ome years ago, I fell out of love with sailing and flying and became enchanted with buses. I decided to become a bus driver. Naturally, people with this form of affliction have a tendency to band together. Being a novice, I hung on every word uttered from the old timers. My background was engineering so I considered myself pretty savvy, but I was just a mite confused when I heard the term bus nut.

I knew what a B-nut was. . . a connector for a hydraulic line. A lug nut holds a wheel on a stud (why is it called a lug nut instead of a stud nut?). Finally I acquired a bus and was determined to find the bus nut. I snooped all over the thing and couldn't locate the damned thing. I found Acorn nuts, hex nuts, lock nuts, peanuts and even cabinets of walnuts, but no bus nut.

Enough of this nonsense! Obviously I spotted the bus nut while shaving one morning. Soon after, I discovered a whole community with this affliction. It became the custom of this group to gather once a month where the men would swap lies, drink beer and gesticulate into the rear of their coaches while their ladies would sit at tables and play cards with little rocks on them so the wind would not make them lose their places.

For some reason, this gathering place would always be somewhere nobody had been before. This was probably because people walking by would look at the group and declare, "Look at those bus nuts!". Obviously this was an insult so we always looked for a new spot to gather. I remember one time we gathered in the desert north of Victorville in California. Now this is kind of like being at the North Pole, only warmer. We only saw one old guy walking by out there and he was hollering at his burro, "Git!! Or I'll git them bus nuts on ye!"

After that experience, Ol' Mose grabbed Noah, went behind his 4104, and bemoaned, "I even saw a rattler shaking out 'bbbus nuttt'. I guess we oughta officially register ourselves as bus nuts". Now it is true, there are a lot of nuts in California. In fact some people think California is the nut capital of the world, but Noah said, "We don’t have to register. The govmint gave up trying to register all the nuts in California. I do believe, however, if we are gonna be bus nuts, we should be Bus Nuts". Ol' Mose didn’t understand the significance of Noah's statement because he couldn't see the bold capital letters, so he just thought he was being emphatic and said, "you bet!, I'll drink to that!", and popped another beer.

Well, to summarize all this nonsense, this was the beginning of a great fellow and galship. These guys decided to call themselves the Bus Nuts, but then Adam pointed out there may be more who would like that name and we weren't going as far as New York City. So after much wrangling they settled on the Southwestern Bus Nuts (kind of a descriptive location from whence we are from). From this sprang the Western Bus Nuts, the Northwestern Bus Nuts, the Central Bus Nuts, the South Central Bus Nuts, the Upper US Bus Nuts, and so on, and so on.

Now there may be some who think they have prior claim to this name, but I can prove I was the 7th president of this chapter in 1984, so I reckon 1978 was the beginning. . . nigh onto twenty years ago. I respectfully submit the above information to be true and correct to the best of my ability to remember. Of course, it's said, "First thing to go is your mind". I don't remember the second thing.

Yer humble Servant,

Dave Galey.