AT THE TIME I DIDN’T GRASP THAT IT WAS THE PERFECT METAPHOR. I DO NOW.
My first road trip freshman year was to Shelton College, in Cape May, New Jersey. We left Center Valley at three in the afternoon, everyone piled into our blue-painted old yellow school bus with ALLENTOWN COLLEGE in red block letters on the side. By the time we got back, at maybe four the next morning, we had gotten lost, pushed the bus to get it started any number of times, yelled at the bus driver to keep him awake and then, that failing, one of the guys on the team drove the rest of the way home.
The perfect metaphor of the blue bus road trip. Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales back then — six years old, its team only on season four — was making it up as it was going along. Its sole resource was us, we kids who decided to go to this new school in the cornfields.
“So many of the things we had to do, we had to do ourselves,” says Jerry Wilkinson.
Indeed.
(“The Bus Wouldn’t Move? We Moved the Bus” continues below — )
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WELCOME TO CENTAUR SEASONS. “The Bus Wouldn’t Move? We Moved the Bus” here on HoopsU.Com appeared originally on CENTAUR SEASONS, a “memory blog” of the basketball beginnings of the half-good, half-bad, all-new Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales Centaurs in Center Valley, Pennsylvana. Steve McKee played on four of the school’s first seven teams, was MVP senior year and in 1974 graduated in the sixth class.
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That blue bus trip to Cape May, says John Cooper, “It says exactly what we were about back then.”
The bus wouldn’t move? We made it move.
The bus couldn’t drive itself home? One of us drove it home.
“Something’s broke? Are you going to fix it or not?” asks Nick Nardo. “You have to have people willing to take the risk.”
Imagine that today.
“Think about it,” Coop says. “I mean, really think about. A student driving the bus? Students out on a street pushing a bus?” These days? “That’s lawsuit city, man.”
“Everything in our lives – everything — happens in a particular time and place,” says Jim Naccarato. “We have a tendency to take things out of their time and place. That’s a contradiction. People will hear this story and go, ‘YOU DID WHAT?’ ” Well, Nac says, remember time and place.
Welcome to the Centaurs’ time and place.
Here in Part 1, the objective was just to get us to the game on time.
JERRY WILKINSON (junior forward): It was a grade-school bus, as uncomfortable as any fifth-grade bus could be. But it was nicely painted. We had box lunches to eat on the way down. The bus driver … I’ll think of his name in a minute …
WALT PFIEL (sophomore forward): Ike.
WILK: He’s worked all day, up at 6 a.m. driving a school bus. Big, heavy-set guy, you know?
WALT: I remember getting on the bus and heading out of Allentown and watching Ike drive the bus with his belly.
JIM NACCARATO (junior guard and Oblate seminarian): We froze our butts off.
E.J. BROOKES (sophomore manager): Guys sitting there with their scarves wrapped around their heads.
DENNIS RAMELLA (sophomore guard): “Hit the heat, Ike! Hit the heat!” You could see your breath. There was frost on the inside of the windows. It was like that on every trip. There were lots of times after an away game where I wouldn’t want to leave the gym.
NAC: It got real cold and dark. The lights were really dim. We were miserable. Absolutely awful.
DENNIS: Cathy [girlfriend then, wife now] went to a lot of the away games. Looking back now, I don’t understand how she did it or why she did it. But it was good to have company along!
South on route 309, down the Northeast Extension of the PA turnpike, across Philadelphia into New Jersey. Old yellow school buses painted blue go about 49 miles an hour, tops.
CHRIS CASHMAN (sophomore forward/center): Mostly what I remember is the slow ride down.
TONY MAZZEO (junior guard): Was the Atlantic City Expressway built then? (Yes.) But we ended up in the Blackhorse Pike? The Whitehorse Pike? We ended up, instead of going diagonally toward Cape May, we ended up going, I don’t know, a couple of different ways.
WALT: You couldn’t go on the Parkway with an old school bus. That explains why Ike was on route 9.
Old yellow school buses painted blue don’t have bathrooms in the back.
MAZ: If I’m not mistaken, wasn’t it like an old gas station or something? Something abandoned? Trashed and empty? We all went out behind the house.
WALT: [Jerry] Flem[ing] started telling stories about the Jersey Devil.
E.J.: Yeah, the Jersey Devil! Stories of cars breaking down on the side of the road and the people never being seen again. The Jersey Devil lived in the Pine Barrens, and that’s where we were.
With all the guys going one way around to the back of the house and into the woods, Flem (who would score 14 points later this night) went the other way and started screaming, scaring everyone, particularly the susceptible Maz.
MAZ: Walt probably put Flem up to it. Yeah, so instead of me being the last out of the woods, I’m first!
WILK: So we’re on the back roads of New Jersey, trying to get to Cape May.
MAZ: We pushed the bus a couple of times.
NAC: We push this thing, Ike pops the clutch, maybe we get this thing started.
Each time, it seemed, we had to push the bus farther, Ike had to pop the clutch more often. We kept going. Then …
NAC: We couldn’t find the joint.
NICK NARDO (senior statistician): I don’t care where we were going, Ike never knew how to get there. That was typical. We loved Ike. But he was just Ike.
CASH: I remember our coach being beside himself about all of this. This was a coach who had taken a high school team to a Pennsylvania state championship. Now here he was with this ragtag group, and he’s in a bus that we’re having to push, and I remember him with the Jesus-Christs-they-can’t-even-get-a-bus stuff. Beside himself. And I have this recollection that I might have said to him something like, Yeah, Coach, I’ll bet this is the same way Lefty Driesell has to do it at Maryland. That really pissed him off.
WALT: We got lost when we got closer to the college. We were looking for a college and the place was in a hotel. And Ike’s GPS wasn’t working that night, I guess. Of course, none of us had ever heard of Shelton College.
CASH: It was kind of a bizarre group of buildings. Stone buildings, unusual for a shore community.
NAC: It was a big old hotel they had converted into a college. Big, old, elegant, multistory hotel. All brick. I can picture where it was. The only high-rise like it in all of Cape May. Well-known people from around the country used to come there in the summer time.
E.J.: The old Admiral Hotel. It had been there forever. My cousins always stayed in Cape May. I can picture it in my mind. Had to be built in the early part of the century. It’s been torn down.
NAC: But the gym, and where we changed, it was, like, underground.
MAZ: Small, boxy gym. Might have been the ballroom for the old hotel.
CASH: I just remember feeling how bizarre it all was.
MAZ: We got there at five to seven for a seven o’clock game.
WILK: We played in the ballroom, right? We take two layups and we start the game.
JOE SCHIEBER (captain, first four-year letterman, senior guard): You had to hang in there back then. Ike the bus driver. Shelton College. All the way down the pike. There was nothing glorious about those bus rides.
This “perfect metaphor” continues later today with Part 2: The Centaurs take on Shelton, then try to get back home to Center Valley and Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales. Come back soon!
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