experienced driver would not have been able to drive it. So the only option was to wait in the middle of nowhere while they found another bus and driver to rescue us.

So we eventually made it back to Pittsburgh, but by then the streetcars and buses were running on very infrequent schedules. It was around 11 PM when we got home. At that age, bedtime was probably 8 PM.

So what has been the most unpleasant day of your life?