Bus Pushing

[ColtFoutz]

In the late 1970s, the Cavaliers thought they'd gotten a real deal when they bought three ancient SceniCruisers for $20,000 each. They saved money for a summer or two, then began pouring money into them. When the Cavaliers were saved from disbanding by the Village of Rosemont in 1981 (they'd actually voted at the beginning of the summer to dissolve the corps), the buses were the first thing Don Warren replaced.

Here's an excerpt from a late chapter in my book about bus woes, with plenty of pushing stories!!! (Forgive the strange indentation in some places.)

The corps’ buses bucked and staggered like old mules nearly every turn of their tours to Canada in the early 1980s. “I remember seeing this all-girl drum corps going down the road,” treasurer Don Heitzman said. “They were driving brand-new Mercedes Benz buses and we were all sitting along the road sucking our thumbs.”

DeGrauwe recalled trying to solve the problem of a broken window in a part of Quebec where few residents spoke English. “We went to one mechanic with an old shop. ‘We’ve got an almost antique bus. Can you fix it?’ ‘Yeah, I can fix it.’ He looked at it, then, and said, ‘This isn’t an antique, this is a relic.’”

Lights would go out, wires in the fuse box would get to burning. “We broke down so many times,” DeGrauwe said, “the cadets had a bus and we told them to bring that bus to Canada. And that goddam bus broke down.”

Jeff Fiedler thought DeGrauwe was going to have the final breakdown. The corps was delayed – yet again – on its way to Montreal, and DeGrauwe described the troubles of the moment to Don Warren via truck stop pay phone.

“Adolph, come home,” Warren was telling him. “If you don’t think you can do it, come home.”

DeGrauwe started laughing. He turned to Fiedler. “He says we should (expletive) come home!”

“We can’t come home,” Fiedler said.

“I know that.”

DeGrauwe’s head was resting against the side of the phone booth. He looked so frustrated and so spent, Fielder figured the director had had it. He was falling apart. The bus sent to save them had just died, and the kids were standing on the side of the road in Ontario. The A corps had piled onto the bus at a skating rink the evening before, and when they woke up a few hours later, the emergency bus was out of commission. The corps ended up renting a school bus to complete the two-day trip to Montreal.

“We were supposed to have a beach party in Maine, but we missed it and Phantom Regiment got our lobster dinner,” soprano Bill Wiggins groused.

“We were literally spread out all over Canada,” Fiedler said. “My dad was driving the merchandise trailer and he called – ‘Do you know where everybody’s at?’ We were all over the place (due to breakdowns). ‘Oh wait! There’s a bus just went by!’”

“I’m supposed to be managing the drum corps, and I’m with Conrad doing maintenance on the buses,” DeGrauwed moaned. “I wasn’t a mechanic! I remember in Whitewater we had a problem and I was underneath the bus, fixing something. Somebody came up and took a picture of me. And I said to them, ‘You’ll never find Gail Royer (of Santa Clara) doing this.’”

Transportation woes were another way of defining the 1970s, Fiedler said. Every time the corps seemed to make progress, they were held back by something, such as buses bought for convenience that ended up tiring out the corps and making travel a burden.

“There are many good stories about pushing,” Fiedler said. “In Colorado, we were pushing in the Pueblo area on a back road and it was completely dark. And we went up over a mountain and suddenly you were all by yourself and you could see everything, but you couldn’t see the bus any more because it was gone (rolling down the slope)!”

When the buses were rolling of their own volition, the air conditioning would quit. Fiedler remembered waking up at 4 or 5 a.m. on a swing through northern Louisiana and finding his arms had melded to those of his seat partner, Dallas Niermeyer, and both of their appendages had melded to the seat with the heat. “We literally had to peel our arms apart,” Fiedler said.

A little later, the corps pulled into a truck stop and the driver must have banged on the right panel or given the dashboard a good punch, because the air conditioning whirred to life. And for the rest of that ride the bus was cool, and comfortable – a sensation never to be experienced again, Fiedler growled.

Not that the guys didn’t have fun in the tanks turned clubhouses. The A/C may have been out most of the time, but open windows could prove very entertaining.

“We had a free day in Milwaukee,” remembered Marco Buscaglia, a baritone who started with the cadets in 1978. “And a bunch of guys got drunk. Big Wally was sitting in back of me, next to Kenny Farr, and he threw up out the window in the middle of the night, about 2 a.m. And Sean Mead, way in the back, was sitting with Sly (Sybilski), and he wakes up in the morning and has got puke in his glasses because it came right in through the back window.”

“We used to be able to throw something out the front windows and it would come right back in the back windows,” Fiedler explained. “We’d have throwing experiments. Paper. Food. Clothing. We’d be going at it, and it would just jump and get sucked in the back window.”

“Chewing tobacco was another story,” Buscaglia grinned.

Edited December 15, 2007 by ColtFoutz

[kelcanadian]

Here's an excerpt from a late chapter in my book about bus woes, with plenty of pushing stories!!! (Forgive the strange indentation in some places.)

The corps’ buses bucked and staggered like old mules nearly every turn of their tours to Canada in the early 1980s. “I remember seeing this all-girl drum corps going down the road,” treasurer Don Heitzman said. “They were driving brand-new Mercedes Benz buses and we were all sitting along the road sucking our thumbs.”

This would have been the Ventures All Girls Drum & Bugle Corps from Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario. The envy of most, if not all, Canadian drum corps at different times because they did ride around in their own Mercedes buses. From everything I've heard and understood this was down to some excellent business management skills at the time which, to this day, continue to help the Ventures Winter Guard to compete successfully in the Independent Open class at WGI's.

kel

[gmanbay41]

I remember the bus pushing by many east coast corps.

It provided great entertainment after the show. We used to pull up a seat and cooler and watch the Crossmen & 27th try to get their bus going.

I believe the Crossmen are the winners of the bus pushing, since they had the most practice doing it!!!

Thanks for the thread and reminding all of us of a GREAT TIME in drum corps history!!!

Hype!

George

[ColtFoutz]

This would have been the Ventures All Girls Drum & Bugle Corps from Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario. The envy of most, if not all, Canadian drum corps at different times because they did ride around in their own Mercedes buses. From everything I've heard and understood this was down to some excellent business management skills at the time which, to this day, continue to help the Ventures Winter Guard to compete successfully in the Independent Open class at WGI's.

kel

Bully for you guys, then! You can sometimes tell a corps' fortunes by how well they travel!

Thanks for the insight!

[uncle z]

“We used to be able to throw something out the front windows and it would come right back in the back windows,” Fiedler explained. “We’d have throwing experiments. Paper. Food. Clothing. We’d be going at it, and it would just jump and get sucked in the back window.”

A good shot of baby powder out the front window would usually put an end to "The front of the bus sucks the back of the bus" games.

[RobG]

Don't forget: drove the bus

An honor?!?!? Anyone who marched 27th, male or female, has probably pushed a bus, cleaned a bus, and repaired a bus. I remember pushing a bus at 3 o'clock in the morning, somewhere in the middle of the Rockie Mountains, and abandoning my good friend Jimmy DeSab (the driver) somewhere near Vail (Vale??) Colorado, and travelling to the next show on two buses. I stood in the aisle and fell asleep standing up. Nobody had it any better. Those that could fit were three to a seat.

[tubamann]

Ah yes, the 0-4. Probably the same model. No A/C (at least it didn't work). Most of the seats didn't recline, the bathroom didn't work, by mid-tour, the floor looked like the remains of a Malaysian squat-hole.

Ah yes. The GMC PD4104. The last one rolled off the assembly line in Pontiac Michigan in 1961. Underpowered, with a seperate engine to run the AC. The infamous friction brake for parking..giving one the ablility to kick-start the engine by pushing.

They don' make themn like that anymore. Thank God.

[Martybucs]

OK, this photo is a bit bleached by sunlight, but it's from 1971.

We needed to make a U turn on some highway in Texas because we missed an exit and it was a million miles to the next exit. So the first bus tried to cross the median which turned out to be really steep and the bus got stuck. The guys crossing the highway are from the bus I was on. As we ran to push it I snapped this picture.

The other two buses went all the way across at an angle and didn't get stuck. Once across, they turned around. No doubt today, the highway would be way too busy to do that manuever.

The guy standing there in the tank top is Bob Hannum, the legendary Thom Hannum's older brother.

[Scooter Pirtle]

John, help me out here, but didn't a Gatorade emptying land on a police cruiser windshield one time? Was that with the Reveries??

You're right, there were no remains of a bathroom on the 04, but I think one of the busses had one and we used it for storage. Maybe the 314, which I road my rookie year.

Tiff, you would be proud to know that we did indeed push the Star of Indiana busses in '86. It was at the Indy 500 parade and the coaches were stuck in the mud. Luckily, we had plenty of veterans from other corps who knew exactly what do do! I knew then that we were becoming a drum corps!! There's a picture in the '85 yearbook of it!

When I was with a Class A corps in the mid-80s, we had teams assigned for push duty. One team even specialized in "reverse" since our bus didn't have that particular gearing.

Nowadays the bus is transportation. But there was a time when the bus was home, sleeping quarters, change room, warm-up area, tavern, and part of the strength and conditioning program!!!

Viva Le Bus!!

[Martybucs]

Nowadays the bus is transportation. But there was a time when the bus was home, sleeping quarters, change room, warm-up area, tavern, and part of the strength and conditioning program!!!

Viva Le Bus!!

:devil: :w00t: