The boxes, which were entirely mechanical, were painted navy, green or black. He has installed a vintage fairbox made by the Cleveland Fare Box Co., which he restored over the course of two weeks.
He chose to paint this in the orange, cream and navy blue of the Oriole line in honor of his father. Soon, Demczak decided to purchase a second bus, a 1957 GMC Transit Coach, which had seen service in the San Diego Transit system and Tempe, Ariz.
1950 BUS DRIVER UNIFORM BADGE DRIVERS
Demczak, who does the majority of the driving, and his drivers wear period-appropriate uniforms and caps with the ACE badge. The exterior was returned to what it would have been when it originally became part of the Gray Line, when it was put into service nearly 50 years ago.Īnd Demczak was in business, mostly providing charter transportation at weddings, while also planning holiday tours, historical bus trips and other special events. “(The upholstery) just dissolved when you touched it,” he said. “And the one thing we hadn’t fixed was the heating system.”ĭespite the cold, Demczak finished the trip to Pennsylvania, where the interior of the bus was repaired and the seats taken out and re-upholstered in sections. “When I started out, the weather was good, but by the time I’d gotten into the mountains, there were six inches of snow,” he said. The drive went well, until Demczak arrived in Colorado and began travel through the Rocky Mountains. I had a lot of books, and I did a lot of research.” “These are mechanically simple motors, but they were built for millions of miles. It reduced the cost (of the repair) substantially.”Īfter a month of 10-hour days, the bus was in good mechanical shape - interior and upholstery work still needed to be done - but Demczak needed to drive it back to Pennsylvania. “He would let me in on the weekends, and I’d work into the evenings, and he’d let me stay and lock up behind me,” Demczak said. Thanks to a stint as a gas station mechanic at 16 and a long-standing interest in electrical, Demczak was able to do much of the work himself, and Hook allowed him access to the lot and his tools. “None of the lights worked, none of the instruments worked,” he said. Demczak spent the next month in California. He was attending a conference for MUG Enterprise in Los Angeles, so, after his conference, he took a Greyhound Bus out to where the bus was parked at Ken Hook’s auto repair shop. Now all Demczak needed to do was to repair the bus and get it back to Pennsylvania. “One of those has been converted into a shed,” he said. “They were going to scrap it, when (the collector) bought it for its scrap value,” Demczak said, noting such buses were heavy and primarily made of aluminum, so were valuable scrap.ĭemczak noted such buses where often converted into motor homes or tour buses, and there are now less than five left, most of them on the west coast.
1950 BUS DRIVER UNIFORM BADGE WINDOWS
He purchased the bus, notable for its unique windows that curved up into the roof and its six-panel curved windshield, known as a “fish bowl.” The bus was originally one of three delivered to Gray Line Los Angeles in 1969, where it was in service for 18 years, before being purchased by the Fun Bus Los Angeles charter company, which ran it for 15 years. The only problems were the bus had been sitting in a lot for years and was no longer mechanically sound - and it was in California.ĭemczak didn’t let that stop him from purchasing the bus from a long-time collector looking to reduce his collection size. Something clicked, and I said, ‘yeah, maybe it is.'”Īlthough he was no longer part of the motor coach association, Demczak hadn’t lost his interest in antique buses, and he had his eye on a 1969 GMC Starliner. Several years later, I ran into a friend who went to the wedding and he said (the antique bus) was a great business concept. “When we married, we used it to transport our guests from the hotel to the reception and service sites, and back again,” he said. The organization purchased the bus in 1991, and Demczak was involved in restoring it. The organization obtained a 1947 GM bus originally purchased for the Harmony Short Line, but which later was in use by the Port Authority until 1974.
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