Getting to School

A long time ago I wrote about getting to school. This story appeared at http://arthursdays.blogspot.ca/2009/03/i-am-mr-getlin.html

In watching the kids at the bus stop waiting for the school bus every morning it made me think again about getting to school.

In order to go to high school, I had several choices of transportation, none of them perfect.

We had to make a choice at the end of the 9^th grade as to where we would like to go to high school. For some unknown reason, probably due to space availability, when I was leaving the 8^th grade they asked us to choose. The scientific method they chose to make the decision was to give the first 5 people on the class list their high school choice and the next 5 stayed in the junior high school. I luckily was included in the list of getting your choice.

We had many high school choices; basically the whole city of Baltimore was open for enrollment. Most likely for the kids in the Jewish neighborhoods was Forest Park High School, a place we could walk to. It was just 2 blocks from our current junior high and was a no brainer. However, we did have a few other logical choices; the most promising for me was City College, the third oldest high school in the US and sort of the academic one, or Poly (Baltimore Polytechnic Institute) the engineering and math type school where I would never fit. I chose City which necessitated some interesting transportation woes. Basically, it was three buses away, and took about 45 minutes on a good day.

We were eligible for a bus pass which gave us, I think, a 10 cent ride to and from school. The best solution was having a friend with a car so you didn’t have to worry about getting there, but gave you lots of opportunities to cut school and go all sorts of places. I traveled around suburban Baltimore and visited friends in other high schools and was chased in and out of an assortment of schools as a trespasser. We went to friends’ homes for a day of TV and fun, or once in a while found both boys and girls who were hiding out and found an assortment of very innocent things to keep us busy.

But most of the time I went to school. The only problems came when friends graduated and we were left without as many guys with their own cars. This meant we had to find a way to school.

Hitching a ride was the best part, and even though it required at least two and sometimes up to four rides, the challenge was there. It was a” trial by transportation” most of the time. I am amazed looking back on those most simple and innocent times, how helpful people were. There were so many who gave us, up to 5 or 6 of us sometimes, a ride to the next stop or all the way to school.

I have little memories of bus rides, although in the 4 years I spent in high school, I must have used the bus often.