The old red Dixie College school bus

That is just a funny picture I found online. It has nothing to do with this story.

I recalled a memory from my high school life that made me smile, so I thought I would write it down so that my kids can know about it.

There was a program that I did in high school called Upward Bound. It was for kids who were in a household with parents who had not graduated from college. It was a govt. program that paid for college classes for high schoolers during the summer.

I made some lifelong friends during Upward Bound. One of which married my brother.

The old girls dorm was called the Dixiana. It is now called Elderhostel. It is at 140 E Tabernacle.
I was a junior in high school when I started UB. I did it for 2 years. During the summers, all the kids in UB from Hurricane, St. George, Washington, Enterprise, and Mesquite would live in the dorms and go to 3 college classes and earn college credits for free. The UB would get us a job and we would live like college students for the month and a half during the summer. My job was cleaning the dorms after the youth conferences and after the football camps and basketball camps. Another of my jobs was working in the college book store. I can't even remember what I did there.

But, part of the deal was transportation to and from the college that was on 700 E. Tabernacle Street. The college owned this really old school bus that had been painted red, the college colors. They had a driver of the bus whose name was Bob. Bob was kind of an eccentric kind of person. he scared me a little. I was always on my toes around him. I didn't know if he was a creep or just weird. A lot of times there would be just a few kids on the bus, so we could sit where ever we wanted.

There was an intersection on 400 East and Tabernacle that had bigger than normal dips. The 400 East street was called "Flood Street" for a reason. When it rained hard on rare occasions, most of the water would run off the Red Hill and flow down this street, and the street would be a big beautiful mesmerizing mess. The big dips were to help accommodate the larger flows of water.

Bob would watch in his big passenger view mirror as he carefully drove over these big dips several times daily. He would time it just right so that the back wheels of the bus were just about to go through the dip just as he would gun it.

Those of us in the know, would bounce on the back seats as we went through the dips, cause we knew if we did it just right, we would bounce clear up to the ceiling of the bus and sometimes get so much air that we could hit our head on the ceiling.

We all had a great time on Bob's bus going through that intersection.