Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

By Lloyd Albritton

Columnist

Mr. Jake Hollingsworth drove School Bus No. 67 for the Escambia County, Fla. School System, the Nokomis Route, all the years that I attended school (circa 1952-1965) and for many years after I graduated from high school. Moreover, he drove the Nokomis Route school bus even when my father was in school, though the two men were only eleven years apart in age. In a way, they were almost related insofar as my father’s older sister, Agnes, was married Mr. Jake’s older brother, Grady, since 1929. In my father’s senior year of high school in 1942, he was able to attend his senior prom at the Atmore Country Club only because Mr. Jake drove him there, and waited outside for him until the prom was over. They remained lifetime friends and neighbors.
My father always described Mr. Jake as a “patch farmer” because he was inclined to buy up any piece of land he could get his hands on, whether it was only an acre or two or a 100 acres or more, cleared or uncleared. Mr. Jake valued land above all other commodities. Some of his land was left in pine timber, from which he harvested turpentine, firewood and even ran some cows to forage on the woods grass. For the most part, however, he would clear the land and plant pasture for his cows or row crops for the market. I don’t think many people knew just how much land Mr. Jake owned, but it was common knowledge that he owned many parcels of land scattered over the Florida Panhandle. Some said he owned properties even over into Mississippi and Alabama as well. Mr. Jake loved the land and I am confident that he was a wealthy man when he died as measured by his property values.
Mr. Jake did not act like a wealthy man though, and no one would ever guess as much by the way he dressed or the way he lived. I am also quite certain that he never thought of himself as anything more than a poor common man. It was said that Mr. Jake acquired much of his property during the depression years when land could be purchased for only a few cents an acre or perhaps traded for a good plow mule or a milk cow. Mr. Jake was, in fact, a depression-era man. His character was forged by the hardscrabble times of The Great Depression years of the 1930s. It may very well be that he thought of the $100 or so that he earned each month from driving the school bus as a financial security blanket of sorts since there was not much cash money to be had in those days.
Mr. Jake was a short man. I often heard some of the older citizens of the community refer to him as “Little Jake.” He stood perhaps a little more than 5 feet tall, I would estimate. He always wore khaki pants with a sturdy brown leather belt, a long-sleeved khaki shirt, high-topped brogan work boots and a sweat-stained felt hat. I don’t believe I ever saw him in any other mode of dress except once each year when he might don his official school bus driver’s uniform for school pictures, or at church, when he would wear a plain white shirt without a tie. He also carried a huge brown wallet in his back pocket with a heavy chain attached to his belt. My father told me that Mr. Jake had lost his wallet one time with $600 in it. $600 was a huge sum of money to most any man in those days. Forever after that, he kept his wallet firmly secured to his belt with a chain strap.
One thing that made Mr. Jake seem even shorter was the fact that his clothing was always too big for him. His buttoned shirtsleeves always hung to the middle of his palms and the seat of his pants looked like a whole family had moved out of them. The straddle of his pants hung almost to his knees, perhaps foreshadowing one of the youthful fashion fads of modern times.
Mr. Jake was always clean-shaven with a ruddy complexion from years of working outdoors in the hot Florida sun on naturally fair, freckled skin. He wore plain wire-rimmed eyeglasses. The hair on the back of his broad, muscular hands and wrists was reddish blonde, as was the hair on his head, which was darkened and plastered to his head from the perpetual wearing of his felt hat, which he only removed to wipe the sweat from his forehead.
Mr. Jake’s wife, Ms. Bessie, was rotund in build and a bit larger than he. When seen together they actually appeared a little comical. Like her husband, Ms. Bessie did not effect pretentiousness whatsoever. She was a plain, hard-working farm wife who had no reluctance to working in the fields all day like a man and tending to her household chores and children while she was resting. She did not go out much socially and I don’t think most people in the community knew her very well. Her quiet personality was much overwhelmed by the boisterous personality of her gregarious husband.
Mr. Jake and Ms. Bessie had four children in total. The two oldest, Thelma and Eldred, were several years older than I and finished school when I was still in elementary school. Of the two youngest boys, DeWayne (we pronounced it Dee-Wayne) was three years older than I and the youngest, Paul, was my age and was one of my best pals throughout all my school years.
My family lived just a mile or so down the road from Mr. Jake’s home and my brothers and I were always the third pickup each morning at 7 a.m. DeWayne and Paul were, of course, the first students on the bus because they boarded the bus at their house where Mr. Jake kept it parked when he was not actually driving his route. His first pickup, after DeWayne and Paul, were the Barnhill children: Eugene, Otis, Ollie Ray and their baby sister Lora Belle, whose mother happened to be Mr. Jake’s sister. When the Barnhill family moved away in the mid-1950s, their house was occupied by the Manning family, whose daughter, Faye, became the second pickup of the route. Faye was one year behind me in school. The bus ride to school took about an hour in the morning and the return trip home in the afternoons took about the same amount of time, except when Mr. Jake got mad! On those frequent occasions, typically brought on by misbehaving children, it could take two or three hours to get home because Mr. Jake would stop the bus to preach hellfire and brimstone to us at just about every stop. When Mr. Jake got into a preaching mood, all schedules were off. Mr. Jake was a Pentecostal Holinist by religious persuasion, you see, and Pentecostal Holinist preachers are prone to get a little long-winded at times.
The morning and afternoon school bus rides to and from school each day were an important and memorable part of my school years’ experience. Mr. Jake’s Nokomis bus route had a well-earned reputation of being the roughest, most unruly load of school children in the entire school district. This unique and beloved experience was only made possible by the unique character and severe extremes of Mr. Jake’s personality. His bus was always loaded with colorful student “characters” from one year to the next, but Mr. Jake himself was the main character around which all events revolved.

To edit the entire story of Mr. Jake Hollingsworth to fit the space I am allowed for this column would be an injustice to such a memorable and colorful character as he was. Consequently, I hope my readers will forgive me for making this story a serial, to be continued in the next three (3) issues of this paper. Stay tuned!