BETHEL — It’s 5:30 a.m. inside the Bethel bus garage, and the laughter is already flowing. Brenda “Bubba” Blaisdell has been the life of this party since 1974, when she first started driving for the SAD 44 district.

“Wild,” is how one fellow driver describes Bubba. “It’s really quiet and there isn’t a lot of laughter when Bubba’s not here,” adds another.

On the wall hang 22 “mug shots” — 8″x 10″ printouts — all photos taken by Blaisdell. She points and narrates: “That’s the new driver, handsome, oh man… Miranda, making that funny face… Cindy Goodrich, she’s a riot…”

“Oh, Bubba,” says a driver who walks in and spots her own photo blown up and hung on the nearby refrigerator.

“They’re all cute,” says Blaisdell when talking about the new male drivers.

“That’s why we got that paper,” jokes Liz Buck, another driver, referencing a letter the garage received about being careful regarding sexual harassment.

Blaisdell began driving in 1974 at the age of 18. “I didn’t need a special license, just my driver’s license,” she says. She was never afraid of the size of the bus. “I could put that bus anywhere. I was never intimidated. Maybe because my dad was a truck driver and a logger.”

While maneuvering the bus was easy, managing the students – especially the ones she’d just been in school with – was difficult. The first few years were tough, she says, because the students didn’t take her seriously, being nearly the same age.

In contrast to the loud laughter and jokes in the garage, Blaisdell’s bus is a quiet ride. “You wouldn’t even know there were kids on there,” said another driver. Blaisdell drove the Albany Township route for 36 years and now covers the West Bethel route. Altogether, she’s been driving for 51 years. “I’ve had grandkids of kids I drove,” she notes.

She knows all the students and their families along her route. Parents often text her when their child won’t be riding, which helps – especially when navigating tricky side roads in winter.

Each morning at 6:15 a.m., she completes her safety check before heading out to Gilead. At her first stop the younger brother of a student runs up the bus steps to hug her, then gets back off the bus. She picks up kids on Bog Road and Fleming Road before heading to The Flat Road, eventually turning around before Flat Road intersects with Grover Hill Road in “Mud City.”

The Flat Road holds decades of memories. Blaisdell was born in a house there, moved to The Smith Farm when she was 16 – also on The Flat Road – and still lives on the Flat Road today. On her route, she points out a farm and a creek where she and her neighbors fished for suckers, and talks about how they rode cows because they couldn’t afford horses.

It was during high school that she got her nickname from the football players she hung around with. Her perpetual tan reminded them of Bubba Smith, a Black pro football player. The name stuck – though these days, most people call her just “Bub.”

Children of all ages ride her bus — from kindergarteners to high school seniors. “I’m losing five seniors this year,” she says with emotion. “They don’t know how much that means,” she adds, describing how they greet her with hugs or shout her name when they see her at school.

She and the other drivers take pride in their buses and in having a good time, too. In May, Blaisdell, Janice Bachelder, and Liz Buck washed the buses in front of the depot on Main Street dressed as old ladies — wearing nightgowns and curlers in their hair. “We heard lots of tootin’, and we were hollering to the truck drivers going by. Several people stopped to take pictures and we don’t know who they were,” Blaisdell laughs.

Blaisdell radiates joy and positivity, but she doesn’t hide the personal hardships she’s faced. “Life is hard… sometimes I feel like I should be sad all the time, for all that’s happened in my life, but I just put my head up and go with it,” she says.

“We have a lot of fun in here,” she adds of the bus garage.

“We used to have more fun … before the letter,” Buck says with a smile.