Leaving a Job With a Bus, Not a Slide
By MICHAEL WILSON 
How thrilling the ride off the back of a jet and down that inflatable emergency slide must have been for Steven Slater, flight attendant — cold beer in his hand, wind in his hair, the seat of his JetBlue uniform gliding merrily toward the runway. Woo-hoo!
And yet, with his swift arrest at home later Monday, the whole caper has nothing on the infamous take-this-job-and-shove-it run of one William Cimillo. A Bronx bus driver fed up with the daily annoyances and nonsense of it all, Mr. Cimillo, 38, climbed behind the wheel of his bus one morning in 1947 and took a 1,300-mile detour.
“He disappeared for two weeks,” recalled his son Richard Cimillo, a retired firefighter who is now 75. “They picked him up in Hollywood, Fla.”
Mr. Cimillo was married with three sons. He had been working for 16 years at the Surface Transportation Corporation.
“He was tired of driving the bus and throwing the change in the changer and the monotony every single day,” Richard Cimillo explained in an interview on Tuesday. “It was a tough job back then. You had to make change, you had to give out transfers, you had to sweep out the bus. Today, they just sit behind the thing. They don’t touch a dime.”
(To be fair, today’s drivers do much more than sit behind the thing, but we defer to a proud son, whose father died in 1975.)
Back in 1947, there was an interstate all-points bulletin for the missing bus. But no one reported any Cimillo sightings until he himself did the honors. He had apparently run out of money. He sent the office a telegram asking for $50. “I think he was playing the horses down there,” his son said. “They sent down the detectives to pick him up.”
Asked why he did it, the busman would explain: “This New York traffic gets you. It’s like driving in a squirrel cage.” Elsewhere he was quoted in words that Mr. Slater, the flight attendant, would appreciate: He “wanted to get away from everything.”
Richard was 12 at the time. Watching the newsreel before an afternoon matinee with his pals, he got an unwelcome surprise. “All of a sudden this splashed up, my father with the handcuffs and two cops,” he said. “It was tough for me at school. I used to get ribbed a lot. ‘You know who this kid is? The bus driver’s son.’ I used to shy away.”
The elder Mr. Cimillo returned home to an indictment for grand larceny, but he got something else, too: a hero’s welcome. The boys at Surface Transportation voted to host a dance to raise money for his legal fees. The charges were later dropped.
“The public was enormously in his corner,” Richard Cimillo said. “He became a celebrity. He was walking around like a movie star. Networks flew him to California. He went on a couple of shows — ‘Can you guess who this is?’ ”
And, three years later, the highest of honors: a copycat. In 1950, another driver, George Geddes, “fed up with bus driving,” as he later explained, took his Bronx bus on a less extravagant holiday. He stopped off for a few drinks and drove around, winding up in Kingston, N.Y., where he “came to my senses” and hailed a passing priest, who advised him to turn himself in.
EIGHT years after that, in 1958, Elizabeth Taylor and her stepson Michael Todd Jr. announced plans to make a movie about the Cimillo adventure: “Busman’s Holiday.” Ms. Taylor was to play a beauty pageant winner who joined the bus driver on his journey, and was to make her singing debut in the picture. But whatever happens when deals like this fall apart happened — in one account, the script burned in an airplane crash — and the movie was never made. “It seemed to just peter out, and died,” Richard Cimillo said.
Sadie Cimillo, the busman’s wife, forgave him. “Out of the bad came a lot of good,” their son said. “She got a trip to California, which she’d have never had.”
As for William Cimillo, he wound up receiving what could be seen as the ultimate punishment — an outcome that might give Steven Slater chills. They gave him his old job back.
And he took it, without any more stunts.
“You tell somebody a joke the second time,” he told The New York Times in 1960, “and it’s not always so funny.”
Jim Dwyer is on leave.
How thrilling the ride off the back of a jet and down that inflatable emergency slide must have been for Steven Slater, flight attendant — cold beer in his hand, wind in his hair, the seat of his JetBlue uniform gliding merrily toward the runway. Woo-hoo!
And yet, with his swift arrest at home later Monday, the whole caper has nothing on the infamous take-this-job-and-shove-it run of one William Cimillo. A Bronx bus driver fed up with the daily annoyances and nonsense of it all, Mr. Cimillo, 38, climbed behind the wheel of his bus one morning in 1947 and took a 1,300-mile detour.
“He disappeared for two weeks,” recalled his son Richard Cimillo, a retired firefighter who is now 75. “They picked him up in Hollywood, Fla.”
Mr. Cimillo was married with three sons. He had been working for 16 years at the Surface Transportation Corporation.
“He was tired of driving the bus and throwing the change in the changer and the monotony every single day,” Richard Cimillo explained in an interview on Tuesday. “It was a tough job back then. You had to make change, you had to give out transfers, you had to sweep out the bus. Today, they just sit behind the thing. They don’t touch a dime.”
(To be fair, today’s drivers do much more than sit behind the thing, but we defer to a proud son, whose father died in 1975.)
Back in 1947, there was an interstate all-points bulletin for the missing bus. But no one reported any Cimillo sightings until he himself did the honors. He had apparently run out of money. He sent the office a telegram asking for $50. “I think he was playing the horses down there,” his son said. “They sent down the detectives to pick him up.”
Asked why he did it, the busman would explain: “This New York traffic gets you. It’s like driving in a squirrel cage.” Elsewhere he was quoted in words that Mr. Slater, the flight attendant, would appreciate: He “wanted to get away from everything.”
Richard was 12 at the time. Watching the newsreel before an afternoon matinee with his pals, he got an unwelcome surprise. “All of a sudden this splashed up, my father with the handcuffs and two cops,” he said. “It was tough for me at school. I used to get ribbed a lot. ‘You know who this kid is? The bus driver’s son.’ I used to shy away.”
The elder Mr. Cimillo returned home to an indictment for grand larceny, but he got something else, too: a hero’s welcome. The boys at Surface Transportation voted to host a dance to raise money for his legal fees. The charges were later dropped.
“The public was enormously in his corner,” Richard Cimillo said. “He became a celebrity. He was walking around like a movie star. Networks flew him to California. He went on a couple of shows — ‘Can you guess who this is?’ ”
And, three years later, the highest of honors: a copycat. In 1950, another driver, George Geddes, “fed up with bus driving,” as he later explained, took his Bronx bus on a less extravagant holiday. He stopped off for a few drinks and drove around, winding up in Kingston, N.Y., where he “came to my senses” and hailed a passing priest, who advised him to turn himself in.
EIGHT years after that, in 1958, Elizabeth Taylor and her stepson Michael Todd Jr. announced plans to make a movie about the Cimillo adventure: “Busman’s Holiday.” Ms. Taylor was to play a beauty pageant winner who joined the bus driver on his journey, and was to make her singing debut in the picture. But whatever happens when deals like this fall apart happened — in one account, the script burned in an airplane crash — and the movie was never made. “It seemed to just peter out, and died,” Richard Cimillo said.
Sadie Cimillo, the busman’s wife, forgave him. “Out of the bad came a lot of good,” their son said. “She got a trip to California, which she’d have never had.”
As for William Cimillo, he wound up receiving what could be seen as the ultimate punishment — an outcome that might give Steven Slater chills. They gave him his old job back.
And he took it, without any more stunts.
“You tell somebody a joke the second time,” he told The New York Times in 1960, “and it’s not always so funny.”
Jim Dwyer is on leave.
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