Southern Indiana Living MayJune 2017

I was confused. I had my mom’s name
and my brothers’ plumbing. I said, ‘Call
me anything else.’ I just thought Gene was
a girl’s name.’”
It stuck — a photo of him sliding
into second base that ran in the West End
Star newspaper even identified him as
“Beany” Smith.
So did the work ethic he picked up
at Fontaine Ferry Park, where his love for
driving on the turnpike foreshadowed his
life’s work.
Another piece fell into place after the
family moved across the river to Jeffersonville,
Indiana. Beany was determined
to finish eighth grade at St. Columba, so
after his dad dropped him off at 39th and
Market in the morning, he’d catch a TARC
bus to downtown Louisville after school,
transfer to a bus that let him out at Ewing
Lane in Jeffersonville and hitchhike home.
The youngster was fascinated by the
bus and loved talking to the Jeffersonville
driver, Vernon “Mike” Niemeyer. Years
later that relationship would pay off.
Smith attended Jeffersonville High
School (Class of 1975), where his wife
Kathy (‘76) recalled him as a fun guy to
be around. “He made you laugh, just being
silly. He had a lot of friends,” she says.
They dated for a while in school, then reconnected
later.
Beany’s dad died at 45 and his stepmom
kicked him out, so he finished out
his senior year living in his car and grabbing
showers at his friend Billy Zinser’s
house.
He spent time in the Navy and
worked as a deckhand on the Delta
Queen, the Cincinnati steamboat that
traveled up and down the Ohio and Mississippi
rivers. But deckhands work in isolation,
shielded from the public, and that
wasn’t going to work for Beany. He got
off in New Orleans, had a little fun and
caught a Greyhound bus home. Naturally,
he chatted up the driver, who spoke
about the glamorous life of a charter bus
driver — ball games and golf, nice hotels,
and a heavily female clientele.
That sounded pretty good to a
young single guy, and the wheels started
turning in his head.
‘Looking for a career’
Greyhound bus drivers had to
be 25 years old, and Beany Smith was
only 21. But his high school swim coach
knew Mike Sodrel, who’d acquired the
old Home Transit and Daisy Lines bus
companies that ran in Southern Indiana.
Sodrel, who also owned a trucking company,
had added charter bus service.
Though he didn’t know Sodrel at the
time, Smith had family members working
there, and Niemeyer, the bus driver from
eighth grade, also put in a good word.
Smith showed up for his interview looking
like a lot of young people in the late
1970s.
“Here was this young guy, twentysomething
years old with long hair and
a beard, and I really questioned whether
he’d give that up to have a career driving
a motor coach,” Sodrel says. “I told him if
he was serious to be back at 9 in morning
with a shave and haircut. I thought that
was the last I’d see of him.”
Above: Beany, with the IU pep band before a football game.
Smith did come back, though, with
bits of blood-stained Kleenex dabbed on
his newly buzzed head and some attitude.
“I told him I was looking for a career,
not a job,” Smith says, “so if you’re gonna
hire me today and fire me tomorrow, I’m
not interested. I told him I’d work two
weeks for free, and if I was good, then
keep me busy.”
Sodrel says Smith showed promise
from the start.
“Heavy vehicles in that era all had
manual gearboxes, and there were no tachometers
to show you how fast the engine
was going,” Sodrel says. “It was quite
an accomplishment to change gears without
grinding. Beany was a really quick
study, and he had the people skills to go
along with it.
“For a good coach operator, there
are parallels to be drawn to an excellent
waiter. ... We’re in the service business.
You don’t hover over people, but you anticipate
their needs. That is something you
develop over time. Beany is very personable,
and he had what it takes to handle
both parts of the job.”
Smith is ever-grateful for Sodrel’s
leap of faith, and he still tells a story that
illustrates his mentor’s leadership style.
The early training included a trip to Nashville
to carry employees of the Ernst and
Ernst accounting firm to a company softball
tournament. Smith had an idea for
how to kill some time.
“I told him that since he was teaching
me to drive, I’d teach him to bowl.”
Bad idea.
“I beat him three games,” Sodrel
says, laughing at the naïveté of Smith’s assumption.
“I told him, ‘Here’s your first
practical lesson — it’s in humility. Don’t
ever tell anyone what you’re gonna do,
just do it.’”
Years later on a whim, Sodrel entered
a bus rodeo sponsored by the American
Bus Association. He won a regional
contest in Reno but was disqualified on a
technicality, so he suggested Smith compete
at Indianapolis. He won there and
advanced to the finals, where he completely
flopped.
“It was heartbreaking and pretty
embarrassing that I didn’t do better,” he
recalls. “I went out on the ocean with Billy
Zinser, and let’s just say we had a long
night.”
Beany is no moper, and he jumped
right back into the ring. Eleven more times
he advanced to the finals, never finishing
worse than third, and six times he came
in first and earned the title “International
Bus Driver of the Year.”
The $5,000 winner’s checks were
nice, but Smith says the recognition of his
skills was the real payoff. The competition
included personal interviews, a written
test and a staged component that required
drivers to identify and correct planted defects.
“It’s the Super Bowl of what I do —
you can’t win anything bigger,” he says.
“It was always for personal pride, not the
money.”
Six degrees of Beany
If you’ve been around Southern Indiana
anytime at all, it’s an even money
bet that you or someone you know has
ridden on one of Beany’s buses and heard
his rapid-fire spiel.
It goes something like this:
“Ladies and gentlemen, my name is
Beany Smith. It’s not a God-given name
but it works. My real name is Clay Eugene
Bernard Thomas Smith III (um, not quite
true), and I’d like to welcome you to the
Free Enterprise System.
“I’ve been doing this for 39 years,
and I’ve driven for a lot of famous people.
I have a few priorities, and safety is the
first — yours and mine. I love everyone
on this bus, but myself the most. I wanna
May/June 2017 • 19