Bob Beach

"Dad didn't really encourage me to get into the business. He was pretty much the type of person who said,'Do what you like to do.' The bus business - that's what I wanted to do." Bob Beach

By 1950, Ray Beach realized that his school bus operation was going to need more room. Having bought some pasture land in the 800 block of Mount Avenue near what was then the southwest outskirts of Missoula, he erected a 120 x 40 foot metal Quonset building that summer and soon had new headquarters. The building is now Beach Transportation's maintenance shop.

Although he was becoming more involved with student transportation, Beach still had his grain trucks. He leased two of them to the Missoula Mercantile's wholesale grocery department, which employed two young men to drive them. The men, Warren Cockran and Herb Roehl, later would join the Missoula Police Department. On retiring from there in 1974, they would become Beach Transportation drivers.

A student and athlete at Missoula County High School from 1946 until his graduation in 1950, Bob Beach went on to the University of Montana. Periodically, he spent time on weekends at the Mount Avenue Quonset building servicing school buses. "I wasn't old enough to drive bus (the legal age was then 21,) but I became very good friends with Harold Keyser and his brother." Beach said. "I used to sneak a trip now and then and haul football players from the high school out to Victory Field. I had begged and begged Dad to let me do it, but he always said, 'No, you're not old enough.' One day I just did and proved I could. He didn't know about it ..." In 1953, when he turned 21, Beach began driving the Clinton route as a part time job. His routine in those days frequently included an early morning stop at Missoula's historic Oxford cafe for breakfast.

Graduating from UM in 1954, Beach spent two years in the Air Force at Clovis, New Mexico. While in the military, he began to think about returning to Missoula and the school bus business. Said Beach, "Dad was getting older, and the operation, instead of having four buses, like it did when I went into the service, now had six or seven. Honorably discharged in July 1956, Beach came home and was offered a job with the high school athletic program by then MCHS Principal D. H. Berry. Simultaneously offered a $300-a-month job by Ray Beach, he declined the high school position.

The same year, in August, Beach and former Helen Marie Ring, whom he had known in high school and college, were married. Beach Transportation thus became a family business, with the Beaches and their three children, Greg, Scott and Diana, handling a variety of tasks ranging from secretarial work to driving to accounting to bus maintenance.

By the mid-1950s, Beach school buses were logging some 45,000 miles a year on six high school routes in Missoula County: Lolo, Bonner, East Missoula, Mullan Road, Orchard Homes and Clinton. From September 1941 through May 1954, they logged a total of 391,340 miles - all without a single child being hurt. The price of a gus had gone from $3,200 in 1941 to about $8500. In keeping with his ideas about safety, Ray Beach had equipped each of his rigs with $175 sanding devices to help drivers get better traction on icy roads and highways in wintertime.

Meanwhile, another high school building for Missoula was in the planning stages. It would be situated on South Avenue West near the site of the town's old airport, Hale Field. Initially, a unit of what still was called Missoula County High School, it eventually would be named Sentinel High School and become an identity unto itself.

Now 24, Bob Beach began driving the Clinton school route again. He liked driving, and, like Harold Keyser, he liked students. "I got to know the kids very well ... I knew every student by his or her first name ... The Larson kids out at Clinton were good friends, so were the Monteliuses and the Ailports ... I guess I had a soft spot in my heart for kids. If one wouldn't speak to me when they got on the bus in the morning, I'd say, 'Hey you're not speaking to the old bus driver this morning, huh?"

A decade earlier, Missoula grade school students taking specialized courses, such as manual training, had to walk from their neighborhood school to another building across town. By 1956, shop and home-economics students were being "shuttled" to the appropriate buildings on Beach buses. A typical shuttle would take Keyser from Paxson or Roosevelt School to Central.

"Shuttle runs in those days were kind of a nuisance." Harold Keyser said. "There wasn't money available to pay a driver to be on hand throughout the day, so someone would have to come from somewhere and make the necessary run." Beach and Keyser were the main drivers, with others filling in part time. One such part timer was George Smart.

When they weren't driving, Beach and Keyser were learning other phases of the bus business. Said Beach in later years, "When Harley and I first started, we knew every bolt and nut underneath those buses. I did the work underneath and Harley did the work on top. We knew the personality of each of them; each bus has its own pickup, power and what it can do on the road." Said Keyser, "We'd come in off our routes in the morning and we'd service buses or fix anything that needed to be fixed. If we got home with that and had any time left, we'd go do whatever else."

Bob Beach also worked closely with his father, preparing bids for the school districts and learning other basics of the bus business, "He always used to tell me, 'You can't be too expensive, and you can't be too cheap. You have to make a little bit for your effort.' And if I remember anything at all, he said at that time. 'It'll take you three years to pay for a unit.' And, of course, he reminded me that you always have to put away a little money for the replacement of that unit."

Ray Beach all but retired in 1958, leaving his son to manage the school bus business. An ardent fisherman, the elder Beach, along with his wife, spent considerable time at their summer home on Flathead Lake's Big Arm Bay. His health would deteriorate in the early 1960s. Seriously ill with diabetes by 1964, he died on Jan. 31 of that year.

This story has been excerpted and 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.