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My search for a Pacific School Coach for restoration began, almost incidentally, right after this site expanded to feature the School Coach shortly after its launch. The purpose of covering the School Coach was primarily due to the fact that no other website featured it, and partly due to the fact that I received information shortly after posting a couple photos of them, that Gillig indeed had a relationship to the School Coach. After that, I began my search for one myself. (I'd spent considerable time riding one in my first year of school back in 1986, South Kitsap School District still had a sizeable fleet of them at the time) There'd been a few I'd been well aware of, and two intact ones, but one was moved from where it sat down near Longview to an unknown location (possibly scrapped altogether) and there had been one sitting for years up at a storage yard in Sequim, Washington. The one in Sequim was known to be totally intact, and is quite visible from Highway 101 sitting in a storage yard a football field away from the highway's shoulder. The one in Sequim, however, has been sitting for close to ten or fifteen years, and that fact kind of made the idea of trying to locate the owner to talk about purchasing it seem rather, well, unattractive. When I left production of this website in 2003 to go on hiatus and "pursue other interests", I discovered one in a wrecking yard just outside Gorst, Washington. Although relatively intact, it had been painted a dark green. Needless to say, the only thing I kept from that bus was the front "PACIFIC" cast wing badge emblem (these things are huge and heavy!), and the dashboard switch panel. Shortly after returning from my hiatus in the summer of 2006, a 1955 Pacific School Coach showed up on Craigslist for $3800 located down in the small town of Cathlamet, Washington. The listing showed a bus that for all intents, looked like it had been taken out of service just yesterday. This got me real excited, but I wasn't willing to spend that much money on an old school bus. So I decided to let this one slide, thinking that "there must be more out there, then..." After a few months had elapsed, it reappeared on Craigslist with a reduced price of nearly half the original asking price. I then contacted the owners of it and started talking about buying it. After a series of e-mails back and forth, and after the deal looked solid, things took a nosedive. My employer at the time wasn't giving me enough hours, so I couldn't manage to come up with even a down payment. By January 2007, I thought that maybe it was still available, and decided to contact the owners yet again. On a hunch, I sent the sellers an e-mail in the middle of that month asking if it was still available. In their reply, they told me it was, and talks of purchasing the bus started in earnest a few days later. On January 27, 2007, I decided time had gone by long enough, and it was time to go down and check this bus out in person. So, I set forth and went to see for myself just what this bus looked like. Needless to say, I was very impressed with what I saw. The ad claimed that a few seats had been taken out, and the bus was in the process of being converted. What I saw couldn't have been farther from the truth. The whole bus looked as if it was retired just yesterday. Everything was intact, and every seat was still installed save for the left front seat, which was just simply detached from its mountings. The owner purchased it at auction from the district with intentions of turning it into a motorhome, but grew reluctant over the project due to the bus' age and the fact that his wife didn't view it as her idea of a motorhome to begin with. The bus had apparently been retired only a few years prior, and was originally owned and operated by the Wahkiakum School District there. |
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