We Brake for Awards

Think about all that traffic you deal with all the time, but then picture how bad it would be if you had to spend five or six hours in it every day. Now imagine your car is about five times bigger and heavier than it is now, about half as fast. And, just for fun, think how it would be if you had all that and a few dozen screaming kids sitting in the back.

Got that image? Well, welcome to the world of Janice Easter and Linda Gray, a pair of women who have, between them, logged more than 50 years of driving Huntington Beach school buses without a single blemish on their safety records.

Impressed? Both of them also spend part of their day shuttling students with developmental and physical disabilities, which presents the extra worry of occasionally dealing with seizures, blocked trachea tubes and other medical crises.

“Some of these kids are so fragile they have a special aide sit next to them,” Gray said. “It can be really rewarding working with special-needs kids, but it can also be really challenging. It so great when you see some improvement in them. Some of them really shine.”

You think school buses are painted yellow? With these two, it looks more like gold to us.

This morning, the Automobile Club of Southern California will present a 25-year safety award to both Easter and Gray, a wonderful honor that should be especially meaningful--and comforting--to the parents of kids in the Huntington Beach City School District.

Last week, Easter reflected on 28 years of service and all the young faces she has seen clamber on and off her buses since she took a job that she originally thought would be a short-term gig to collect enough paychecks to buy a Ford Galaxy.

“All I wanted to do was buy that car,” Easter said. “It was long and sleek and I loved it. That was in October 1969. And here I am, still driving a bus.”

The job is getting tougher all the time. “Traffic in Orange County has quadrupled, not doubled,” Easter says with a sigh. Worse, people see buses, and they race to get in front of them--often cutting them off without realizing that the hulking vehicles need a lot more room to stop. Still, Easter says she loves the job--especially when she sees former passengers.

“They flag down the bus and jump in, give me a big hug and give me updates about going to college, of their new girlfriends or a great new job,” Easter said. “It’s great. I’ve been doing this so long that I start getting the children of the children I had on my bus years ago.”

The school years come and go, but the youngsters who bound up the steps of the buses these days with their notebooks and lunch boxes seem much like the

generations that preceded them, Gray said.

“Generally, they’re the same,” Gray said. “The language they use these days is a little more colorful, if you know what I mean. And that’s a little disturbing. But the kids are great.”

Gray spends part of her workweek ferrying the sports teams from local high schools to their away games and tournaments, a very different experience than driving the regular school routes. The teams are generally quiet on the way to games--the coaches want them focused and disciplined--and Gray doesn’t need to look at the scoreboard to know who won after the game. “If they lose, it’s a pretty quiet trip on the way back,” Gray said, “and if they win, they are wild.” In victory or defeat, the weary and sweaty athletes always make the return trip “very, very fragrant.”

The memories make Gray chuckle, but she, like Easter, admits that the stress of the streets makes the job harder all the time. “I start every day praying,” she said. “People have no regard for buses, they run stop signs, they don’t seem to think.”

With all that, what keeps her driving?

“When I see the kids I used to have, at the grocery store or someplace, and they say, ‘Hey, bus driver!’ ” Gray said. “It always makes me smile.”

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THE CHASE CONTINUES: Last month we told you about reader John Jaeger of Irvine and his one-man campaign to pursue and report cops who speed without using their lights and sirens. Today we bring you an update: Cops are still speeding and Jaeger is still pursuing.

We got a fax from Jaeger last week with the latest complaint he has filed with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department about one of the agency’s deputies zooming down a local freeway at breakneck speed without the appropriate warning lights activated.

“This is still going on, nothing has changed,” an angry Jaeger told us Thursday afternoon. “And they apparently don’t care if anybody knows about it.”

Some background: In 1993, Jaeger was on the northbound Santa Ana Freeway when a sheriff’s patrol car raced past him. “He was flying. More than 100. I got angry. I said, ‘This is not going to happen in my neighborhood.’ ”

Jaeger stomped on the accelerator and hit triple-digit speeds to catch up to the deputy and write down his plate number. That would lead to the first of seven complaints Jaeger has filed with area agencies. Three of those complaints have led to officers being disciplined for violating department policies, which put strict limits on when, how and why officers can drive at high speed.

A spokesman for the sheriff’s agency says “deputies are human” and sometimes speed, but he assured the public that the incidents are rare and diligently investigated when they do crop up.

The most recent of Jaeger’s complaints was for an Aug. 31 incident--two weeks after we publicized his maverick efforts, a fact that has the commercial real estate broker seething. “You think they would get the word out to slow down,” he said. “I guess they don’t care if they kill somebody. But I care.”

A lot of you wrote in with your own accounts of witnessing speeding cops, but almost all the letters expressed an equally deep concern about Jaeger’s habit of flying after the cops and doubling the danger. One of the readers was C.L. Jarusek of Placentia, a cop himself, who wrote: “The most important point that must be made is that Mr. Jaeger is so adamant about catching speeding officers he is endangering others by his driving. Maybe he should get a life, and mind his own business.”

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The Roads Scholar wants to hear your insights, stories and questions about traffic, the commuting experience and Orange County transportation issues.

You can call him at (714) 966-5724, send e-mail to geoff.boucher@latimes.com or mail letters to him at The Times Orange County, P.O. Box 2008, Costa Mesa, CA, 92626. Please include your full name, hometown and phone number.