efore I tell you this sad story of woe, let me first tell you that Red Bus Drivers didn’t get paid much when they drove their Red Busses around Glacier and Waterton National Parks. Instead most drivers lived on tips that could be good or bad.
Usually I worked out of Lake McDonald since I was living at Somers and drove in each morning. Like most Red Bus Drivers I picked up my passengers on the west side of Glacier and we toured the park for the day then returned to Lake McDonald and I headed for home after washing my bus.
There was a primer tour called the Great Lodges of Glacier Tour and in that tour we hauled the same passengers for a week from East Glacier Lodge to the Prince of Wales at Waterton to Many Glacier and lastly to Lake McDonald Lodge.
One year the transportation man for Glacier Park Incorporated convinced me that I should be a permanent driver for that tour. The tour consisted of the lead driver and his wife who was the tour director and two other busses one of which was going to be mine.
So I signed up for a tour just to see how it would go. The tour director wanted me to come to Glacier Park Lodge at East Glacier the day before to meet my passengers. I told her I would do that if she would get me a room in the hotel but I would not stay in a dirty dormitory. She refused to get me a room so I said I would be there the next morning.
The next morning she pulled a fast one on me and took off a half hour early. I pulled into East Glacier at the right time only to have the transportation manager screaming at me for being late. Finally he said that they would meet me at Two Medicine and for me to get there quickly. I did just that and it seemed that things were going well except that the tour director decided to sit in my bus and do her knitting during the day to see what kind of a driver/entertainer I was. She found I was pretty good and that made her job even worse than if she had found I was horrible.
We were on our way to Waterton and when we got through customs I pulled all the stops and told my guests all about the building of the Prince of Wales Hotel. I was magnificent if I do say so myself. When the story was finished we pulled up to the door of the Prince of Wales hotel and my people got off the bus only to hear the tour director say that she wished Mike Buck (another driver) had been with us as he told a great history of the hotel.
In the meantime my people told the tour director they wanted to stay in my bus and with me for the duration of the tour. The tour director said they had to sit in a new bus the next day. That did not go over well with the guests or the other drivers because we never knew what another driver had covered. It was always better to keep your same guests all tour long.
After letting the guests off the tour guide told us to go into town and eat dinner and then come back to an old dormitory to sleep. The tour director and hubby lead driver stayed in the hotel and ate in the dining room with the other guests. The other driver and I checked out the dormitory and found just mattresses on the floor and no light bulbs in the light sockets. Then we went down town and there was nothing open where we could eat. So back to the hotel we went and finally the tour director told us we could eat in the dining room next to the kitchen door but we could only order certain things. Some meal that was. Then with no sleep we were up early cleaning our busses and imagine my surprise when at 6am my guests were already in my bus. They were not going on another bus, period. Well, it took that old Brunhilda tour guide about ten minutes to get them all chased off the bus and into other busses and we finally left for Many Glacier. At Many Glacier we could leave the guests and head for home for a day then return to Many Glacier and take the guests over Logan Pass and down to Lake McDonald Lodge where they would stay for the last night of the tour.
That went as well as it could with a horrible tour guide and finally I got back to the transportation department and there was an envelope for me with a twenty dollar bill in it. That was my tip for the week! Now, mind you, I usually picked up over a hundred dollars a day in tips. So once again I was shafted by the tour director and her husband who kept most of the tips.
I told my boss that was the end of my Great Lodge Tours and afterword, I heard even worse horror stories than I had experienced. Good drivers need not apply for those tours. Only weak kneed drivers who were afraid of the tour director and their own shadow were what the job description should have read.
