After 21 years, Tilley decides to park her bus

By Rose Hooper

For 21 years she drove a school bus, and that's stressful enough... having to watch the road, keep your eyes on all the mirrors and manage the kids at the same time.

She drove the Cherokee-Soco Road route ­ 154 miles a day, up and down every side road to the Haywood County line. That compounded the stress.

But Tilley loved it, every mile and every minute of it.

She drove her last bus in December, retiring after 21 years.

"I cried all the way home," Tilley said of that last ride.

Her success and popularity as a bus driver stems from her attitude, other drivers and students agree.

"She loves kids, you can tell," said one of Tilley's co-workers.

Laying down the rules

Tilley credits her success to "laying down the rules at the beginning. At the start of the year I tell the kids up front what I will and won't put up with. They learn if they're good to me, I'm good to them," she said.

"Wild" kids on the bus can be a driver's nightmare, but Tilley perfected the technique for dealing with them.

"Most times I'd shame them out of their bad behavior. Oh, they'd get mad at me for a day or two and then, when the time was right, I'd ask, ŒYou still mad at me?' and, of course, they'd say, ŒNo.' They get over being mad at you."

Tilley remembers one girl threatening to "mash my face in 'cause I made her sit up front. I pulled a bluff. I got right in her face and told her, ŒDon't tell me what you're going to do. Just go ahead and do it, if you think you can.'"

"I love her to death, but she can be tough," said one girl on her route.

One day back when Fred Harris was principal at Cullowhee Valley and Tilley was driving that route, Harris said to her, "Oh, no, Jean. We're going to jail. I heard you hit a girl on the bus."

"We aren't going to jail," Tilley assured him. "It was my own daughter."

Seems her daughter Dana, who was 15 at the time, told her mom on the bus that afternoon, "Right now you are not my mom; you're just my bus driver, and you don't have any right telling me what I can and can't do."

"I popped Dana a quick one and let her know she didn't stop being my daughter when she got on my bus," said Tilley, who didn't start driving a school bus until most of her children had already left home.

ŒGranny'

Early on Tilley got the nickname "Granny." She has 11 children, 23 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. But that's not where the name originated.

"I put this one boy off the bus for misbehaving, and when I drove by his house his whole family was in the yard hollering, ŒGranny Grunt! Granny Grunt!' Then it got to be a joke, with the principal calling me that, and pretty soon the name stuck."

On Tilley's Soco route, she would have snow when nobody else would.

"I would radio in and tell them it was snowing up on the mountain and what did they want me to do," she said. "They'd tell me just go on, so generally my next call would be to tell them I was stuck in the snow."

Snowbound

One day, when it started snowing bad all over the county, school dismissed at 10 a.m. and Tilley tried to get up Soco.

"The roads were covered in snow and you couldn't tell where you where in the road. On one side road I backed up... turns out there was a fresh-dug ditch underneath all the snow. The bus's front end popped right off the ground and I couldn't budge," she said. "I radioed for help and sat there for three hours before I realized they had forgotten about me. A guy came by with a backhoe and I got him to finally pull me out."

Cold weather is one reason Tilley has decided to park her bus.

"I'd get up at 3 a.m. When I got to the school bus garage, I'd be the first one there, so I'd crank up some of the other buses, along with mine, so they'd get warm," said Tilley, who left the lot at 5:15 a.m. She would pick up her first child at 6:10 on Rough Branch and her last child at 7:20.

Dreading the cold

"I loved driving the route in the summertime. But I started dreading it when it got cold. I just decided enough is enough. But I still get up at 3 a.m. ­ force of habit," said Tilley, who still goes to bed at 10 p.m.

She retired in July but was persuaded to continue driving until school was out for the year. At her retirement party, Jackson County School Superintendent Mack McCary presented her with a clock. "I want you to notice," he told her, "that it doesn't have an alarm."

Pregnancy, tears, tobaggan

From all her years behind the wheel, Tilley can tell some alarming stories. Like the pregnant girl who was ready to deliver any day.

"If I hit a bump too hard, everybody on the bus would turn around and look at her," she recalled. "One guy asked me if I wasn't scared she would have the baby on the bus. I told him I wasn't worried; I knew what to do. After all, I'd had 11 of my own."

When Tilley drove the Cullowhee route, she remembered ­ with great affection ­ a young kindergarten girl "who cried all the way to school and all the way home. She didn't want to leave her momma.

"One day she asked me how old she had to be before she could quit school, and when I told her Œ16,' she just cried all the harder," Tilley said. "All year long she cried. You couldn't talk to her or anything. Now I see her ever so often. She works for a lawyer in town."

Tilley had one student who always wore his toboggan on the bus. She didn't have a clue why until one day he said to her, "You are a fine bus driver, but you freeze me to death 'cause you always crack those upper windows."

On her route this bus driver dealt with one girl who slashed her wrists and a boy who pulled a knife on another boy.

Easier than a car

When friends said to her, "I don't see how you drive a big old school bus," Tilley replied that it is easier than driving a car. "You are up high where you can see everything, plus you have lots of mirrors. Now the buses are automatic and have power steering."

But school buses weren't always automatic and power assisted, especially when she started driving back in 1980. Back then she was paid $3 an hour. To supplement her income, she worked in a rest home.

When she took the Soco route, she worked security three hours a day at the high school. "Now they have a full-time resource officer for that," said this Cullowhee Mountain Road resident.

She also worked with trans-occupational students at the high school, supervising them as they picked up trash or mowed grass. During the summer she worked with the paint crews at the schools.

Will miss the kids

She loves being around kids and that's what she's going to miss. Many have written her letters of appreciation or quick notes of thanks ­ like for the pizza party she throws at the end of every year. Now that she's retired, she plans to put all the notes and cards in a scrap book.

Some of her former bus riders will see her in a store and rush over and hug her, telling her that she was the best bus driver they ever had.

"If I had to do it all over, I'd be a bus driver again," Tilley said with no hesitation. "I always loved to drive and I love kids, so it was the perfect combination for me."

Road trips

Now most of her driving will be spent "taking road trips to see my children."

They are Martha Jones and Jamie Cunningham of Sylva, Diane Mathis of Cullowhee, Steve Tilley of Whittier, Dana Trammel of Commerce, Ga., Sandra Reece, Kim Roane and Bobbi Durham of Waynesville, Peggy Pace of Pickens, S.C., Billy Bryson of Santa Maria, Calif., and Debbie Rushing of Greenville, Tenn.

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