“Rosa Parks Limo” Conquers That Hill

He rocked and rolled his bus out of the deep slush at Wal-Mart. He navigated Eastern Street but skipped the Bella Vista incline because it hadn’t been sanded. Then he low-geared it up the steep and icy Skiff Street hill between Dixwell and Mix avenues because he knew his early-morning customers needed that ride to Union Station.

As the latest storm struck, Glen Smith was among the CT Transit drivers Wednesday meeting new challenges navigating their 40-foot vehicles through slush-filled curves and hills of ice-rink slickness, and finding ways to get New Haven to work and to school.

The task posed a special challenge for drivers like Smith who do the early morning runs. His New Haven-Hamden route began at 5:47 a.m.

He said the diciest part of the early Wednesday morning run of his D‑5/D‑4 bus was the steep hill on Skiff Street from Dixwell to Mix in Hamden.

“I’m like the first bus. You know in the army, they have a scout who goes up? I was the scout. If something was wrong, I’d have called in.” However, the supervisors ​“didn’t say go up or not. They leave it up to our own discretion,” said the 16-year veteran driver.

Smith said the hill was close to being an ice sheet. But he knew passengers were waiting, so he shifted into a low gear and made the attempt.

Smith, 53, grew up on Beers Street in New Haven. He used to take his kids up and down this Hamden hill on their bicycles. It took stamina, so he knew well how steep it was.

“I took a chance to go up there,” he said. But when he arrived at the crest, five people were waiting for him. They looked glad to see him when he cranked his doors open.

“They said, ​‘Wow, you made it,’” Smith reported.

As a reporter rode his route with him, Smith said that in his view, despite the ice Wednesday, the first and second storms had proved tougher. In them, he couldn’t even get out of his yard to go to work.

This morning, after rising at 3:30, he was able to chip a rectangle’s worth of visibility on his ice-caked windshield and side view mirrors of his SUV, so as to get to work to start the first run by 5:59.

When he got stuck behind Wal-Mart, he kept pushing the gear-changing buttons. (Long gone are the stick shifts.) ​“I went back and forth. I got it out “‘cause people had to go to work,” he said.

An affable and mild-mannered guy who doesn’t let conditions or people bother him, Smith said that people who ride his bus make the job a pleasure.

As he maneuvered down Grand Avenue, a longtime passenger who identified himself only as Red stepped on at Blatchley Avenue. As he was about to drop a gold-colored Lincoln dollar coin in the box, Smith asked if he could exchange it for a dollar.

Smith said he is a coin collector as well as a photographer. He asked for the Lincoln dollar, just as he would have a Susan B. Anthony dollar, which he also collects.

Red agreed to make the trade. He said he considers Smith’s bus not a CT Transit vehicle, but ​“the Rosa Parks Limousine.”

Smith has been driving this route since Jan. 9. He also did the route between 2004 to 2006, so the regulars like Red know him.

Wednesday morning’s trip was the beginning of the first of six pass-throughs he’d drive before the end of the day.

At Dixwell and Bassett he paused to ask fellow driver Charlie Eckard, who was driving Bus 358 on the D‑12 route, how the Skiff Street hill was shaping up. Eckard reported it was OK. Smith in turn cautioned him about the deep slush in back of Wal-Mart.

As Dixwell widened into Hamden and the avenue became two lanes in each direction instead of one, Smith said that in his experience Hamden takes better care of its roads than New Haven.

His scariest experience as a driver came in 1996 when he was on the Grand Avenue hill. There the ice caused his bus, loaded with passengers, to slip and slide. He was able to bring it to a stop using a sturdy tree at the curb, and no one was hurt.

“Accidents happen. We’re not invincible,” he said.

On bad weather days, his five-minute breaks, built in to keep on schedule, get reduced to as few as three minutes.

So at the Stop & Shop Plaza at Dixwell and Skiff, while the store’s Anthony Chiaia chipped away the ice before the bus’s open door, Smith dashed in and within 90 seconds was back with a coffee and a cinnamon twist.

Then it was on to the Skiff Street hill. A passenger was waiting on the other side of the street in Hamden Plaza because he was certain Smith would still not attempt to make it up and instead do a make-shift turnaround in the Hamden Plaza at the hill’s base.

The passenger didn’t know what this driver could handle. When the man got on, sneakers squeaking with water, and was seated, Smith geared up, and took the hill easily.

“This was in fifth gear,” he said, whereas this morning just after sunrise, it was in the lowest. ​“There was a sheet of ice this morning.”

The bus cruised towards the completion of its loop back along Dixwell towards downtown, when it stopped not far from Dixwell Plaza.

A woman had a dollar but not the needed additional quarter as she got on. Smith gave her a gentle reminder and let her ride.

Another woman asked if the bus goes to Wal-Mart. ​“There’s a big sign,” Smith said, with a smile.

“Ass wipe,” the woman responded.

“See what I have to put up with,” he said, turning to a reporter. ​“I don’t let stuff like that bother me.”

His general view of humanity from the bus driver’s seat: ​“People are generally nice except when they are in hard times.”

Smith’s planned to go home once completing his rounds, get warm, and have some soup, either beef broth or chicken. His son, a computer technician with the Board of Education, was home from school Wednesday; he promised to cook.