The Grandpa Eddie’s Bus Story

1953

The story as told by my Grandfather Eddy Lazaroff

How the New Haven Orange Street Bus Line got started

Written 2010 Re-written 08/06/2015* 721 Words

By Howard Yasgar

In 1953, the rumor was that my grandfather, Abraham Lazaroff, started the Orange Street Bus

Line in New Haven, Connecticut.

Also, I heard he was somehow involved in the New York City bus strike.

I was 14 years old and the bits and pieces of the stories that I had heard intrigued me.

So, one day, when Grandpa Eddy was over for a visit, I asked him to tell me the story about the bus strike in New York, and did he really start a bus line in New Haven.

Grandpa Eddy got wistful, and he told me the following story.

He said, “One day I was in Milford Connecticut, and everyone was talking about the impending bus strike that might be coming in New York City.”

Everyone said that New York City would be shut down completely if the buses stopped running, and if that ever happened, the taxi drivers would also support the strike.

Grandpa Eddy said, “That’s when I saw in the newspaper there was an open-air bus for sale, it was parked on the side of the old Boston Post Road in Milford Connecticut.

So, I went over to look at it.

It really was an old bus, open-air style with a canvas roof on it, and worst of all it had hard rubber tires.

“After talking to several people, I found who the owner was and I bought the bus for a few hundred dollars.”

I spent a couple of days cleaning It and getting the engine running.

Then, “I drove all night up the pot holed Boston Post Road, until I reached New York City”.

Back then, the Boston Post Road was the only way anyone had to get to New York City”.

Once I arrived in New York City, I didn’t realize it, but the bus strike had already started.

So, when I stopped at the first street corner, people started getting on my antique bus.

Each person gave me a nickel which I stuck in my pocket.

After I filled up all my pockets with nickels, I asked a young boy to go and find me some kind of bag or box to hold all the money.

The boy returned with two horse feeding bags, the kind you put over a horse’s head, so I used them both, filling them up with nickels.

That night I slept in a barn using money bags as pillows. My greatest fear was getting robbed.

I put the money in a bank, and I filled the bags many times during the week, until one day the strike was over.

When I returned to New Haven, I started looking for something to do with the bus.

I wanted to sell it, but everyone was telling me that Orange Street in New Haven was poorly serviced by the Connecticut Bus Company, and I should think about using my bus.

So, to test the market I started driving up and down Orange Street, and soon, I became known as the Orange Street bus line.

I was really impressed by what Grandpa Eddy told me because the Orange Street bus line that I knew back in 1954, had all modern equipment, with token machines in them.

The Orange Street Bus Line, I knew, was a first-class company in New Haven.

However, Grandpa said that the Orange Street bus line never had a transfer agreement with the other New Haven bus line, so it was eventually bought by the Connecticut transit Company in the 1970’s

I asked Grandpa Eddie “why he didn’t still own the bus line?”

“That’s another story he said”, and with that Grandpa Edd6y got up and walked away.

I looked up the Orange Street bus line and found that it was sold to the Connecticut Bus Company in 1970.

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