Remember the good ol’ days when every morning before school all of the neighbor kids would gather in front of one neighbor’s home to wait for the bus? It was like bonus friend time, a chance to talk and laugh, compare lunches, maybe even put the finishing touches on last night’s homework.
Well, that doesn’t happen anymore. These days it’s more common for the bus to stop in front of each child’s home individually, even if they live very close to one another. In one Webster neighborhood, however, the memory of those days is not lost forever, thanks to the efforts of Blaise Midnight.
Blaise lives at 950 Shoemaker Rd., almost exactly halfway between the road’s west end at Van Alstyne Rd. and east end at Holt Rd. He remembers that back in the early ’60’s, when he and his brothers were just starting school, there were still orchards across the street, and a lot fewer houses than there are now. But there were still plenty of kids in the neighborhood, and on school mornings, 15 or more of them would gather in front of his house, all waiting for school buses to take them to Thomas High School, St. Rita School or Klem North Elementary.
“We’d all congregate here and mess around in the morning play a game or something until the bus came,” Blaise remembered. But his house — and therefore the bus stop — is at the end of a very long driveway, so when it was raining, the kids didn’t have any protection from the weather. So around 1962, Blaise’s father Gene built what would become the Shoemaker Rd. bus stop, complete with a bench and generous overhang.
That simple shelter would serve the school children of Shoemaker Rd. for many years, seeing them off to kindergarten, seeing them graduate from high school. But eventually, as the schools changed their busing policies, the Shoemaker Rd. bus stop wasn’t needed as much, and began to fall into disrepair, despite occasional upgrades.
Blaise said,
Originally, it was brown inside, and I painted it green years ago. Over the years my father had put roof on top of roof, on top of roof. It was crooked and leaning and it looked pretty shabby. My wife said, “Just rip it down — it looks like an eyesore.”
Then we happened to run into (our neighbor) Mrs. Dugan in the store one day, and told her we were thinking about tearing it down. She said, “What? You can’t tear it down! It’s a landmark. All of our kids have stayed there.”
So last September, Blaise took it upon himself to refurbish the old bus stop … much to his wife’s surprise.
“My wife was out of town for about a month so I redid the whole outside,” he said. “I just decided to do it and surprise her when she came home.” Fortunately, Blaise reports, “she loves it now.”
It’s possible the Shoemaker Rd. bus stop will never be used by school kids again. For the time being, though, Blaise uses it as a landmark to help direct people to his driveway (“there’s a bus stop out front”). He’s thinking about maybe, somewhere inside, inscribing the names of all the kids who used the stop as shelter through the years.
After all, they might be older now, but many of them still live on the street and remember it fondly.
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(posted 8/20/2024)
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