Salt Lake City: Livability in the 21st Century

LEWIS STAGES
From transport via Model “T” Ford in 1914 to today’s
modern fleet of motor coaches, transit buses, mini-coaches,
vans and a new fleet of CNG (Compressed Natural Gas)
buses, All Resort Coach, Inc., d/b/a Lewis Stages boasts a
century of outstanding service. The company
provides charter, tour and contract transportation
services in Utah, Nevada, and
throughout the Western United States.
At age sixteen, Orson Lewis earned enough
money shoveling boxcars of salt at Morton’s
Great Salt Lake ponds to purchase a Model “T”
Ford. Securing one of the first chauffeur’s
licenses in Utah, he began transporting miners
twenty-five miles between the Bingham
Canyon Copper Mine and Salt Lake City and
called his company “Bingham Stage Lines.”
A century later, Lewis Stages is again
transporting miners at the
Bingham Canyon Mine for
Kennecott Utah Copper, LLC.
When six of his brothers joined
Orson in the business, the company
was renamed, “Lewis Bros.
Stages, Inc.,” and they built a vital
network of scheduled routes connecting
otherwise isolated farming
communities between Pocatello,
Idaho and Las Vegas, Nevada.
Booming growth of passenger
routes in the “Roaring Twenties,”
ended with the Great Depression,
which weeded out dozens of
competing jitney operators.
During those hard times, Orson
bought gas and paid drivers with
cash from each day’s fares, taking home what little was left
to feed his family.
In the late 1930s, when the drums of war were beating
in Europe, Orson put up everything he had to get a loan.
One Sunday a friendly banker made a “kitchen-table deal”
that financed the purchase of a fleet of used school buses.
That loan enabled Orson to win his first arms-plant worker
shuttle contract, beating out a competitor who did not yet
have the needed equipment.
The used school buses, held together during World War II
with “bailing wire and bubblegum,” were golden when no
new buses could be found, because manufacturing was
devoted to the war effort. Those buses moved thousands
of newly minted pilots from Camp Kearns, the Army Air
Corps’ western training center, to Salt Lake City for their
precious few days of leave before shipping out.
When the brakes failed on one of those buses, a seasoned
driver used the gears to time stoplights and made it all the
way downtown without incident but could not stop when
he pulled into the depot. He ran into the back wall at ten
miles per hour ripping the seats, jammed with GIs, out of
the floor. Running towards the crash, Orson was nearly
trampled by stampeding pilots rushing towards the red light
district. Not one stopped to file an injury claim.
After WWII, the company’s operations passed to Orson’s
son, Joe, just returned after three years in Patton’s Army.
With scheduled routes giving way to America’s love affair
with the automobile, Joe reshaped the company as a
charter specialist. The foundations of the revitalized company
were decades-long relationships with the Utah
Symphony, University of Utah, Brigham Young University
(including moving the 200 member cast of the Palmyra
Pageant to New York each summer for twenty-five years),
Utah Jazz, and the growing National Park tour market led
by Tauck Tours.
S A L T L A K E C I T Y — L i v a b i l i t y i n t h e 2 1 s t C e n t u r y
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