What Are The Odds?

What are the odds? It’s a question we may toss out in a moment of surprise but we rarely bother to answer it.

More than once last week I found myself asking just that question as I traveled with my eighteen year-old son John and his friend Pierse.

I could say that we went to New York City for spring break but I’d be stretching the truth. We were actually holed up 12 miles west in Totowa, New Jersey but New York has more cache. I figure the odds of a north Jersey resident claiming he or she grew up in New York City are about 4-1.

Our improbable vacation began on Friday afternoon at 2 p.m., five hours before our scheduled flight. I received a call from Jamie at The Late Show with David Letterman. She had received my request for tickets to the show (from early January) and was offering three seats to the Monday afternoon taping. The catch was that two of us had to answer a Letterman trivia question first to prove we were fans and not just tourists.

I correctly named the deli that Dave regularly visits (Ruperts) but someone else needed to answer the second question. John passed the honor to Pierse who correctly named Al as the floor manager at the show. What are the odds? I’d say about 10-1 on answering the questions but about 1000-1 on getting a phone call in the first place.

Anyway, our travels began on a frantic Friday night at DFW airport. Our early arrival allowed time for dinner until the long check-in line ate up 40 minutes. The odds of a delay caused by a person checking four large cardboard boxes at the self check-in are about 75-1.

Literally, as we walked through security, I received a notice that our flight was delayed by 60 minutes due to bad weather in the New York area. The odds of a counter agent giving us an honest estimate were about 50-1 so we weren’t surprised that the delay would be closer to 2 hours. In all fairness to the airline, the storms in New Jersey were record breaking.

The time zone change plus the two hour delay dumped us in Newark Airport at 2 a.m. More hungry than tired, we stopped at the famous Park West Diner in Little Falls, NJ. The odds of a waitress there calling you “hun” are 3-1 and the odds of hearing some colorful Jersey dialect at 3 a.m. are 2-1.

The odds were excellent that it would be a rainy weekend. There was a 100% chance of rain through Sunday. The odds were somewhat less that we would get 10” of rain but local optimists were just glad it wasn’t snow again.

The next morning (afternoon for the teenagers) I noticed that the Passaic River, which runs alongside the hotel, was reaching its limits. I would not have wagered that the same river would make national headlines on Sunday as the towns of Little Falls, Totowa and Fairfield were flooded. We are looking at 500-1 odds that our Holiday Inn Hotel would provide a view of the 2nd worst North Jersey flooding in 75 years.

The odds of telling this story in less than 1000 words are not good either so I will ask our Flipside readers to tune in next week for “What Are The Odds Part II.”

City Bus Time Travel

The wheels on the bus went round and round and round for me as a child. My mother didn’t learn to drive for many years

They went by numbers instead of names but everyone knew when and where the number 2 arrived. They knew the 28 would pass across the street minutes before the eastbound 28 did. They also knew that the 33 and the 88 were the same unless you fell asleep and found yourself in West Caldwell instead of Bloomfield.

I am referring, of course, to the city busses that criss-crossed the main streets of every town in north Jersey either rushing commuters in and out of New York City or just running across town.
It’s been a long time since I rode a city bus though so you can imagine my delight when I spotted an old transit bus at an Allen service station. I pulled in behind it and met Tim Logan, an Allen resident who collects and restores transit busses as a hobby.

“I grew up in Mobile, Alabama riding the busses around town most often with my grandmother,” explains Logan. “I just fell in love with those busses and rode them around and around town getting to know the drivers and routes.”

Logan earned his CDL (Commercial Driver’s License) at the age of 21 and has been driving busses on and off ever since. He has driven almost every variety of bus since that time including the Dallas McKinney Avenue Trolleys. He currently works as vice-president of Pacific World Corpration, a cosmetics company, but also drives school busses part-time for Allen ISD to keep his hands on the wheel so to speak.

Unlike cars, city busses have only changed style three times since the early 1950’s, according to Logan. Almost all busses were manufactured by GM and they had the “old look” busses which resemble bread boxes with the rounded corners. Then the “new look” busses were introduced by GM in 1959 with their modern sloping windshield and split windows down the side. The ADB-design busses, which are still commonly used in cities and airports, replaced the new look busses in the 1970’s.

Logan currently owns 5 busses and owned up to 14 at one point. His current collection includes a 1988 Chance bus (the only one of its kind), a 1977 Flxible bus (yes that is the correct spelling), a 1971 Flxible, which is the actual bus that he and his grandmother rode through Mobile and his favorite, the 1954 GM shown here. This bus was operated as the #1364 city bus in Minneapolis its entire career.

“This is a hobby so my goal is not to find busses that are valuable,” says Logan. “I am more interested in busses that have nostalgic or historic appeal. Once I restore a bus I might keep it for a few years and then sell it to fund another project. It’s not quite like stamp collecting but I sure enjoy it.”

Logan does not hire his busses out for passengers but they have often appeared in television commercials and parades. An old bus immediately sets the time for a movie or commercial. His 1954 bus was recently used for an American Airlines ad that will appear later this spring.
Logan is not alone with his oversized hobby. There are regional and national associations of private bus owners and museums that share stories and occasionally swap parts.

“Most of the busses I start with are in rough shape but finding ones in running order is getting harder. I figure there are about 50 old look busses in running condition and several hundred new look busses,” adds Logan.

One of his recent acquisitions was hauled down from Ketchikan, Alaska and another was found abandoned in a field. Once restored, they can fetch a good price. Logan says that Jay Leno, Jim Lehrer and Bill Clinton own antique busses. The most valuable one he has seen was used for storage on a farm for many years until it was restored as the original Rosa Parks bus in Montgomery.

Stepping on the old bus was like traveling in time. I could almost hear the clinking of change and see the stares of elderly ladies with their foldup shopping carts. The only thing missing was the familiar smell of bus exhaust rising through the back seats.