Ric Benkleman sat on his front porch for three or four weeks in 2018 and discovered he hated it.
He had earned the rest. He’d started driving in 1971 for a propane company in Alden and stayed sixteen years. He ran a pizzeria for three. He’d gone back to driving tractor-trailer around 1994, spent a summer on an ice truck, and then put in twenty-four years at Coca-Cola before finally hanging it up at sixty-five.
The pension was coming. Social Security was coming. His wife looked at him on that porch and said what he already knew.
“You’re miserable.”
“I am miserable,” he told her. “I can’t retire. I just can’t do it.”
She mentioned that they were looking for bus drivers.
Hired on the spot
Ric looked at two places. The first didn’t sit right with him — he was out the door inside half an hour, and when they called back later, twice, he passed both times.
The second was a school district three or four miles from his house.
“I walked in. They hired me on the spot.”
They told him there was a trailer out in the parking lot and he could get his DOT physical done right then. He did. Training started a week or two later.
He already had a Class A he’d been carrying for thirty years, so what he needed were his P and S endorsements — passenger and school bus. Three or four weeks of training, the written test, the permit, then the road test.
When it was over, the examiner asked whether he wanted to know how he’d done.
“I want to know how I did it right now. Lay it on me.”
A hundred percent. No points off at all. The examiner told him he was the first person in a long time to score one.
“You proved to me, beyond a doubt, that you can handle this bus.”
Then came the wait on fingerprints, which cleared on a Friday afternoon while he was out driving with his trainer. He came back from lunch at one o’clock. The prints were in. They put him in a route seat that day.
The route he waited for
Not long after, they put him on a wheelchair bus with an aide — special ed, or “sped,” as the district calls it.
“I fell in love with it from day one.”
The assignment was temporary — the regular driver was out for a few months, and when she came back, Ric moved on to other routes. He kept an eye out for another opening.
One came, and they gave it to him. He finished his first year on it. The next year he was appointed — permanent, with bidding rights — and he bid that route. He’s had the same one for seven years.
It carries up to five wheelchairs at a time, the legal maximum. Eleven wheelchair students a day across five runs — two in the morning, three in the afternoon — nearly all of it to special education schools. About seven hours behind the wheel.
“It fits me. I can’t say the word enough — perfectly.”
He reaches for the old line about loving what you do and never working a day in your life, and then abandons it for something plainer.
“I freaking love it. I just love it.”
What transferred, and what didn’t
After decades in straight trucks and tractor-trailers, Ric expected the bus to be simple, and mostly it was.
“A bus is basically a big straight truck. Straight vehicles are cool. They’re easy to handle.”
One habit had to go. On his first parallel park, he cranked the wheel the way you would with a trailer behind you — turn right to send the back end left.
His trainer stopped him. You’re not in a double vehicle anymore. Get that out of your head right now.
He pulled up and backed in. First real try, dead center, no cones down.
“She goes, you don’t need any more training on parallel parking. You’re perfect.”
Beyond that, he says, there wasn’t much of a transition at all.
“I’m used to looking at the world through a windshield.”
The one thing he’d change
Ask Ric what’s wrong with the job and he doesn’t hesitate, and he’ll tell you every driver would say the same.
It’s the cars that don’t stop for the flashing reds.
“They think it’s a joke and they blow right by you.”
He’s had three or four go past in a single week. He’s had three or four go past at once while he was stopped on a state highway picking up students. He is precise about the law, the way someone is when they’ve had to explain it many times: a divided highway means a real barrier — a Jersey barrier, concrete, a median wide enough that nobody could readily drive across it. That’s the only case where oncoming traffic doesn’t have to stop.
“Other than that, the painted line doesn’t matter. They gotta stop.”
He doesn’t think most drivers understand what they’re risking when they decide the reds don’t apply to them. He’d like that to change.
Learning the route
A route, Ric says, is its own skill, separate from driving the bus.
He had studied the sheets ahead of time, but a route on paper and a route through a windshield are different things. The first week or two you’re working from the pages — which stop is next, which side of the road it’s on, which way you turn.
After that, it’s yours.
“You get used to the route. You do it yourself without using a sheet.”
His route sheets are still paper, and he prefers them that way over a screen.
What he’d tell a retired driver
There are plenty of retired drivers out there, and Ric has a specific pitch for them. It starts with how he thinks about the work.
“I look at it as well-paid community service. You’re filling a void. You’re filling a need. You’re doing something to help out your local community.”
Then the honest part, which he says twice, unprompted, because he means it.
“You gotta be restless. If you like being retired — you know what, stay retired. You’re not going to like driving a bus.”
For anyone who isn’t built for the porch, his advice is to take a special ed route if one comes open. He has two aides on board with him. Air conditioning is mandatory and has to be working. The mechanics at his shop, he says, could cut a bus in half and have it patched by next week. It’s a route that comes with support, and he thinks a new driver would be lucky to land one.
And the students, he says, are the easiest part of the day.
“The kids are fantastic. Most of the special ed kids are zero problems.”
Forward
Two moments he tells on himself.
A girl started laughing on his bus one morning, so he picked up the intercom and announced that there was no laughing allowed on this bus. The whole bus erupted in laughter.
Another time he was trying to teach a student the compass directions — north, south, east, west. He asked her which way they were heading right then.
She looked him in the eye and said: forward.
“I almost had to pull over. I laughed so hard my tears were coming out.”
He made sure she knew the difference, too — that they were laughing with her, not at her.
“This is classic. This is golden stuff.”
Ric is starting his ninth year. Same route, seventh year running, eleven wheelchair students a day, three or four miles from the house where he spent three weeks discovering he wasn’t done.