The following has been excerpted and liberally edited from Second to None: the story of Beach Transportation Co. and its buses written by former newspaperman Steve Smith and published for Beach Transportation by Pictoral Histories Publishing Company in 1986.

Preface
"Once you're proclaimed as being the best, you go to no ends to make sure you stay the best. Our record and our service are second to none." - Harold Keyser

Beach Transportation began with a lost bid by Ray Beach in 1941 for school bus service from Lolo to Missoula. Although he lost the bid, when the winner was unable to fulfill the obligation, the bid was reconsidered and accepted. Beach was about to go into the school bus business, operating simply as R.R. Beach. Fifteen yearls later, in 1956, the organization he founded would be formally named Beach Transportation Co. Growing steadily, nurtured and guided by his son Robert, incorporated in March 1965, and eventually expanding to include a fleet of modern, long-distance, charter buses, the company would become one of the leading operations of its kind in Montana, as well as the Pacific Northwest.

Safety, dependability and service with a smile - key elements that were to become the hallmarks of Beach Transportation - were recognized early on by school board president Schroeder. Today, more than a half century later, the tradition remains alive. And what was one school bus and one school bus route serving a handful of students is now 80 buses and 150 routes serving thousands.

Ray Beach and the Beginning of Beach Transportation
"He was always kind of gypsy, like me. He always liked to go." - Bob Beach about his father

By 1941, when he signed the Lolo-to-Missoula school bus contract, Beach was trucking grain from Missoula to Spokane, WA. Built in Spokane, the 42-passenger school bus that Beach bought featured a hand-made Novelty Jack body on an International chassis. Equiped with leather seats, the $3,200 rig was financed by the sale of about 40 head of the Beaches' Hereford cattle. Liability insurance on the bus cost Beach $38/yr, a pittance compare with today's soaring rates. Stored in a garage-like utility building on the Beach ranch, the Novelty Jack was to be Beach's only bus for the next eight years.

The route for which Beach had contracted to the bus from the Missoula-Ravalli County line, three miles north of Florence, to Missoula County High School (now Hellgate High School.) A neighbor of the Beaches, Vernon Slaght, worked in Missoula; he became one of Beach's first drivers, bring the loaded bus to town in the morning, going to his own job, then driving students back to Lolo in the evening. Another Beach neighbor, Frank Ruffato, also drove the bus part time. So did a man named J.G. Schreckendgust. Bob Beach remembers his father driving the bus on occasion, but not on a regular basis because of his ranching and trucking activities.

Among the first riders on the Beach school bus was a Lolo teenager named Dick Doyle. Doyle started high school in 1941, went on to athletic notoriety at the University of Montana and became the general manager of the Missoula division of Beatrice Foods. While attending the university in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he became one of hundreds of college students who were to help finance their education as part-time school bus drivers for beach. Drivers then were paid $5.00 for about two hours of driving a day. Doyle, whose route took him to the Target Range area, as well as to the Missoula-Ravalli County line, remembers driving Ray Beach's first bus. By the late 1940s, the rig had engine problems that one afternoon resulted in a connecting rod failure. Doyle had been told by a Missoula mechanic that the engine was all right; when it quit, he had to make three trips in Beach's Buick to get his students home to Lolo. "I stacked 'em in that car like cordwood," he said.

Bob Beach grew up around his father's trucks and school bus. He drove the bus at about age 10. "I never hauled anybody on it then," he said, "but I backed it out of the barn and was driving it around the yard because I'd have to wash it - or attempt to wash it - on Saturdays."

Bob had other responsibilities in connection with his father's bus: "When Dad was on the road trucking, my duty, in wintertime, was to drain the oil out of it, put the oil on the back of mother's kitchen stove, and in the morning get up and put it back into the engine. There were no sophisticated headbolt heaters or any of the electronic mechanisms we have today to keep engines warm. ... Then we graduated to (charcoal) briquets; we thought this was the answer - having a bucket of briquets that we'd put underneath the oil pan at about 5 in the morning so the bus would be ready to go at 7."

World War II brought federal rationing of many commodities, including gasoline and tires. America's schools and related industries, such as student transportation, were considered an important part of the country's war effort. Thus, Ray Beach was entitled to an adequate allotment of gasoline each week; he also could buy bus tires when he needed them. Gas in 1941 cost 23 cents a gallon. In later years, Bob Beach said, "We were about the only outfit in this area that I know of that could buy new tires at all, but we had to have a ration card to do it."

For the most part, Beach was his own bookkeeper, logging monthly income and expenses on opposing pages of a simple journal he kept in his desk at home. A glance at the journal indicates tha monthly MCHS paymnets for Beach's school bus service averaged $222.22 in the early and mid-1940s. Under February 1944 expenses are these typical items: "J.G. Schreckendgust, driving school bus, 2 mo. $110; Vernon Slaght, driving school bus, 3 1/2 days $10.50." Bob Beach said of his father, " He rans the bus operation out of his hip pocket; he knew the income, he knew the expenses, everything ..."

Ray Beach also knew about the need for safety, something he promoted, "all the time," according to his son. "When Dad was on the ranch, he lost part of his ring finger one day when he jumped off a thrashing wagon and caught it on the head of a nail sticking out ... Ever since then, he was very, very safety-conscious, which carried over into his driving ... Everything he did, and everything he had his bus drivers do, was geared toward safetly."

The Beaches sold their ranch in 1944 and moved to Missoula, where they had bought a house at 1702 South Higgins Avenue. More than anything, son Bob like being around his father and his father's equipment: " Dad and I always got along very well ... He probably was the most patient man I've ever met, and he could look down the road and see a future in things ... As a very young kid, I got to drive the 32-foot truck. I thought I was in heaven when I was driving. I was kind of mechanical, and I liked anything to do with movement. I used to ride with Dad on the grain trucks to Spokane during the summer. We'd leave here at unmerciful hours ... He'd let me drive on a flat stretch, so I got to learn how to handle those big-heavy trucks when I was 16, maybe 17, years old."

For Bob Beach, the future held the promise of high school and college. For Missoula and its schools in the post-war years, the prospect was for dramatic growth. Ray Beach's one-vehicle school bus operation would grow accordingly to meet students' transportation needs.

Chapter 2: Harold Keyser | Back to Top