Saturday Diary / When the bus ride Downtown was beeeeeautiful!
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"You are entering beeeeeautiful Downtown Pittsburgh," my bus driver used to say just after he crossed Carson Street and entered the Smithfield Street Bridge. "I know you can't wait to get to work, and I can't wait to get you there."
Those were usually the opening lines of Frank's morning monologue, the likes of which I have never heard from any other driver in a decade of daily bus commutes. Frank and his spiel are now gone, victims of urban fiscal woes, and another small step in the general de-personalization of our day-to-day routines.
On Mondays, Frank cheerily told us, without fail, that we had "just five days to go before the weekend."
He heralded "over-the-hump day," though sometimes on the wrong day. (I've always thought that only Wednesday could be so characterized, but Frank would often designate Thursday as hump day.)
On Fridays, he reminded us of his shirt and pants sizes, favorite colors and love of sweets, in case we were going shopping over the weekend and wanted to get him a gift. Just don't buy him blue shoes, he'd say -- people tend to step on them.
When it rained, he quipped, "As you can see, Luke Ravenstahl has ordered the streets washed again." He'd occasionally joke about the Steelers, sometimes slipping into an atrocious Myron Cope imitation. Once he even asked riders to write thank-you notes to my colleague, Brian O'Neill, after he wrote a column advocating a solution to the transit agency's fiscal woes.
Remember when the Port Authority advertised, with signs on the sides of their vehicles, that they now had bike racks on every bus? Frank somehow ended up with a bus that had the sign, but not the rack -- a rolling tube of hypocrisy that wasn't lost on him. Frank then told bewildered riders, for days on end, that "Bike rack practice has been cancelled for today, due to technical difficulties."
When he learned that I was a reporter, he took it upon himself to let me know about all of the stories he witnessed on his run. There were SWAT standoffs, cars driving on train tracks, unwise drivers who tried to play chicken with his bus. "You missed a big story ... again," he never hesitated to tell me.
I often wondered whether Frank was, perhaps, a frustrated comic who turned to bus driving for a captive audience after his audition at the Improv went poorly. Most of his colleagues are polite enough, but their job description apparently doesn't include a daily monologue.
First Published February 4, 2012 12:00 am
