After 38 Years Driving A School Bus, The District Gave Me A $25 Gift Card At My Retirement. The Next Morning I Looked Out My Window And My Street Was Lined With Cars

I started driving route 9 for the Benton Ridge Community School District on August 29, 1988. I was twenty-nine years old, I had a two-year-old at home and a husband who worked second shift at the Quaker Oats plant in Cedar Rapids, and I needed a job that let me be home in the middle of the day. The district needed somebody who could back a forty-foot Blue Bird down a gravel lane without taking out a mailbox. I could. My daddy taught me on a grain truck when I was fourteen.

My name is Beverly Ann Kozak. Everybody calls me Bev. I’m sixty-seven now, and I drove that same route for thirty-eight years. Same loop, more or less. Out of the bus barn on Highway 30 at 6:40, east along the county blacktop, up through the Wapsie Hills subdivision when they built it in the nineties, down past the Hendricks dairy, and back into town by 7:50 so the kids could get breakfast before the bell.

The first stop was always Locust Street. The corner of Locust and Third, in front of the blue house with the porch swing. My house. I’d pull the bus out of the barn, drive the four blocks home, and pick up whatever kids were waiting at the corner at 7:10 sharp. For a lot of years, one of them was mine.

People don’t understand what a bus driver knows. I knew which kids had eaten and which ones hadn’t. I knew whose parents were splitting up before the teachers did, because a kid who’s been crying all night sits different. I knew which boy was getting picked on and which girl was doing the picking. I knew the ones who were scared to go home.

I whistled while I drove. I always have. My mother said I whistled in my crib. The song I whistled most was “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain,” because it was the one my daddy used to whistle on the grain truck, and because it’s hard to be sad while you’re whistling it. The kids started calling it the route song. By the mid-nineties, they’d whistle it back at me when I opened the door in the morning. Some of them were terrible at it. That was the best part.

The Bus Barn

My last day was the Friday before Memorial Day. I’d told the district in January that I was done. My knees were done, honestly, before I was. My husband Gary passed in 2019, and our son Kyle lives in Omaha with his own family, and I’d started thinking about how many mornings I had left and how I wanted to spend them.

I wasn’t expecting a parade. But I’ll be honest, I was expecting something. When Darlene Fisk retired from the kitchen after thirty years, they had a cake in the gym and the whole staff signed a card the size of a door. When the old superintendent, Mr. Halvorsen, retired in 2012, they had a dinner at the Lions Club with a slideshow.

My boss, Ron, who runs transportation, told me in April that there’d be “a little something” for me. He looked uncomfortable when he said it, and I should have known.

The little something happened at 3:45 that Friday in the bus barn, between afternoon routes and fueling. There were six of us there: me, Ron, two other drivers, the mechanic Luis, and the superintendent, Dr. Craig Pullman, who’d been in the job three years and whom I’d spoken to exactly twice.

He came in wearing a quarter-zip with the district logo on it, holding a white envelope. He looked at his phone before he started.

“Beverly, on behalf of the district, we want to thank you for your many years of service.”

“Thirty-eight,” Ron said.

“Thirty-eight years. That’s incredible. We really appreciate it.” He handed me the envelope. “Enjoy your retirement.”

Inside was a twenty-five-dollar gift card to Casey’s General Store and a card that said Congratulations in silver script. It was signed by Dr. Pullman and the district secretary. That was it.

The whole ceremony took three minutes. I know because Luis looked at the clock on the wall when it started and when it ended, and later he told me, “Three minutes, Bev. I timed it. I’ve spent longer changing a wiper blade.”

The Party That Wasn’t

I found out the rest from Ron that night. He called me at home, which he never did.

“Bev, I want you to know something, and you can’t say it came from me.”

“All right.”

“We had a party planned. A real one. Darlene was gonna do the cake. We’d booked the Legion hall for Saturday. We were gonna invite parents, put it on the district page, the whole deal. Pullman killed it.”

I sat down on the kitchen stool.

“Why?”

“He said retirement recognitions had to be ‘standardized.’ Said if we did it for you, we’d have to do it for everybody, and the budget’s tight, and it sets a precedent. He made a policy. Classified staff get a gift card and a card. That’s it. I fought him on it, Bev. I swear I did.”

“I believe you, Ron.”

“Thirty-eight years. You drove my kids. You drove his kids, for Pete’s sake, the first two years he was here, before they moved to the Marion house.”

I thanked him and hung up. Then I sat in my kitchen with the gift card on the counter and I cried a little, which I’m not proud of. It wasn’t the money. It was the three minutes. It was the man looking at his phone before he said my name.

I’d driven roughly 1.2 million miles on that route. Somebody worked it out once. I’d picked up maybe two thousand children. And I’d been thanked like a woman returning a library book.

I went to bed at nine. I set my alarm for 6:15, because I didn’t know how to set it for anything else.

The Boy Who Stayed On

Before I tell you what happened the next morning, I have to tell you about Jason Mertz.

Jason rode my bus from kindergarten through eighth grade, from 1987 to 1996, though I didn’t get him until ’88. He was a skinny kid with a cowlick that wouldn’t lie down and a Chicago Bulls jacket two sizes too big that he wore every day from October to April.

In the fall of 1993, when Jason was eleven, something changed. He got quiet. He started sitting in the very back seat, which was where the kids sat when they didn’t want to be seen. And every afternoon, when we got to his stop on Ridge Road, he didn’t get off.

The first time, I thought he’d fallen asleep. I walked back and touched his shoulder.

“Jason, honey, this is you.”

“Can I stay on?”

“Stay on where?”

“Just stay on. I’ll get off on the next loop. I’ll walk back. I don’t mind.”

I looked out the window at his house. His dad’s truck was in the drive, parked crooked, half on the grass. There were beer cans on the porch rail. The front door was open, and it was forty degrees out.

I’d known his dad, Rick, since high school. Rick was a good man when he was sober. He’d been laid off from the tire plant that summer, and he wasn’t sober much anymore.

I didn’t ask Jason anything else. I just said, “Sit up front with me, then. I need a navigator.”

The Long Way Home

He rode with me for the rest of that school year. Every single afternoon. After I dropped the last kid at 4:10, I’d drive Jason back to the barn with me, and he’d sweep the bus while I did my paperwork. Luis’s dad was the mechanic back then, and he taught Jason how to check tire pressure and how to tell when a brake line was going soft.

Some days I’d stop at the Casey’s on the way back and buy him a slice of breakfast pizza, even though it was four in the afternoon, because it was his favorite and because I’d figured out he wasn’t eating dinner most nights.

Then I’d drive him home in my own car around six, after his mother got off her shift at the hospital laundry. She’d be standing on the porch waiting. The first time, she came down the steps and put her hand on my car window.

“Thank you,” she said. “I know what you’re doing.”

“I’m not doing anything. He’s helping me sweep.”

“Bev.”

“He’s good company, Carol. That’s all.”

Technically, I wasn’t allowed to do any of it. A driver’s not supposed to keep a child on the bus past his stop. A driver’s definitely not supposed to drive a child home in her own Oldsmobile. If anybody had made a fuss, I could have lost my job. Nobody made a fuss. In a town of eleven hundred people, everybody knew about Rick Mertz, and nobody knew what to do about it, so they were glad somebody was doing something.

In May of 1994, Rick went into treatment at a place in Dubuque. He came out in August. He stayed sober for twenty-two years, until the day he died of a stroke at the feed store, and he coached Little League for most of them.

On the last day of school that year, Jason got off at his own stop for the first time in eight months. He stood on the bottom step and turned around.

“Bev? Can I still sit up front?”

“Only if you whistle,” I said.

He whistled the route song all the way down his driveway. Terribly. It was the best thing I ever heard.

7:10 A.M.

The Saturday after my three-minute retirement, my alarm went off at 6:15 like always. I lay there a minute trying to remember why I didn’t need to get up. Then I got up anyway and made coffee in my Mr. Coffee and stood at the kitchen window in my robe, the way I’d done every morning for thirty-eight years.

At about 6:50, I noticed a car parked across the street in front of the Lindqvists’ house. A silver Honda Odyssey. I didn’t think much of it.

At 6:55, there was a pickup behind it. Then a Subaru. Then a white Ford Explorer with a Hawkeyes plate frame.

By 7:00, there were cars on both sides of Locust Street, as far as I could see, in both directions. Parked bumper to bumper, past the Methodist church, past the corner of Third, all the way down to where Locust meets the county road. People were standing beside them in jackets and ball caps, holding coffee cups. Some of them had kids on their shoulders.

I set my mug down on the counter so hard it sloshed.

I didn’t understand what I was looking at. I thought somebody had died. I thought maybe there was a funeral at the Methodist church I hadn’t heard about. I went to the front door in my robe and my slippers and opened it.

The second I stepped onto the porch, somebody down the block shouted, “She’s out!”

And then the clock on my porch, the old Ingraham clock Gary had hung by the door, said 7:10.

Two hundred car horns started honking at once. Not just honking. Honking in rhythm. It took me four or five beats to recognize it, because I’d never heard it played on car horns before.

It was the route song.

The Horns

I don’t know how they did it. Later I found out they’d practiced. Jason had posted a video of the rhythm on Facebook, just the tune tapped out on a steering wheel, so everybody would know the beat. It was ragged and out of time and a couple of people were going way too fast, and a big Dodge Ram at the far end had a horn that sounded like a sick goose.

I stood on my porch in my bathrobe and I sobbed like a child.

When the horns stopped, people started getting out of their cars and walking toward my house. Men with gray in their beards. Women with grandbabies on their hips. A girl I recognized from maybe 2012, in scrubs, like she’d just come off a night shift. Teenagers I’d driven last year, still in their pajama pants and hoodies. The Hendricks twins, who are fifty now and still look exactly alike. A woman in a wheelchair I knew right away, Amy Sorensen, who I used to load up on the lift every morning from 1999 to 2004, and who used to call me “Captain.”

And at the front of the crowd, walking up my driveway, a tall man in navy scrubs and a Carhartt jacket, holding something big and square wrapped in brown paper. He had a cowlick that still wouldn’t lie down.

“Morning, Bev,” Jason said. “Sorry we’re early. We didn’t want to miss the bus.”

The Post

I made him come in and sit at my kitchen table while about forty people crowded onto my porch and into my front yard, and Luis and a few others started handing out donuts from the Hy-Vee in Marion out of the backs of their trucks.

Jason told me how it happened.

“Luis called me last night. I’m still friends with him. He told me about the gift card.” He shook his head. “Twenty-five dollars, Bev. At Casey’s.”

“It’s a good Casey’s,” I said.

He laughed, but his eyes were wet.

“I’m an ER nurse at St. Luke’s now. Fifteen years. I see kids come in some nights, and I can tell in about two seconds which ones are scared to go home. I can tell because I was one of them. And every time, I think about you. I think about sitting up front. So last night at eleven o’clock I made a post. I put it in the Benton Ridge Alumni group and the Shellsburg community page. I said Bev Kozak drove route 9 for thirty-eight years and the district gave her a gift card in the bus barn, and if she ever drove you or your kids, be on Locust Street at 7:10 tomorrow morning. Bring your horn.”

“At eleven at night?”

“It had nine hundred shares by one a.m. My phone wouldn’t stop buzzing. People were calling from Arizona. There’s a guy out there who drove from Rochester, Minnesota. He rode your bus in 1991.”

He slid the brown package across the table.

“And this is from everybody. We’ve only had about nine hours, so it’s not done. But it’s a start.”

The Scrapbook

It was a scrapbook. One of those big ones from Hobby Lobby with a padded cover, and somebody had glued a picture of an old Blue Bird bus on the front with a number 9 cut out of yellow construction paper.

Inside were notes. Hundreds of them. Some printed off emails, some handwritten on notebook paper, some on the backs of receipts. People had been writing them all night and dropping them off at Jason’s house, and his wife and daughter had been gluing them in until four in the morning.

I opened it to a random page.

Bev, you stopped the bus in 1997 and got out and made Travis Klein give me my backpack back. You never told my mom. I never forgot. — Sarah (Wendt) Hoffman

You let me ride to the barn the day my grandpa died because I didn’t want to go to school and I didn’t want to go home. You didn’t ask me anything. You just handed me a broom. — Marcus T.

You knew my name the first day of kindergarten. I was so scared and you said “Good morning, Miss Emily” like you’d been waiting for me. — Emily R., class of 2010

Bev taught me to whistle. Badly. I’m 52 and I still whistle the route song when I’m nervous. I whistled it at my wife’s chemo appointments. — Dale Hendricks

I couldn’t read any more right then. I closed the book and put both of my hands flat on top of it.

“Jason.”

“Yeah, Bev.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything. You never did. You just let me sit up front.”

The Man in the Quarter-Zip

The cars were still there at nine o’clock. People kept coming. Somebody had called KCRG in Cedar Rapids, and a young reporter showed up with a cameraman and stood on my lawn asking people why they’d come.

At about 9:30, a black Chevy Tahoe pulled up at the end of the block. It couldn’t get any closer because there was no room. A man got out and walked up the middle of the street in a gray quarter-zip with the district logo on it.

Dr. Pullman.

The crowd on my lawn got quiet. Not mean quiet. Just watching. Everybody in that town knew by then about the gift card, because Jason had put it right in the post. A few people folded their arms.

He came up my driveway and stopped at the bottom of the porch steps. He looked at the scrapbook in my hands, and at the cars, and at the people, and back at me.

“Mrs. Kozak,” he said. “Could I talk to you for a minute? Inside, if that’s all right.”

I almost said no. Jason, standing next to me, said quietly, “Your call, Bev.”

I let him in.

He sat at my kitchen table in the chair Jason had been in. He didn’t look at his phone this time. He looked at his hands.

“I made a mistake,” he said. “I want to say that first. I canceled the party, and I gave you a gift card, and I did it in three minutes because I had a board meeting at four-thirty. That’s the truth. I could tell you about budgets and precedents, and some of that’s real, but it isn’t why.”

“Then what’s why?”

He was quiet for a long time.

The Other Bus

“I grew up in Waterloo,” he said finally. “I rode bus 14. Six years. Fourth grade to tenth. There was a group of older boys on that bus, and I was a fat kid with glasses who liked to read, and you can imagine the rest.”

I could. I’d seen it a hundred times.

“They used to hold my head against the window. They took my lunch most days. One time in sixth grade they put gum in my hair, so much my mother had to shave my head. The driver was a man named Mr. Doyle. He wasn’t a bad person. He just never looked in the mirror. He drove and he didn’t look. Six years, and he never once looked in the mirror.”

He looked up at me then, and he was a grown man of fifty-some years with a doctorate and a Tahoe, and for a second I could see the fat kid with glasses.

“I think, when I looked at you yesterday, I didn’t see what you’d done. I didn’t really understand that a bus driver could be what you were to those people out there. Because I never had one. I never had a Bev. I had a man who didn’t look in the mirror. So I thought of it as a job. A driving job. And I gave you a gift card for a driving job.”

He wiped his face with the heel of his hand.

“I read the post at six this morning. I read every comment. There are four thousand comments, Mrs. Kozak. I read about the boy you let ride home. I read about the girl whose backpack you got back. And I sat in my car in my driveway for an hour, because I kept thinking, if I’d had you, maybe I wouldn’t have spent six years being scared to get on a bus.”

“Bev,” I said. “Call me Bev.”

“Bev.”

“You looked at your phone before you said my name.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Well,” I said. “You’re looking now.”

What the District Did

He stayed for an hour. He went out on my porch and shook hands with people, and some of them didn’t want to shake his, and he took that. He talked to Jason for a long time out by the mailbox. I don’t know what they said.

The next Monday, the district posted a statement on its Facebook page. It was short and not very well written, and I liked it better for that. It said Dr. Pullman had made a mistake, that the retirement recognition policy for classified staff was being rewritten by a committee that would include bus drivers, cooks, and custodians, and that the district would be holding a retirement celebration for me at the Legion hall the following Saturday.

They held it. Darlene made the cake. It was shaped like a school bus, and she’d done the 9 in yellow frosting. About four hundred people came. Ron gave a speech and couldn’t finish it. Luis showed a slideshow of photos people had sent in, and there was one of me from 1989 with a perm I’d like to have back from the internet, please.

Dr. Pullman spoke last. He told the room about bus 14. I don’t think anybody in that hall had known. When he was done, a few of the older drivers went up and hugged him, and he let them.

He also announced that the district was naming something after me. I figured it’d be a plaque. It turned out to be a policy. Every route in the district now has what they call the Kozak Rule. If a child doesn’t want to get off at their stop, the driver keeps them on, calls dispatch, and the school counselor gets a call that same afternoon. No questions asked of the child. Just a seat up front.

I’d rather have that than a plaque.

The Last Run

Here’s the part I didn’t expect.

On the last day of school the next year, the new route 9 driver, a young woman named Kayla who I’d helped train, called me up.

“Bev, would you ride with me? The last run. As a passenger.”

I’d never ridden route 9 as a passenger. Not once in thirty-eight years. I’d never sat in one of those green vinyl seats and looked out the window and let somebody else drive.

“I’d like that,” I said.

I walked down to the corner of Locust and Third at 7:05 that morning. There were three kids waiting. Two little Hernandez boys I’d driven the year before, and a girl of about seven with a pink backpack and a cowlick that would not lie down.

“Are you Bev?” she asked.

“I am.”

“I’m Lily. I’m Jason’s daughter. My dad said you have to sit up front.”

“Did he?”

“He said I have to sit up front too. He said it’s the best seat.”

The bus came around the corner at 7:10 exactly. Kayla opened the door. Somebody inside, one of the big kids in the back, started whistling the route song, badly, and a couple more joined in.

Lily climbed the steps first and sat in the very front seat behind the driver, the one with the best view through the big windshield. She patted the green vinyl next to her.

I sat down. My knees complained. Kayla pulled the door shut and checked her mirror, and I watched her do it, and I thought about a little boy in Waterloo whose driver never looked.

We pulled away from my corner, out past the Methodist church, out onto the county blacktop, with the sun coming up over the Hendricks dairy, and Lily leaned her head against my arm.

Out the window, the fields went by green and gold, and I didn’t have to watch the road at all.

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