They Came to Say Goodby to Bus Riders’ Friend

Armen Goglanian’s passion for riding Orange County’s buses was simply explained, friends of the blind man said Wednesday. There were all those other riders to befriend, not to mention the bus drivers themselves.

He made friends with them all. Goglanian knew nearly all of the Orange County Transit District’s 732 drivers, having ridden their routes since bus service began in 1971, OCTD officials said. Some of those drivers, along with other people the Newport Beach man had come to know from his bus rides, came to pay their respects Wednesday in Newport Beach.

Goglanian died of head injuries Saturday when he was struck by a car as he crossed a street near his home.

“There isn’t a square mile Armen didn’t cover” by bus, said Robin Fiddler, a 26-year-old Huntington Beach woman who met Goglanian years ago on a bus. She grinned through her tears. “He was a ‘busaholic.’ He’d find out who the driver was on a bus and sit down and talk until he knew all about them. . . . Then he’d remember their name and come back the next day just to talk again.”

The gestures, large and small and too many to count over the last 15 years, did not go unnoticed.

Hundreds of OCTD drivers and dispatchers contributed money for special floral crosses, including one that read, “Armen, Loved and Missed by OCTD.”

Drivers, some of them off duty but in uniform, spoke at the funeral about the friend who never forgot birthdays, anniversaries and, last year, even found his way up seven flights of hospital stairs to visit one driver’s newborn.

Goglanian died at the same hospital, Western Medical Center in Santa Ana, several hours after the traffic accident. Police, who are still investigating it, said Goglanian was walking across Cliff Drive when a car going about 25 m.p.h. struck him. The driver wasn’t cited.

After an hourlong memorial, about half of it delivered in Armenian, Goglanian’s family gathered beside his casket and remembered the man who had so much to complain about and did so little of it, instead spending his time on others.

By breakfast each day, said his cousin Daniel Goglanian, Armen was out of the house and en route to someone in need. If not, he was probably on a bus.

“He rode with me for hours on end, just to keep me company,” remembered driver Mark Andrews, 33, who had known Goglanian 11 years and used to let him control the bus radio music. “Armen just touched everybody he met, deeply.”

Driver Mary Jane LeFevre, who met Goglanian while driving a route near his Newport Beach home, had once baked him a birthday cake and brought it onto the bus for passengers. She is considered by many drivers to be Goglanian’s best buddy.

“We lit the candles and were going to have cake and punch,” LeFevre said after the memorial services. “And then Armen sits on his own birthday cake. And I said, ‘Armen, are you gonna lick it off your pants?’ It took him a long time to live that one down.”

On other occasions she would josh him, announcing over the microphone that Goglanian, whose family operates a Costa Mesa bakery specializing in pita bread, had just boarded and, “Can you believe it, not even a slice for us!”

OCTD General Manager James Reichert wrote a letter of condolence to the Goglanian family on behalf of every driver, an OCTD spokeswoman said.

Among the 50 mourners were a small contingent of blind and handicapped friends, some of them wheelchair bound and others accompanied by guide dogs. They had met Goglanian during his volunteer work at the Braille Institute.

A graduate of the institute himself, Goglanian taught other blind students, many of whom signed a letter read during the eulogy. It stated that Goglanian “was one of our best students” and concluded: “As our friend, we will miss him deeply.”

Born Aug. 31 in Chicago, Goglanian was “destined to be different,” his cousin Daniel eulogized. Goglanian was born with a heart defect, and at age 5 he underwent open-heart surgery. His mother believes that the surgery triggered her son’s retinitis pigmentosa, an eye disease.

Four years ago, he met his girlfriend, Jan Stallman, a cerebral palsy victim, who displayed a gold bracelet Goglanian once bought her for Christmas.

“He worked as a bell-ringer for the Salvation Army so he could save up enough money to buy it and other Christmas presents,” Stallman’s mother, Delight Wiseman, recalled.

“He was the best friend anybody could ever want,” she said. “For my daughter, he was her legs and her eyes and her heart.”