12/09/2021
Excerpt from my book, "World War II Off the North Carolina Coast"
Chapter Four: “The Wildest Bus Ride in America"
Each day, year-round, the “Sea-going Bus Line” departed Hatteras village at 8 a.m. for its run north and stops to collect riders, mail, and packages at Frisco, Buxton, Avon, Salvo, Waves, and Rodanthe before catching the ferry across Oregon Inlet. At Manteo, riders (salesmen mostly) could continue their journey by connecting with the Virginia Dare Bus Line that passed through Elizabeth City and on up to Norfolk.
Depending on the weather, wind, and tides, the timetable was somewhat variable, so riders at designated bus stops had to be both patient and alert to quickly jump aboard when they heard the horn honk on the days when it was running a little late. When the tide was high or in storm conditions, the bus would have to navigate the inside route, on the sound-side of the dune line where a myriad of tire tracks seemed to lead in a myriad of directions. The freshest set of tracks were the ones inexperienced drivers were usually advised to follow, regardless of where the tracks seemed to lead. If the ruts were deep enough, it almost didn’t matter where a driver wanted to go—his tires would follow the ruts despite the driver’s best efforts to steer out of them.
“We called it ‘Route 101,’ which meant we had a hundred and one different ways to travel,” said Stockton “Stocky” Midgett, Jr., many years later. The sand along “Route 101” was soft and deep, and there were many stretches where the Midgett’s buses could only run about five miles per hour—sometimes not at all.
Russell Twiford of Elizabeth City remembered making trips to Hatteras Island with his father in the ’30s and meeting Stocky, Jr., for the first time. The two boys were the same age, and to Twiford, 10-year-old Stocky, Jr., seemed to be a typical kid until he got behind the steering wheel of the bus. “The first time I remember Stocky, he was driving the bus, and he was too small to sit in the seat,” Twiford said. “He had to stand up to drive the bus because he couldn’t sit in the seat and hit the accelerator. And when you’d hit a soft spot in the sand, everybody got out of the bus and shoveled for a while."
“I remember there were these wooden bridges over the dunes, and riding in the bus was like a roller coaster ride,” said Pat Williams Stevens of Ocracoke Island, who was a young girl when her family rode the bus. “Stocky was usually barefoot when he drove the bus. I had just never seen anyone drive barefoot before.”
Most any of the few people living today who can claim to have ridden the Midgett brothers’ buses say practically the same thing when asked about it: “You’d ride awhile and push awhile,” recalls Mrs. Ormond Fuller.
Despite the difficulties, island residents were frequent riders because not many owned their own cars. Almost everyone boarded the bus at its regular stops, but sometimes the boys would find riders waiting in the middle of nowhere.
Stevens remembers one such time when a solitary figure waved down the bus in one of the desolate expanses between the villages. “One time they stopped, not in a village, but in a place where there was nothing around,” Stevens said. “An elderly woman got on the bus. It was a terribly hot day, and she was wearing black cotton stockings. I watched her with amazement as she spent the next hour pulling sand spurs out of her stockings; they were full of sand spurs. No one knew where she came from.”
In a 1981 article about the Midgett boys and their bus service, writer Diane Ransom, who rode the bus as a young girl, made note of the fact that the bus stops at Rodanthe were always a little longer than at the other villages because the brothers never failed to visit with their mother, Ersie, who still resided in the family home and managed the family’s general store at the north end of the island. How could adult passengers complain when their 10-year-old driver delayed their departure in order to visit with his mother?
Such were the halcyon days when an adolescent was permitted to drive a commercial bus—an age of innocence, days of freedom, and a time of peace and happiness on North Carolina coast. It could be said that the residents of the Outer Banks, and the coast in general, lived an elemental existence—leading simple, unassuming lives shaped by the wind and tides.
By the summer of 1941, as America teetered on the brink of war, the Outer Banks seemed to have been bypassed by time, without strategic value and far from the conflict beyond the horizon. Then, one Sunday in early December, when the “Sea-going Bus Line” pulled in at one of its regular stops, a man breathlessly ran out of the general store shouting, “You’re not going to believe it. They just reported on the radio: The Japanese bombed our naval base at Pearl Harbor. Our country is at war!”
The age of innocence had come to an end.
