Bill Kirby: Taking a bus used to be the way to see the country

"If you want reality, take the bus."

– David Lachapelle

Some summer visitors at my house were complaining about their most recent air travel complications. Apparently Delta is no longer ready when you are. There are a variety of reasons, many difficult to control, but I often try to quieten my wayfaring whiners, by asking, "Why don't you just take the bus?"

They look at me (the young ones at least) like I just suggested hitching up a Conestoga Wagon, and maybe I have.

I haven't taken a bus trip in decades, probably since college, when I went to visit friends over the Christmas break and rode all day across four states to get there. I wasn't in a hurry and it was so much cheaper.

I was used to riding the bus. When I was a kid, my mother would drive me down to the Atlanta bus station, put me and a small suitcase aboard and wave as it drove off to take me to visit a "best friend" who had moved away.

I'd stay a week, then take a bus back.

I was 12 or 13 and it now seems strange that we once had no problem putting an unaccompanied youngster on a motorized conveyance filled with strangers. But then,  bus trips used to be pretty common.

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Check out old movies and see the number of times people meet on buses, get on buses, get off buses or get questioned by cops as they attempt either one.

It wasn't like taking the train. Trains (and yes, I'm old enough to have done that, too.) were a bit more upscale and rigid. Kind of British, you know? They had conductors in uniforms, enforcing expectations. They usually went from big town to big town. Buses knew the two-lanes.

Buses were driven by a guy named "Marv" who had started out on a truck … or maybe a tank.

Marv might talk, or not, and you pretty quickly knew which it was.

You knew because almost everyone used to take the bus – a valued transportation option. So valued that in March 1964 the governor of Georgia came to Augusta to dedicate a new Trailways bus station at Seventh and Greene streets.

Gov. Carl Sanders called it a "progressive move" for the state.

"As I look to the future," he said, "all I can see is progress – all part of a historic Georgia at a historic time."

Augusta Mayor George Sanken offered similar sentiments and the Fort Gordon marching band performed for a large crowd that had gathered … all for a bus station.

Things have changed, and I am not suggesting we go back, because it doesn't work that way. Life, like buses, moves forward.

But I will say there was something about riding in a bus that seemed more human.

As Oprah Winfrey once put it "Everyone wants to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down."

Yes, young folks, there was once a time when a bunch of strangers could get inside a large metal vehicle called a bus and, despite their many differences, pretty much behave and get along as they traveled together.

Why, they might even help out a kid whose mom told him goodbye without any instructions on ordering a hamburger at the bus station in Macon.

Bill Kirby has reported, photographed and commented on life in Augusta and Georgia for 45 years.

This article originally appeared on Augusta Chronicle: Bill Kirby: America might be better place if more people traveled by bus