When people discover my love for Crown school buses, they figure I spent my childhood on the West Coast riding them to school and back. That isn’t quite the case. I was raised in Carmel, Ind., just north of Indianapolis, and we didn’t have Crown buses. I grew up riding buses manufactured by Blue Bird and Thomas Built Buses. To tell the truth, I did not even know what a Crown Supercoach was until recently. I had seen them on TV, but didn’t know what company manufactured them. All I knew was that they were predominantly West Coast school buses. Because I had only seen them on TV shows that took place in California, I called them "California buses" for lack of a better term.
An odd, but intriguing, bus
I always thought Crowns looked quite odd, like something out of the past. But I couldn’t seem to get the image of them out of my head. One fall evening in 1998, I decided to investigate them. Using the Internet, I discovered a Website that listed all sorts of school bus manufacturers. It also had photos of their products. I scrolled down the list until I came across a manufacturer I had never heard of before, and there I spotted them. . . school buses built by Crown Coach Corp. in Los Angeles. That was it! And how that one little excerpt from a Website has changed me forever. While visiting California last spring, I finally had the chance to ride in a Crown. It was the best bus ride that I ever had! I can’t describe it, but those who have ridden in or driven them probably know what I’m talking about. The ride was so nice that I decided to get a Crown bus of my own. To that end, I contacted a gentleman who had obtained some retired models from Calaveras Unified School District in northern California. For $2,500, he parted with one of his buses. That money came out of my savings. I also sold one of my saxophones to repair the bus.
