A True Story: As It Was Told to Me

For the past few days I've been giving someone a ride extremely early in the morning to their tech college in a nearby town. 

Yesterday I noticed high schoolish children getting on their school bus before 6:30 AM, which means they'd probably been standing there in the dark and cold since 6:00 AM, and I was thankful all I had to do was walk a few blocks to school everyday when I was growing up.

An adult male was driving that school bus yesterday, which reminded me of when I was in high school and other high school children drove the school buses.

Yes.  You read that right.  Our school bus drivers back then were, for the most part, 16 years old with a few 17s and a couple of 18s thrown in for good measure.  No adults at all.  None.

In fact, my ex-husband, my brother Tom, and many of my friends (both male and female) were bus drivers in high school. Which reminded me of the story my ex-husband used to tell about his first time driving a school bus.

Back then drivers licenses could not be printed at the DMV.  No such thing as personal computers, and what few computers did exist were HUGE and housed in important places like NASA or the Pentagon, NOT in your local DMV.  No such thing as personal printers either.  What happened was you went to the DMV, passed all the tests, and then waited weeks for your actual license to arrive via snail mail before you could legally drive.  That is how it worked when everything was paper and pencil.

So...my ex-husband had passed all his tests and was in the process of waiting for his school bus driver's license to arrive, but that particular day they were a bus driver short and really needed someone to drive the bus, so the football coach in charge of the buses that day wrote my ex-husband a note:

"Mr. Hambright has my permission to drive this school bus."

or some such nonsense, and signed it: Coach Blanton.  Then he put my ex-husband on the bus and told him to take all the little children home, which my ex did because no one ever argued with the Coach. 

Now as I think back on this, I have to laugh at the absurdity of a football coach thinking he had the power to overrule SC laws of the road.  The audacity it took.  The sheer nerve.  What a megalomaniac!  AND he got away with things like that all the time because he was a winning football coach.  Amazes me.

But then I look up the salaries of football coaches in major colleges and universities and see that they are often the highest paid people on campus, so I guess it makes sense that they would think highly of themselves.  -shrug-

I often wonder what would have happened if a state patrol officer or another officer of the law had stopped my ex with only a note from the coach that allowed him to drive a school bus.  If it were a local policeman, I'm betting he would have accepted the note.  If it were a state patrolman, I'm thinking my ex would have been in big trouble. 

I'm also wondering how many other times that Coach wrote similar permission slips for yet unlicensed 16 year old school bus drivers???

What do you think???