A Tribute to the LRTA

By Leo Racicot

Due to a series of nerve-wracking experiences driving on the Wild West streets of Las Vegas for three years followed by working for a woman in Cambridge who wanted me to ride her autistic son around the city while he screamed at the top of his lungs like a banshee, I decided to let my driver’s license go, after over 30 years of driving. This perhaps too-impulsive act happened just at the time I was moving back to Lowell. Suddenly, I found myself needing to find a new way of getting around. I discovered that the Lowell transit system, the LRTA, had upped its services since the last time I lived here in 1993 to such a degree that its buses could and did take me everywhere I needed to go. For a long time, I’d take a bus then usually walk the rest of the way to my destination. But then, as happens with the aging process, my feet and legs began to fail me such that now, if I want to go somewhere, I have to travel bus-to-bus, eliminating the walking part of my journeys as much as I can.

I mention all this as a prelude to telling you that in nineteen years of bus travel, I’ve gotten to know nearly all the drivers, some in, if not intimate ways, then certainly in companionable ways that make the often long rides nothing short of sheer delight. I know all their names, their family histories, their ups, their downs. Not one of them (with the exception of maybe two) know or have cared to know my name or anything about me. They know I’m a regular, part of the bus culture that develops among commuters who use their buses on a regular basis. There’s a certain comfort, something I like very much about knowing them and them not knowing me. I like the anonymity. It’s certainly a bond apart from the usual relationships I’ve had: friends/a strong, lifelong sibling bond. Best of all, I like it when it happens that I’m the only one on the bus with the driver and I have him or her all to myself in conversation. I like, for example, two real characters, emigrants to America, both from Bulgaria: Costa and R.G. It tickles me that I should ever know anyone from Bulgaria, much less two. Both men wound up working for the LRTA who, though they of course know each other, admit they never socialize outside of work (different interests, I guess). Whenever I’m at a bus stop and Costa pulls up, it always makes my day. After he learned I worked in libraries, as I’m getting on the bus, he always announces (in a booming voice, I might add) “Librarians!”  (plural, always the plural), Librarians are entering the bus!” and then add, in his heavy Eastern European accent, “Okay, now Librarians are sitting down on the bus!” I always get a kick out of this; however embarrassing this was at the start. I’ve gotten used to it, and came to feel I’m not just another bus riding drone. Because, no doubt about it, there is a certain stigma attached to people who have to ride buses. Costa makes me feel good about myself. I like learning about his past, his driving of cross-country semis, his time working for the U.S. embassy in Japan — before Costa, I held to the ignorant belief that all bus drivers must be uneducated dolts. But Costa is very intelligent and I’ve loved my chats with him through the years. There’s also, as I say, a certain stigma attached to people who have to ride buses to get around, an unspoken less than pathos. Many’s the time (too many), a passing car, as I’m waiting at the bus stop, people in cars have honked loudly when they catch sight of me there, especially in bad weather, the occupants of the car, usually teenagers, jeering at my, to them, pathetic situation. “Hey, look at the grown man, without a car, waiting in a blizzard for A BUS.

Truth is — I like and am so thankful for being able to ride the buses, like very much the sight, the voices. the “hellos” of the men and women I’ve come to know so well, or not well at all, as the case may be. One driver (actually two: Donna and Denise) were kind enough when they’d see me trudging along knee-deep in winter weather, to stop, pick me up and, though they probably weren’t supposed to do this, actually take me home to my door. Donna would always say, “It doesn’t cost anything to be kind.”  I treasure the drivers. Some might be more grumpy than others (who wouldn’t be grumpy driving around in circles all day in sometimes heavy traffic, dispatchers barking at them on the radio, traffic cops directing them to take long detours, passengers who don’t know where they’re going or are loud or pay no attention to the rules (I once saw a student pull out a pungent Chinese takeout container from a bag and start scarfing it down as casually as you please, paying no attention to the NO FOOD/DRINK sign right in front of him. The job has to be a nightmare most days. It’s the consistently pleasant, cheerful, welcoming drivers who impress me so much, drivers like Kenny, like Robin, like Ellen, like Rachel, like the Buddha-like Asian fellow whose name I’ve never known, like Bob, whose good-natured teasing characterizes me as “The Philanthropist”, some poor schmuck who rides buses, walks all over town in his mission to hand wads of cash out to the needy. Bob, himself, would hand free bus tickets to me more times than I can count. Ellen would do this, too.  Driver Carol’s funny-naughty comments always crack me up. .And,  I miss Bill Berry who for years kept telling me that “every Saturday in summer, the Harley Davidson outlet on Boston Road has a free cookout — hot dogs, hamburgers, all the soda you can drink.” You gotta get over there”, he’d urge and add, “Then you hop on the #15 bus, get off at Kimball Farms and have a banana split for dessert!”  I first came to know Ellen through her partner, Val. Val and I were coworkers with CTI back some forty years ago. Great gal. She drove for LRTA for years then transferred to dispatch where, for a lot more years, she worked as head dispatch (think she’s gone to part-time now)  She and Ellen are two of the finest people I know. And when my sister, my only sibling, passed away and they found out I have no family left, they warmly, compassionately said to me, “You have us.” I believe they meant not only the two of them but the whole company and its drivers.

The LRTA drivers, their faces, their smiles, make life, esp. daily life, a little less hard. And when favorites have passed on: Norman Welch, Bill Desmond, Cheryl Houle, Jack Leahy, Sonny Brouillard, I’ve mourned them. I miss them. They’ve become, for me, and I know, for many others who travel with them, some of us for years, an extended family, a logical, needed extension of how we feel when we see familiar faces every day, even our fellow passengers. These friendly, joking faces bring a comfort, a continuity to our daily lives. And that, in this increasingly isolated, almost zombie-like, robotic society where the world that people see on their phones, on The Internet and TikTok can be more real to them than the person standing next to them at a traffic light, that can be everything.

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Thank you LRTA

Kennedy Center

Sonny Brouillard

Rachel

Ellen P with Kenny in the driver’s seat

Sokhoeun