She Was a School Bus Legend : Obituary: Helen Kazarian Magee hired and trained many of the current drivers in Los Angeles. She worked in the business for 57 years.

Helen Kazarian Magee spent almost six decades making sure that children got from home to school and back safely. After the 78-year-old Gardena resident died Sunday, hundreds of school bus drivers from throughout the Los Angeles area mourned the loss of a woman many called “a legend in the school bus business.”

“She hired and trained the majority of people driving school buses in Los Angeles right now,” said Jim Murchie, director of operations for Laidlaw Transit Inc., the contract school bus company where Magee worked as a supervisor. “She was one of the first women ever to drive school buses, starting back in 1935. She worked full time right up to the time she went into the hospital” last month.

“We all called her ‘Mother Magee,’ ” said Doug Pendleton, a bus supervisor for the Los Angeles Unified School District. “She was my first line supervisor when I started (as a school bus driver) back in 1975. She could be tough as nails when she had to be but she was always generous and forgiving.”

“She was a mother to all of us,” added his wife, Ann Pendleton, a bus dispatcher. “She’s going to be missed by a lot of people.”

Magee started life in a place and time when survival, not just getting to school on time, was the main challenge faced by children. Born Hanum Kazarian in the village of Kars in Armenia in 1913, Magee and her family fled from their home when Turkish forces undertook what Armenians today refer to as the genocide of Armenians.

Magee, then a young child, became separated from her parents and was later wounded in the leg by a bullet. Eventually she was reunited with her parents, but the leg wound left her disabled.

Magee’s family hoped to immigrate to America, but first they spent four years living in Juarez, Mexico, awaiting entry documents. They arrived in Los Angeles in 1926. Soon after, Magee spent several months in a Pasadena hospital undergoing a series of operations on her leg. According to William Steinbeck, a family friend, the leg improved somewhat but it was left shorter than the other, and for the rest of her days Magee had to wear a special shoe to compensate.

Also while in the hospital, the young Hanum Kazarian changed her name to Helen Kazarian. Later she married--she eventually divorced her husband--and her name became Helen Magee. In recent years she lived with her sister, Mary Shea, in Gardena.

In 1935, while living in South Gate, Magee landed a job with the Los Angeles Board of Education to take handicapped students to and from school on a contract basis. She drove the children in her own car, which had wooden benches installed, and was paid 18 cents per child per day. Friends say that often she would go into homes to help dress her student riders for school.

Shortly thereafter, when buses for handicapped students were introduced, Magee was hired by the contractor as a school bus driver--despite reservations in those days about the ability of a woman to handle a bus. Although not a large woman, Magee proved her doubters wrong; despite the lack of power steering, power brakes and other modern bus improvements, she handled the buses with skill.

Later it was said of her that “she loved school buses so much she must have yellow paint in her blood.”

For 57 years Magee worked for a series of companies involved in the Los Angeles student transportation business, most recently the Laidlaw company, which operates 600 school buses for the Los Angeles Unified School District and another 600 buses for other school districts in the area.

In the mid-1960s, after driving a bus for 28 years without an accident, Magee became a trainer and supervisor. Later she became the liaison between Laidlaw and the LAUSD, getting up at 4 a.m. each day and heading into the field to make sure the school buses were running on time.

In March, Magee, who had hardly ever missed a day of work, went into St. Francis Hospital in Lynwood for cancer surgery. She died Sunday morning. About 200 people attended funeral services at Rose Hills Memorial Park near Whittier on Wednesday.

“Helen always had the philosophy that she had to be doing something,” said Laura Greenwood, a driver for LAUSD. “No one will ever be able to replace her.”