Bus driver makes final stop after 50 years at the wheel

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This article was published 29/06/2019 (2377 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When school trustee Abe Hamm asked a chicken farmer to take on a New Bothwell bus route, the response was a resounding, “No.”

But when Hamm asked John Hiebert again to drive the following year of 1969, Hiebert had to admire his persistence.

“I told him, ‘I’ll do it,’” said Hiebert. “‘But remember, Mr. Hamm, for one year only.’”

It’s now fifty years later, and Hiebert’s finally hanging up his keys.

The first thing Hiebert learned as a bus driver is the bus always takes first place, even over his farm.

“Kids have to be on time for school,” said Hiebert. “It can’t be any other way.”

Hiebert said he was pretty strict with his kids about keeping the rules.

“Respect is a two-way street,” he said. “You have to start with respect to get it.”

For the kids who didn’t like staying in their seats, they’d come onto the bus the next day and find their name written on a place card above that most dreaded seat at the front of the bus.

While their friends told jokes and traded cards at the back of the bus, the troublemaker would have to sit in the front and listen to Mr. Hiebert talk for an entire bus ride.

Hiebert said it was pretty effective.

“I had a mischievous childhood, so I understood them,” said Hiebert. “It helped me to see the problem coming before it happened.”

Hiebert also likes to share the strange things kids have told him.

Like the one girl who, new to Hiebert’s bus, informed her driver he’d be picking her up last in the morning and dropping her off first in the evening.

“I wasn’t about to change the route for her,” Hiebert laughed.

But other memories take on a more serious note.

Before the days of two-way communication, there was no way to contact the division if a bus broke down.

It also made school cancellations virtually unheard of, because there was no way to let everyone in the community know about them.

“If you could see the hood of your bus, you were driving,” said Hiebert.

One stormy evening, Hiebert was dropping off a Grade One boy. Hiebert took one look at the long driveway, turned to the student, and told the boy he couldn’t let him walk alone.

Once Hiebert finished the run, he returned to the boy’s driveway. The boy’s mom, standing half-frozen in the snow, was livid.

“I went home that day feeling sorry for myself,” said Hiebert.

But that evening, Hiebert got a call. It was the boy’s mother, sobbing on the other line.

She told the bus driver that on the way back down the driveway, she and her son had gotten lost. They finally hit the neighbour’s field before realizing how far they’d walked.

“She told me, ‘Always, always do what you did. I think we would be looking in a field for my child if you hadn’t,” recalls Hiebert.

While incidents like that are rare, Hiebert said times like that made him think twice about bus driving.

But now, as he reaches retirement, Hiebert said he’s proud of the work he’s done.

“I’m going to miss it like crazy,” he said. “It was my kind of job.”