The buses of old Akron, Ohio are fond memories of mine. I was born and raised at 967 N. Howard Street in Akron. This address was right on the bus stop. Local buses turned the corner right in front of our house.

The bus stop was right at the side door of the house. To make waiting for the bus a little more comfortable, my father constructed a steel pipe rail that ran through concrete posts at the sidewalk edge of the yard for people to sit on while waiting. And they did.

My mother did not drive a car in those days, back in the 1950s and '60s. We depended on the bus every Saturday to go downtown to shop. I was her package transport. We would stand in the kitchen of our house and watch out of the back door and when we spotted the bus turn several blocks up the street, we had five minutes to lock the door and get to the bus stop at the side of our yard. We would get onto the bus, drop a dime into the coin counter box and take our seats.

The trip downtown took around 20-minutes as the driver had a few stops to make along the way for more passengers. Mom and I would do the shopping at O'Neil's and Polsky's department stores, have lunch at the lunch counter in Scott's 5 & 10, then head to a few smaller stores and then go to the bus stop in the afternoon to wait for the return trip home.

We would once again board the bus and ride home and get off at the side door of the house. It was a weekly ritual. I can still smell the fuel fumes from the buses, that deep, oily diesel smell. In the winter the buses were always warm inside unless you got a seat by the front or back doors. With all the stops letting passenger on and off, those seats were always cold from the doors opening constantly.

Sometimes I went to town alone to meet friends and "hang out". One of our favorite activities we called the hat game. In the late '50s and early '60s most men wore hats. So, as they stood at the bus stop reading their newspaper, we would reach out the bus window as it began moving and grab a hat from a man's head and carry it about a half block down the street and drop it on the sidewalk. He would yell and curse us and run after his hat. We would laugh ourselves silly watching him run after that hat.

One night in the middle 1960s, during the winter, it was snowing like crazy and the streets were really slick with ice. We had a large picture window in the side wall of the living room that looked out to the bus stop area.

At around 11:30 pm, while my cousin and I watched an old horror movie on late night TV, all of a sudden the whole living room lite up bright. There was headlights come into the picture window. I got up and looked out and was looking right into the windshield of a bus and looking down the center isle of seats. The bus had come up the street and tried to stop at the traffic light on the corner and had slid sideways and the front wheels jumped the curb and he was stopped with his windshield against the side of our house. The bus wouldn't move and the driver asked to use our phone and he called the metro garage to get someone to come out. We had nine late night passengers from the bus waiting in our living room and having coffee that my mother made for them until a mechanic arrived with a tow truck and managed to pull the bus and right it up. That was a heck of a night. I was 15 years old.

During the late '50s and early '60s my dad left the car in the garage during the bad snow and cold of the winter. Since we lived on a bus stop and the buses stopped right in front of his work at Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, he would rather ride to bus to and from work. So the car stayed snug in the garage in the wintertime.

I have not ridden a bus in around 45-years. I have driven since I was sixteen. But I remember the Akron buses very fondly. I think the thing I remember most is the advertising posters that were all the way up the walls over the side windows. And I remember the long pull cord that signaled to the driver that I wanted to get off at the next stop.

Another thing I remember was something that drove my poor mother out of her mind. When I was 5 and 6 years old, before I learned to ride a bike, I had a small pedal car farm tractor that I rode around the sidewalks.

As I said before, the buses would turn at our corner and, being so long, they would drive up over the walk at the corner with their rear tires. There was a traffic light at the corner and I would ride my tractor up the sidewalk and stop at the corner and wait for the light to turn green as if I was really driving. As I sat there, a bus would turn and the rear tire would come over the sidewalk about five feet from me. I thought it was really cool watching that huge tire turning in front of me. But mom would see me from the window and not think it was so neat. She would scream at me from the front door. Finally my dad made me my own traffic light that actually turned red, yellow and green using a timer. (Dad was an electrician). So that ended my corner experience with the buses. I was relegated to the back yard from then on.

I can still see those big tires rolling over that curb right in front of me. Good times!