I guess fewer and fewer people do these days. But when it was in operation, it was great: regular commuter bus service from Lorain to Cleveland and back, several times a day.
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| The Cleveland-Lorain Highway Coach bus garage on Broadway |
And here's a great article by Staff Writer Bob Cotleur about it that ran in the Journal back on July 19, 1970. It tells how the company dates back to 1923 and was started by Harry Coleman and H. A. ("Bob") Sanborn. At the time of the article, the company was being run by H. A. Sanborn's sons, Bob and Don.
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I remember Mom telling me that she and my sister used to take the bus to Cleveland in the late 1950s a few times to shop (remember, it was an era in which families only had one car – and the father took it to work).
I myself took it a few times as well.
When I was still in high school, I has signed up for a summer art class at the Cooper School of Art in Cleveland, and to get there I was going to have to take the bus. It was kind of like an adventure for a high school kid, especially when I walked all the way from Public Square to E. 22nd Street, being chased by panhandlers all the way. (Unfortunately when I made it to the school and wandered around inside, I discovered that the class had been cancelled.)
I took the bus again when I was living at the Overlook Apartments and working in Downtown Cleveland. I normally drove to the RTA bus stop at the Aqua Marine in Avon Lake, but one day my car battery was dead. So I flagged down the Highway Coach and rode that in. It was more expensive, but a much nicer, more plush ride.
When I was at Boys Village in 1969-1970, I would ride the Greyhound bus from Wooster to the Terminal in Cleveland, and take the Highway Coach into Lorain. Of course, the buses were a familiar sight downtown, now part of something fondly remembered.
ReplyDeleteHey Dan - the summer before starting 7th grade a buddy and I rode the bus to an Indians game. The bus station was behind where the current city hall is now. I remember the route they took was down Rt 57 which at the time I thought was pretty strange since we always took lake rd . Quite an experience walking from the bus station in downtown Cleveland to the old municipal stadium and back. Do you think parents would let their kids to that today? Todd
ReplyDeleteA very interesting article with some 70s flavor on the side. The "Crofter's thing" he refers to. I had to turn to Claude AI for the following:
ReplyDelete"Crofters, Inc. was a Columbus, Ohio-based firm at the center of a major 1970 scandal involving the Ohio State Treasurer's office. The Ohio Treasurer's office (under Treasurer John Herbert, with an aide named Gerald Groban and consultant Howard Lore playing central roles) was investing large amounts of state pension/treasury funds — including State Employees Retirement System (SERS) money — into risky, thinly-traded commercial paper from companies with murky finances, notably King Resources Company (the oil/mineral outfit tied to financier John King) and Consolidated (parent of Westgate-California, part of Bernie Cornfeld/Robert Vesco-era financial circles).
"Crofters, Inc. acted as the middleman/broker arranging these loans between the state and the borrowing companies and collected enormous "finder's fees" for doing so — receiving cash fees totaling $605,000 for arranging the sale of promissory notes that Ohio's retirement system committed to buy, worth over $28.7 million. Related parties also picked up fees like a $120,000 finder's fee from King Resources for services on one loan.
"The scandal broke into public view in spring 1970 after newspaper investigations, leading the American Stock Exchange and then the SEC to suspend trading in the stock of one of the companies involved, and eventually to an SEC civil suit, SEC v. Crofters, Inc. (S.D. Ohio, decided 1972).
"Crofters and its associates pocketed the money for steering Ohio state funds into these speculative loans. It was one of the bigger state-government financial scandals of that year, especially in Ohio press."