I remember as a child visiting my Grand Parents in Memphis, TN.
We were from a small town in Georgia with less than 4,000 people and we still had a lot of dirt roads, wooden bridges and unpaved drives. We even had friends that didn't have running water or indoor plumbing.
Have you ever seen someone sweep their front yard with a homemade broom to make it look beautiful. Well this is just a glimpse of the town that I grew up in.
No, I wouldn't take anything for these experiences but I was always happy to ride in the car with my family on trips to my mother's parents in the big city.
It would take us over ten hours with seven people in the car all bunched up together to get there.
My mother had a sister that had a Kindergarden and sometimes while we were there she would let us go with her classes on Field Trips and these were always an adventure for us kids. Sometimes we visited Pepsi Cola and saw how they brought in the bottles and cleaned them and then filled them and got them ready for sale.
Sometimes we would visit Hart's Bakery to see how they made Loaf Bread and other bread products and when we got ready to leave they would give us a little loaf of bread.
But what I enjoyed the most was riding with my Uncle Joe who drove a city bus from the edge of the city limits to downtown Memphis and back to the edge of town.
Sometimes we had the Express Bus that made a direct route from downtown to te had left something on the bus the edge of town on a main road like, Popular Avenue, Summer Avenue, Madison Avenue, Jackson Avenue. We would only stop at bus stops on the main road.
Other times we would ride on a bust that may take several hours to get from the edge of the city to downtown, because it made many stops along the way and we went down many different streets to get customers that lived on the many side streets.
At night when he was ready for his shift to end we would drive to the barn to turn his bus in for the night. When we pulled into the lot we would make sure that everything was off of the bus, and if someone had left something on the bus it was brought into the Terminal Office in case the customer called for it.
He would check his bus for paper or bottles and they were disposed into the Terminal Garbage and then he drove his bust through the Bus Wash, and then it was filled with gas and ready for the next day.
My Uncle would then pull out the coin dispenser from the bus and take it into the Terminal to the banking area and we could hear and see as the coins were sorted by machine, separating the nickles, dimes, quarters from each other and count them for deposit for each bus.
After this was all done we would go out to find his truck for a ride to our grand parents home.
