The Bus Stopped Here : Santa Monica’s Greyhound Station Closes After 48 Years

For 48 years they have come--troops heading to the Korean War, hippies and housewives, Caribbean tourists in dreadlocks, even the occasional Hollywood star. And for 48 years, Gertrude Miles has sold them tickets, helping them “Go Greyhound” to places as near as Santa Barbara and as far as Bar Harbor, Me.

This week, however, that half-century of service came to an end. Friday, at 5:15 p.m., the Santa Monica Greyhound station dispatched its last bus--San Francisco-bound No. 6754, with stops in San Luis Obispo, Salinas and San Jose.

Greyhound, which has been closing terminals throughout the country in recent years, decided to vacate the squat brick building on 5th Street in Santa Monica because of low ridership, a company spokesman said. For riders, that means the closest Greyhound station will now be in Downtown Los Angeles, 20 miles away.

For Miles, 81, the closing means retirement--time to hang up her company-issue dark purple skirt, matching vest and white shirt.

“It’s going to be sad. I think a lot of people are going to miss us,” Miles, the station’s manager, said Friday. “I just feel like I want to cry, and yet I don’t want to cry.”

The Santa Monica Greyhound station has stood on 5th Street, north of Broadway, since the late 1950s, when it moved from 6th Street and Santa Monica Boulevard.

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It had a hollow look on its last day of service. GTE workers unscrewed pay phones from the walls. The lockers and vending machines had long since been removed, leaving only the dull-yellow linoleum floor, the orange plastic seats and the dingy brown walls.

As she sold tickets, checked schedules and cleared out her office Friday, Miles reflected on the station’s healthier days decades ago, when it echoed with the hubbub of hundreds of passengers, clanging pinball machines and an ever-playing jukebox.

In the late 1940s, she said, the riders were different from today’s passengers, most of whom take the bus out of necessity rather than for pleasure.

“(They were) just kind of family people,” said Miles, a native of Chester, Pa., who moved to Santa Monica in 1938 with her husband, Earl--now deceased--a television repairman. “Everybody looked up to Greyhound in those days. They would travel everywhere.”

In the 1950s, families were joined on the buses by soldiers preparing to fight in the Korean War. But it was in the 1960s and ‘70s, Miles says, that business boomed.

“People knew they could get on the bus and go anywhere they wanted,” she said. “We had families of six or eight people. And we had a lot of Japanese people come over for tours. We would make hotel reservations and sightseeing tours for them all over the United States.”

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Miles cracks a smile when she recalls the young people who flocked to California then.

“I don’t remember calling them hippies,” she said “But they were fast people, what with their bags and sacks and their long hair.”

The station even got its share of Hollywood glitz.

Once in the 1960s, James Arness, star of TV’s “Gunsmoke,” booked a one-day charter tour to a local dude ranch. And occasionally the depot served as a backdrop for productions ranging from the TV show “Jake and the Fat Man” to a film now in production, starring Al Franken of “Saturday Night Live.”

Miles marks the station’s decline from the gas shortages of the late 1970s.

“That’s when everything started to go down,” she said Friday. “People stopped traveling and the world started to turn upside down. . . . At one time, we had 64 buses a day and they just kept cutting the service. Now it’s down to six buses a day.”

Riders were advised of the shutdown by a sign taped to the station’s front and back doors: “Effective October 1 this station will be closed. Nearest station is Los Angeles, 1716 East 7th Street.”

For many using the terminal this week, the news didn’t make much of an impression.

British tourists Anna Slidel and Mark Godden were in no mood to remark on a bus station’s passing Thursday--not after arriving from Phoenix minus their luggage. Mindful that they were scheduled to board a plane Friday for the Cook Islands, they wanted to know when their suitcases would show.

“We don’t want to be here all bloody day,” Slidel said.

To others, the terminal’s closing held more meaning. Wayne Schneider of Santa Monica, a frequent rider in the late 1950s and ‘60s, stopped by Friday to see the place one more time.

“I remember (Miles) from back then,” he said. “They used to have a good (food) counter that ran along the wall, and they served hamburgers and coffee. It used to be a lot more lively.”

No one, however, will miss the commotion more than Miles, who worked at Douglas Aircraft as a parts procurer during World War II. After being laid off at the close of the war, she joined Greyhound as a ticket seller, becoming station manager in 1957.

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There was, to be sure, the downside of bus station life--the dozens of break-ins, for instance, and the two times she was robbed. In one robbery in the late 1970s, a man brandishing a gun knocked her over and emptied the cash register. She yelled for help and police caught her assailant at a restaurant down the street.

But for Miles there were many more good times than bad.

“The best memories I have are taking care of people who were stranded here . . . a family of five or six who had no place to go,” she said. Summoned from her Santa Monica home late at night, she would go to the bus station and phone local charities to find the travelers a place to spend the night.

For the past year, the Greyhound terminal has had only two full-time employees--Miles and Fausto Canal, a ticket seller. Canal, a three-year veteran of the Santa Monica depot, expects to be reassigned to another station in the Los Angeles area.

Miles, however, has sold her last ticket. She says she is planning a vacation, only her second in the past 48 years.

But she won’t be taking a bus. Her destination is Hawaii.