Santa Monica Riders Recall Life Aboard the Big Blue

One bus rider recounted the story of a fellow passenger who slowly and quietly stripped to his underwear before being removed from the bus.

Another, a 70-year-old self-described “slave to a car,” described her conversion into a contented (if occasional) passenger after her first bus trip to the parking-poor Getty Museum.

Officials at Santa Monica’s 70-year-old municipal bus company are learning a few things about life aboard their aptly named Big Blue Bus, thanks to stacks of entries from passengers in an essay contest commemorating the company’s anniversary year.

Bus officials will choose a contest winner every other month throughout the year. Winners receive 70 bus tokens, and their essay and photograph are displayed in the Big Blue buses for two months.

The contest’s first 130 submissions range from slightly shocking to sweetly sentimental.

Venice resident Esther O’Bannon, the first winner, recounted how one Big Blue Bus driver reacted when the electric wheelchair lift malfunctioned at a moment when a waiting passenger needed it.

“So, what does he do? He picks up the man’s wheelchair and secures it in the bus. Then, he picks up the man and helps him into his chair!” wrote O’Bannon, who regularly rides the bus to work. “I just sat there, watching in stunned surprise.”

At the passenger’s destination, the driver again lifted the man to the street, then hauled the wheelchair out and made sure the man was seated comfortably before setting back on the route, she said.

“I am not able to tell you the driver’s name, only that he is not a big, muscular man,” O’Bannon wrote. “But, he surely has a lot of heart, and he puts it into his work.”

The driver was Leonel Navarrete, who said he had read the essay on the bus but hadn’t known it was about him until he ran into O’Bannon at a bus stop a few weeks ago.

“I asked her, ‘Who was the driver?’ and she said, ‘It was you!’ ” said Navarrete, who said he has had to lift wheelchair users onto his bus more than once.

Jim McGuirk, whose essay will be displayed beginning Tuesday, wrote that as a kindergartner he missed his stop on the way to school and was assisted by a watchful bus driver.

“I always had a note pinned to my shirt and I sat diligently behind the driver. He would let me out at 4th and Hill Street. . . . One day, things were a little different,” wrote McGuirk, now 39 and still a frequent bus rider. “This was a relief driver. I did not get off as I should have. I panicked and told the driver. He very kindly took me by the hand, gave me a transfer and walked me across the street to the bus bench for the return direction.”

The driver waited with McGuirk for the next bus and explained his situation to the driver before returning to his own vehicle.

“Many would question why a 5-year-old would be allowed to ride alone. It was 1963 and it was an economic necessity for my family,” wrote McGuirk, whose working parents had five other children who attended a different school. “I always felt safe and secure every time I boarded the Big Blue Bus. I will never forget the kindness shown to me that day, which I truly appreciate now that I have a child of my own.”

Another essay-writer told about encountering a friend she hadn’t seen since their high school graduation 21 years earlier. The two renewed their friendship. Another remembered riding from Santa Monica to Century City to visit her boyfriend (who is now her husband) when they were first dating.

Some tales about the bus system, which serves 21 million passengers annually on routes ranging as far as downtown Los Angeles and Los Angeles International Airport, were a good bit steamier, and seamier.

One woman described the express route she used to take to downtown Los Angeles as a “hotbed of social activity” where flirtation and romance blossomed and faded.

“Those of us who appreciated a good-looking man in a suit and tie had plenty to look at. . . . You could observe the selected individual anonymously, for weeks, even, until a casual remark about an article in the newspaper, or book resting on [his] lap, could begin a conversation,” wrote Jennifer Polhemus of Santa Monica. “And a conversation, like the bus, could go almost anywhere.”

Angeles Irwin of Westchester regaled contest judges with a memorable story from 1976. She was accompanying her sisters and mother, new immigrants from the Philippines, to her home in Westchester from West Covina by bus.

“One late Friday evening, after riding two buses, we boarded our last bus, the No. 3 Big Blue Bus that stopped for us at Lincoln and Venice. There were no vacant seats. . . . One of those [passengers] standing near the back part of the bus was a man with a heavy coat on. He was looking around trying to catch the eyes of the other passengers.

“Suddenly he took off his heavy coat and dropped it on the floor. Then he dramatically began to slowly pull off his clothes, one by one, first his sweater, then a shirt, then another shirt, a white undershirt, then his pants . . . the man stripping was about to take off his last piece of cover when the bus driver realized what was going on.”

The driver removed the man and his pile of clothes, Irwin wrote.

“The man was left standing in his teeny underwear! . . . I suppose my Filipino relatives had their first experience in what L.A. and bus rides can offer in the way of entertainment.”