news from doswell: Church Bus Magazine, 1986

Just before clocking out one afternoon from my job at Kings Dominion in January, 1986, I overheard a mechanic say to someone else “Craig can’t work overtime today – he has to drive a church bus.”

The sentence stuck. For some reason I found church buses oddly humorous, and a great premise for a project. Then again, I found construction trailers and highway rest areas hilarious.

I thought the Church Bus scenario was perfect: not well-known enough to be universal, but just odd enough to be funny. Following on the successes of “Not the Green Section” and “The Richmond Inquirer”, then the crickets chirping after “The Richmond Trolleys”, followed by the rousing (but anonymous) success of “Richmond Scene Magazine”, I found another solo project and dove into it.

My idea was to produce and print about 100 of these strange little magazines and leave them on Church bus windshields all over Richmond, as well as given away for free in bookstores “for the rest of us”.

I too was looking for a distraction, as my girlfriend (and current wife) Susan was admitted the previous December 29 for over 2 weeks at St. Mary’s hospital with Meningitis. The upside? She permanently quit smoking while there.

For the first time I enlisted assistance in the form of the funniest man in Richmond – Mac Calhoun. I mentioned the idea to him prior to beginning production and he was so enthusiastic I asked him to contribute. He responded with “The wreck of the Old ‘77” and the “Fun Facts” on pages 8 and 9. They are by far the funniest pieces in the magazine.

Despite a nice write-up in ThroTTle (“Church Bus Magazine will have you singing hosannas”) the magazine predictably went the way of the Richmond Trolleys – too out there to be enjoyed. It was a magazine only a parent could love, for sure.