WAR TIME HUMORISTS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 24 December 1942, Page 5

WAR TIME HUMORISTS

WASHINGTON BUS DRIVERS.

DIFFICULTIES CHEERFULLY OVERCOME.

Next to taxi drivers, bus drivers are Washington’s most amusing people. With buses running in a steady rushhour procession, strangers asking all kinds of questions, and overcrowding a normal phenomena, the Capital’s war time bus drivers have adopted a “sink-or-swim” kind of humour. Even when they are definitely sinking, it’s funny at limes. For instance, there was the driver who was harassed one day bj r a whole series of petty annoyances, such as people standing on the rear-door-open-ing treadle when they didn't want to get off and refusing to heed his “please move all the way to the rear” plea. Finally when the crowd began, to obstruct'his vision by not observing the “stand behind the white line” rule, he pulled the bus up to the curb, picked up his cash box, and announced loudly that he was through with bus driving and the folks better find their way home any way they could. Then there are the street-announcer wits. Competing with the street car conductor who always calls "12th and Pennsylvania Avenue; Internal Revenue Building; get off and pay your income tax” is the bus driver who announces the approach to the 16th and Euclid Street stop for the new Government girls hotel as “Government Gals' Concentration Camp, all out.” Not so long ago, bound for a Watergate concert in a bus that had no sign to tell its destination, we and a whole busload of folks had numerous chuckles over the driver’s performance. He would drive up to a bus stop and wait for the nretty young Government stenographers there to ask where he was headed. When he'd say “Watergate” and they began to draw back with a disannointed air, he’d chirp up. “Better come and go along.” Nobody took him up on his invitation, but oyer and over again he'd leave a giggling groun of girls behind as he drove off. Friends of ours vouch for the fact that they have actually ridden with green drivers who had to turn and ask the passengers the route the bus was supposed to take. Passengers are usually extremely co-operative in pointing out the turns to which they have become so accustomed in their daily comings and goings from the City.. Just as coroperative was the driver of a bus coming in from Alexandria the other day, who, finding himself caught in a hopeless traffic jam as he annroached the City, dismounted and played the role of a traffic cop until he succeeded in getting the snarl untanas for equipment —well, with ever- bit of rolling stock back in use, the driver sometimes has to exercise a bit of mechanical genius to keep goin« Last night on the bus, half the overhead lights wouldn’t light, The driver came back and gave each of them a good wham with his fist. Most of them went on and the passengers went appreciatively back to their evening papers. —M.H., in the “Christian Science Monitor.”