Crosstown Bus Links 2 Worlds

Housekeeper Maria Celis sits back in the seat of the gritty 576 bus, alive with the hard-nosed spirit and immigrant dreams that defined the generations of women who traveled down the same road before her. She suddenly breaks out with a big grin.

Just moments before, she had succeeded in delaying the South Los Angeles bus that some call the “Nanny Express” long enough for two other regular riders to buy a sack of tamales from a Vernon Avenue street vendor.

“We watch out for each other,” Celis said, nodding approvingly to driver Jose Fonseca after the tamale bearing women climb aboard.

Fonseca, a trainee and still green, shrugs. With his concentration focused on keeping his schedule, the delay had not been without its tense moments.

“I’m not supposed to stop,” Fonseca said. “If I do, they will be late. They will hear about it and then I will hear about it.”

Being late just won’t do, not for the women and handful of men who every day ride the 576 bus to clean the houses, care for the children and wax the floors of the rich and powerful of Beverly Hills, Bel-Air and Pacific Palisades.

Being on time is part of the deal.

But so is looking out for each other on this special bus created from the ashes of the 1965 Watts riots and which today runs from extremes in poverty to extremes in wealth, then back again.

Created in 1968, the route of the 576 cuts across the city in a way that gets housekeepers and nannies to their jobs in the fastest, most direct way possible. Still, everyone on the 576 line makes sure there are always a few minutes to pick up stragglers, grab a doughnut, even celebrate a birthday.

The 576 bus goes one way in the morning: outbound.

Five buses leave South-Central each weekday morning at the crack of dawn, making a limited number of stops as they wind their way from the oil-stained auto repair shops, weather-beaten restaurants and busy liquor stores of Vernon Avenue to the broad, palm-lined boulevards and mansions of Beverly Hills and beyond.

In the afternoon, the buses reverse the process. The last bus leaves Sunset Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway at the edge of the Pacific at 5:09.

During the middle of the day, the line shuts down.

The 576 has endured through riots, upturns and downturns in the economy, immigration crackdowns and amnesty, marriages and deaths, new buses and rickety ones, green drivers and veterans.

This is a bus line for both dreamers and survivors.

The older riders know well the bitter racial history of Los Angeles.

Still, they smile and laugh and celebrate each others’ lives. What keeps them stepping aboard, sometimes for 30 years, is the dream that they are creating better lives for their children, or grandchildren.

Mirroring the Los Angeles area’s growing Latino population, the riders these days are mostly Latinas. Back when it started in 1968, things were different.

“Back then it was all black,” said Betty Ramos, 83. She laughed at a memory and added, “When you saw a white woman on the bus you knew someone made a mistake.”

Ramos has kept house for one family in Beverly Hills for more than 30 years. She remembers the 1940s, when a black woman could be hassled on the street in Westwood if she didn’t have a white woman’s name and address in her pocket.

“I couldn’t walk out there like I can now,” said Ramos, gazing out the window of the Burger King on the corner of Le Conte Avenue and Westwood Boulevard, where she likes to stop for breakfast on her way to work. “If the police stopped you then, you better have a name and an address, tell them, ‘I am going to Miss So and So’s house.’ If not, they would tell you that wherever you came from, go back.”

Things got better after World War II, she said, though life was still hard. Ramos, a regular bus rider since 1952, said she worked at housekeeping and being a nanny during the day and at aircraft plants at night, supporting her family.

Today, she said, she battles “high blood pressure, angina and a good case of arthritis.” But she said getting her children educated made everything worthwhile.

“I walked with paper in my shoes so they wouldn’t have to,” she said.

Ramos said it happily, taking a measure of satisfaction from a life that has produced five children, 23 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.

“I don’t have the sense to be sad,” she said. “My kids say I am crazy. They say I am going to work myself to death. I say I had my reasons. I didn’t want them to do what I had to do, to scrub windows, take care of babies.”

*

By the time the bus reaches the Santa Monica Freeway at Western Avenue, it is nearly full. And at the midway point when the geography starts changing. The air starts to smell like money as the bus chugs up La Cienega Boulevard to Canon Drive in Beverly Hills, then to the leafy, sweet curves of Sunset Boulevard.

Everyone safely on board, the tamales tucked away for lunch, some of the riders of the 576 trade family gossip. Although some men ride the 576 line regularly, it is mostly a woman’s world. On Celis’ bus, there is only one man among the 32 passengers.

Older black women like Ramos, full of jokes and street wisdom, keep up a running conversation. As they hold court, they pass on what they know to the new riders as well as the drivers.

Doreen Cuoumo, who drives a bus that leaves half an hour after Fonseca’s, said, “I guess that’s why they put trainees on this line, because [the longtime riders] will never let you get lost.”

Post-Riot Panel Saw Need for Bus Route

The 576 bus would not exist at all if it were not for the Watts riots. The McCone Commission, a blue-ribbon panel appointed by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, investigated the causes of the riots. The commission found that the transportation system in place at the time “restricts, handicaps, isolates, frustrates and compounds the problems facing the poor.”

Addressing the need for a line that would eventually become the 576, the commission identified “several hundred women” who made the northwest commute each day from South-Central Los Angeles to work as domestics, traveling for hours one-way and making numerous transfers.

The special line eventually got approved. The ride now is often less than an hour, depending on where the riders get on and off.

Today’s riders live with the fear that the MTA may someday cancel their line. The agency has already come close once. The plan was to hand the 576 over to a private bus company or the Los Angeles Department of Transportation. But the MTA reached an agreement with the United Transportation Union to use the 576 line to train new drivers.

“It is holding its own, sort of,” said Frank Schroder, MTA’s director of scheduling. “It’s not the most productive line in the system.”

Translation: With only five buses in the morning and five in the afternoon, it is a money loser although the buses fill up. The women are charged an extra 50 cents a trip, on top of their basic $42 monthly bus pass, but the 576 is still what Schroder calls a “high subsidy” line.

Although the buses still get new riders, the years have taken a toll on the veterans.

“A lot of our bus family are gone,” 72-year-old Elaine Williams said sadly on the 576 recently. “They died. You hear the news on the bus.”

Williams, a nanny, said she has been taking buses out of South Los Angeles and back again for 38 years. She and Ramos ride the same bus.

A lively woman, Williams is dressed in matching blue pants and top, with a red baseball-style jacket. She wears a white cap with gold colored metal buttons and rhinestones that would be fashionable on any country club golf course.

Both her daughters, Williams said, went to college--USC and UCLA. They will never have to wash windows for a living, she said.

Washing windows and changing diapers was all some black women could find during the 1950s and 1960s, Williams said.

“We all had a lot of doors slammed in our face,” she said. “We had to take what we had to take.”

Leda Blades, another 576 rider, does housekeeping now after many years as a waitress with a national restaurant chain. When she started with the restaurant, “They didn’t hire white, only black. Now they hire anybody, but you have to have gone to school.”

Issues of social justice--and getting willing workers to their jobs--remain alive today, just as they were during the years before and after the Watts riots.

Locally, the Bus Riders Union and allies in the civil rights movement have gone to court for--and won--better bus service for transit-dependent Angelenos. But enforcing a consent decree that requires such things as upgrading an aging bus fleet remains an ongoing battle between the union and the MTA.

Once in awhile a reasonably new bus even shows up on the 576 line. The riders of the 576 accept whatever the MTA sends their way. The bus to them is a way of life.

They celebrate each other’s birthdays, mourn deaths in the family, and open their hearts to each other with the intimacy of family members.

“I have friends I’ve known for 20 years because of this bus,” said Gisela Tomas, who was born in Mexico and rides it Monday through Friday.

Though they earn $50 to $80 a day, they dig deep into their own pockets to help each other out. Recently, when the mother of one of the riders died, $350 was raised as a gift so the woman could attend the funeral in Seattle.

Driver Midel Paschel said that when the money was handed to the woman there wasn’t a dry eye on the bus.

The women say they feel safe on the bus. Forgetting a purse can cause anxiety on a regular bus, but not on the 576. “If you forget something, people know who it belongs to,” said Lupe Magane, 75, who wears a senior citizen bus pass on a chain around her neck and sells Avon products in addition to working as a housekeeper. “There is no stealing.”

“Any time when one of the regulars is not on the bus, we inquire,” said Honduras-born June Johnson, 61, who punches the clock at 7:10 every morning at the UCLA Medical Center, where she has been employed 21 years as a custodian. “We watch out for each other.”

Birthdays are special. When Frozene “Flo” Jones recently celebrated her 66th birthday, friends on her bus threw her a party, hauling cake and presents on board. At an earlier birthday, a driver wrote “Happy Birthday, Flo” on the revolving signboard on the front of the bus.

Children and employers are not immune to the deep emotional attachments that develop from the bus culture.

MTA driver Beatrice Evans remembers her mother Sally, now in her 90s, getting up at the crack of dawn and returning after dark, year after year, as she made her way from their home at 99th Street and Avalon Boulevard to her housecleaning jobs in Beverly Hills.

“You know how when you are a little girl, you always want to go to work with your mother? Well, I did, and I didn’t want to go back,” she said.

But it led to a career. “My mom always wanted me to go into driving buses,” Evans said during a recent training run on the 576.

Lolita Anderson, the daughter of longtime rider Aurelia Menifee, marvels at the bonds her mother formed with other riders, saying they are a major part of her mom’s social life.

“When she gets home [from housecleaning] she is tired,” Anderson said. “So she doesn’t go out a lot. So those are her friends on the bus.”

“You take the bus because it will get you there almost when you should get there,” said Menifee, who has been on the same job for 35 years and a regular on the 576 for almost as many years. If she is late, she said, “you get bawled out.”

Fear of crime and missing the bus is never far from anyone’s consciousness. The bus passes through some of the highest-crime neighborhoods in the city. When their employers keep them late to cook for a party or do some other chore, regulars on the 576 must take other buses home. Since it doesn’t run during the middle of the day, a family emergency can pose problems.

Betty Ramos, who likes to stop at the Burger King, said that if she is not at work by noon the woman she works for “will start calling around.”

In the early 1970s, Ramos fell and broke her leg when the bus braked suddenly. Her employers got worried when she didn’t show up. “At 3 in the afternoon they found me lying in a hospital bed,” Ramos said.

Getting anywhere fast is a common problem. John Walsh, a Los Angeles schoolteacher and longtime bus rider advocate, said he believes more people would ride buses but for the fear that they will be stranded far from home during a family emergency.

A so-called “new kid on the block” after five months as a regular on the 576, Christina Hastings, 38, lived through a transit dependent person’s nightmare. The mother of five works at the Beverly Hills Hotel. One day she got a call that her 5-year-old, who has a chronic kidney problem, had been rushed to the hospital.

“It took two hours to get from Beverly Hills to the county hospital. I had to transfer to three buses,” she said.

*

You can walk to the beach at the last stop of the outward bound 576, Sunset Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway.

Here there is fresh air and surf, fabulous homes built into the hills.

Fonseca, like many of his passengers, is an immigrant. He was born and spent the first 18 years of his life in Mexico City. Sometimes, waiting to start his afternoon run back into South Los Angeles, Fonseca will walk to the beach and dream. “It motivates me,” he said. “I look up at the homes in the hills and I wonder how they made their millions.”

Sometimes, the differences in wealth jump out and slap the drivers in the face. To generate extra revenue, the MTA uses the 576 buses as school buses early in the afternoon. Just before the drivers start their return trips, they pick up students at Paul Revere Middle School in Pacific Palisades and take them home. These are children of affluence. Whereas the women bring the drivers cookies and tamales and treat them like family, the students are a different story.

Many of them, said Paschel, “look at us like we are maids and butlers or something.”

A Nanny’s Two Families

The morning bus is so punctual by the time it reaches the Palisades that Andy and Joannie Burstein Besser and their two children begin looking for Guatemalan-born nanny Gloria Barillas at 8:04. The Bessers and Barillas have developed deep emotional bonds.

Barillas hitchhiked to the United States from a rural village in Guatemala when she was 17, a trek that took her five days, landed her in a detention center on the Mexican side, then freedom when a border guard showed compassion. She is here legally now, the result of amnesty.

Her mother died when she was 10. Forced to quit school to help support her father and five brothers, she began harvesting bananas at 11, she said. She was so short that she had to stand on a wooden crate to reach the fruit. She is grateful for her seat on the bus.

The Bessers say the 576 drops her off each morning “like clockwork” shortly after 8, two blocks from their Pacific Palisades house. At the other end of the line, Barillas’ husband picks her up about 6 p.m.

“She is wonderful,” said Andy Besser, an attorney. “She would jump in front of that bus for our kids and that is what we love about her.”

When cancer was discovered in Barillas’ right breast in 1997, the Bessers treated it as their own health crisis. Andy Besser, who works in the medical legal field, knew top specialists at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. He helped Barillas transfer her medical insurance from her clinic in Huntington Park. There were radiation and chemotherapy treatments. She kept working, even after losing her hair. She is clear of the cancer today.

On days off, Barillas works as a nanny for another Pacific Palisades family. Though she speaks good English, she communicates with her young charges in Spanish so they can learn her native tongue.

When Barillas wants to take the children to the park or for ice cream, they jump on a bus.

Barillas lives with her husband, two children, Lisa, 12, and Randy, 23, and Randy’s growing family. She also sends money home to her five brothers in Guatemala.

“My dream is for my family, to enjoy a safe life and have a better life than I have,” she said.

As hard as she works, she looks to women like Ramos and Williams with awe.

“The old ladies are very nice,” said Barillas, her own black hair graying around the temples. “They’ve worked very hard for a long, long time.”

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Riders on the 576

The 576 bus line was started for women in South-Central who work as housekeepers and cooks in wealthier parts of town. The westbound buses run only in the morning, and the eastbound only in the afternoon. Riding the entire route takes nearly two hours.