The Night the Bus Burned

(picture for illustration only—not actual bus)

“It was a dark and stormy night…” 

Well, not exactly rainy.  What was the last evening and closing program & Parents Night of a week of Neighborhood Bible Time turned into a harrowing, unique bus story to top ALL church bus stories!

I’d been at Liberty Baptist in Pigeon Forge as assistant to Pastor Robert Settle for about 9 months.  There had been other challenges such as a weekend the previous December (see “Born to Die”) when a child in junior church passed away in a school bus incident. Time was flying by as I busily worked with music ministry, overseeing children’s church and a weekly bus route, all the while seeking to launch into youth evangelism.

The church had a large house just across the parking lot with a full downstairs area that served as the church fellowship hall and guest quarters. With 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, living room, dining room, kitchen, and an office upstairs, it was a mansion for a single man!

Soon after taking the position, I volunteered to take a bus route. However, not long afterwards the driver of my route quit mid-year and left me both responsibilities of visiting the riders’ homes on Saturdays and driving the bus each Sunday.  My route was the longest of 5 routes and I would return home around 2:00 pm on Sundays for some rest and preparation for Sunday evening choir practice.

That summer was quite the blur with travel in meetings helping another evangelist, meetings on my own, and directing a week of NBT at Liberty.  The first meeting that summer turned out to be life-changing as that was the week Heather and I met at Tabernacle Baptist of Hickory, NC!  Dr. Settle had pastored there before he came to Liberty Baptist.  The Sunday night starting the meeting, Heather’s mom dragged her up to me and said, “My daughter can play all the Bible Time songs! She can play for you this week!”  In short, we ended up getting engaged just 7 weeks later when I was conducting a VBS closing program at Carson Memorial Baptist in Kings Mountain, NC.

Carson Memorial Baptist in Kings Mountain, NC (where Heather and I were engaged during a VBS!

It was more difficult than I had realized to oversee a program at home while I was traveling in meetings elsewhere, especially being gone the week before!  When I took the position there, Pastor Settle had given me leeway to travel during the summer.  However, I later learned that the deacons of Liberty had thought that I would be gone only a week or two.  When I was gone most of the summer, that became an issue with them.

I seem to recall that the week of NBT was the very next week after the revival meeting in Hickory where Phil Vos was pastoring, the pastor who married us. 

I returned to Liberty and the usual busyness of making sure everything had been going as planned.  I had scheduled someone to visit my route that summer, as well as having laid out plans for responsibilities such as music and junior church.

Everything was going smoothly … until Friday.  The 5 routes consisting of 2 regular size buses, 1 van, and 2 small buses, all had their regular drivers … until that evening.  To this day, I do not know what happened that last night to leave only 2 drivers for all 5 routes!  The only reason that I can think of is that 3 of the drivers had to work that weekend at one of the Pigeon Forge events!  For whatever reason, I was not told that 3 of 5 regular drivers would not be driving that night.  I found out AFTER the awards program when the kids were heading to the buses!

Neighborhood Bible Time Rally Time

I recall running around with my bull horn trying to “direct traffic” and make hurried decisions as to which riders should be on which of the two large buses.  I ended up having to take an unfamiliar bus, shuttling children who didn’t ride my bus and a route that I didn’t know.  In all the hubbub, I ran and grabbed a box of ice cream sandwiches to use for awards as kids exited the bus.  A sweet lady named Margaret who rode the bus on Sundays was my only helper.  While she knew the route to take that night, she wasn’t one to “take charge” of a group of rowdy kids on a bus.

I was headed out on an unfamiliar route with 30 noisy children on a bus that regularly was used to take children to school.  After we left the church, heading up Wears Valley Rd. toward Cades Cove and the opposite direction from my normal route, Margaret instructed me to take a right onto Walden’s Creek Rd past a gas station where the church had an account.  Not far down that road was a trailer park where we had our first stop and turned the bus around.  After leaving there, as we headed back toward 321 we turned left up a back mountain road into a Tennessee “holler.”  We soon dropped off a child and Margaret then informed me that was the only stop on that road.

Uh oh.  Where could I turn this thing around on a steep and narrow mountain road??  I continued, thinking I would likely come across another turn I could use to reverse course.  Sure enough, such a road soon came along!  My plan worked great, until…

That road also was a steep decline and I backed down just enough to turn around. When I accelerated to come back up the hill and head back the way we'd come, the engine cut off!  We were left sitting in an old, manual stick-shift bus on a steep incline with about 30 rambunctious kids and no power brakes or steering!  What’s more, every so often the vehicle would lurch, so I kept my full weight on the brake and the emergency brake deployed.  I didn’t know what to do.  After several unsuccessful attempts to restart the engine, I noticed that the gas hand was way below the empty mark!  It was a surprise that this vehicle that was used twice daily to carry children during the school year was out of gas!  Not only was the regular driver of that bus absent that evening but he left it with no fuel!!

Thinking of gasoline, I saw a house nearby and asked Margaret to go and see if they had some.  She returned with negative news. They had no gasoline.  It was then that I made another mistake.  Not knowing the history of that bus, I tried one more time to start the engine.

POOF!!! What happened struck a chill up my spine!  That last try was the “last straw” for an old church bus engine that I later learned from Bill the church mechanic that it had been known to backfire through the carburetor.  Well, that evening it did that! My last attempt to start the engine caused a flame to pop up in the engine that I could see from the driver’s seat!

Oh no!  What to do now?  Send the kids out the back door of the bus and they may be run over by a lurching bus, or have them exit the front door near where the engine was burning?  I quickly decided to “stay with the ship” in the driver’s seat and instructed the children to exit the bus by me…as I watched the growing fire in the engine.  I had no idea if it would explode!

After all the children had exited, I then left.  I then remembered the fire extinguisher mounted just inside the front door.  With the fire upward, no smoke was entering the bus.  I took it to the front, pulled the pin, and aimed it at the engine.  PSSSSSEWwwwww….  It petered out in just a few seconds!  All I could do at that point was make my way to the bottom of the hill with the children.

The rest of the evening was a blur.  Another church having VBS that week, stopped by with a loaded van and offered to return later for us.  Also, one of my girls was so affected by the situation that she had an asthma attack, though there had been no smoke in the cabin of the bus!  So, the paramedics were called!

Finally, the other church did return to take us all back to Liberty.  By the time we returned, Brother Danny Suttles the deacon had returned from dropping off his route, so we then shared the remaining kids and I was able to take my group home. 

former deacon, now former disgraced pastor

I later returned to the church from that trip to a burned-up bus, questions for a police report, and the need to finalize packing for my next meeting in Alabama as I was to leave out that next morning. It was a very late night!  I was pooped, and the NBT evangelists were packing to leave the next morning for their next meeting.  Time for some shut eye.

The next few days were extremely busy with both morning and evening rallies for children and teens at Anchor Baptist. It wasn’t until the following Tuesday that I was able to call Pastor Settle.  In a word, he was not happy about the bus incident.  He’d arrived at the church for Saturday morning bus visitation only to find a blackened bus and no information as to what had happened!  (This was the days before cell phones!)

For years after that harried night, he blamed me for taking that bus into the “hollers,” though more than once I tried to tell him that I didn’t know where the bus was headed that fateful night!  He asserted that I should have known not to take a large bus into those areas because announcements to not do so had been made on a regular basis.  Maybe I never paid attention to those announcements because my bus was a short one and my route didn’t go into those areas.  Whatever the reason, I never remembered hearing those announcements.

The entire situation involved maintenance neglect of the buses coupled with the neglect of the other drivers to inform me of their absence that last night.  All told, it was one of the most unforgettable nights of my life and an example of the LORD’s protection and provision!