Bus-Driving Another Of Life’s Adventures

As a teenager, James Wallrabenstein took a vocational test that showed he should be either a farmer or a priest.

“That is a dichotomy I have lived with all my life,” Wallrabenstein said, his hands cupped over his head.

And it may help explain why Wallrabenstein, a Foothills resident with two master’s degrees, is happy driving bus No. 39 for the East Valley School District.

This is a Renaissance bus driver. Wallrabenstein lives on 21 acres up Ao Aolani Lane - Pathway to Heaven in Hawaiian. He has a view to die for, a consuming interest in organ music and a serious collection of toy trucks and tractors. Some day, he says, he will get around to writing a book on the history of public transit in Hawaii.

It’s quite a life for an Ohio farm boy.

Does he struggle with the same issues that confront every other school bus driver today?

Yes. The other day a kid set a small fire on his bus. Glory of glories, Wallrabenstein was lucky enough to catch the whole thing on video camera. The boy won’t be allowed back on his bus until March.

Wallrabenstein’s bus-driving experience goes back to his college days in Honolulu. (Why Hawaii? It started as a family joke and turned into a bona fide bid for adventure.)

His first bus was a former Los Angeles Rapid Transit bus that had been shipped to Oahu. The year was 1970, and school bus regulations in Hawaii were slim.

“They didn’t even remove the tobacco advertising from the inside of the bus,” Wallrabenstein says, still incredulous. What made the 20-year-old think he could drive a bus? He assured his prospective boss that he’d grown up driving on the farm, climbed in the bus and drove it around the block without bumping up over the curb, and voila. He got the job.

For years after that, Wallrabenstein wove together academia and bus driving - and a third strand, developing Hawaii’s services to the deaf. He emerged with a master’s in educational administration and a master’s in counseling, valuable experience in working with the deaf and a sense that, although he could have written his own ticket, he wanted something different.

“I made a conscious decision that life in the slow lane was OK,” he said. That life kept him in Honolulu, driving a city bus until 1989. Then, the congestion of city life prompted his move to Spokane. The publisher of a trade journal, Bus Rides, lives here and touted Spokane’s virtues. Wallrabenstein occasionally writes articles for Bus Rides.

Once he found his home in the Foothills, it didn’t take him long to get involved with the community.

At the Foothills Rural Association annual yard sale, he bought a 1969 cabover Ford truck.

“I like to say I bought a set of mud flaps with a truck attached,” he said.

“The next thing I know, I’m the treasurer of the (group). Then I was president for one year and now I write the newsletter. So, I’ve gotten to know everyone.”

Wallrabenstein, 46, drives truck for one neighbor in the summer, hauling grain in from the fields of Kevin Kaelin’s farm. Kaelin describes him as a valued hand.

But Wallrabenstein also makes time for music, playing as Knox Presbyterian Church’s organist, enjoying his own beloved Kawai grand piano, and masterminding a compact disc of performances by Spokane church organists.

He also makes his own recordings. Perfectionist that he is, when his batteries get down to about half-power, he discards them, not wanting to run out of juice during an organ concert. That has a side benefit for his bus riders: He supplies them with castoff batteries.

Most of the students who ride his bus are good kids, Wallrabenstein said. But some are hellbent on mischief.

Last fall, he was having a discouraging amount of trouble with one of his routes.

“One elementary level girl gave me a drawing that said, ‘Jim is the best school bus driver in the world.’

“She’ll never know what good medicine that drawing was for me.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo

MEMO: Saturday’s People is a regular Valley Voice feature profiling remarkable individuals in the Valley. If you know someone who would be a good profile subject, please call editor Mike Schmeltzer at 927-2170.