KNOXVILLE — Earl Lawson, 79, likes to sit where he can see the turn he used to worry about. When the bus comes around it he still leans forward a little, although the young woman driving has handled it fine for years.
Lawson has ridden his old Knoxville Area Transit route every Tuesday since he retired in 1996. He pays the fare and checks that the route still runs, which it does. He sits on the right. A driver once offered him a ride home from Burlington, which would have left half the job undone.
“I told him I appreciated it,” Lawson said. “He was going right by the house. But I’d already paid, and I wanted to see where we came back through.”
He carries a pocket notebook with 17 stops that he has been told were “temporarily” moved. Each entry gives the old location and the date somebody told him. He writes in pencil because, at first, he expected to do some erasing. One entry places a stop beside a tire shop that later became an upholstery business, and Lawson has added the upholstery shop underneath.
“My wife keeps saying get a bigger one,” he said. “This one goes in my shirt pocket. I don’t want to be holding something on the bus.”
KAT dispatcher Brenda Wilson said the notebook is “mostly right.” She has questioned an entry from April 2003 that reads “across from grocery,” with no grocery named.
“He can tell you who was driving that morning,” Wilson said. “I asked him about the store and he got off on how that fellow used to keep the bus too cold.”
Wilson has put a paper clip on the page she needs him to look at.