A Bus Agent Retires, And An Era Ends -- Cle Elum Woman Worked 30 Years For Greyhound

CLE ELUM, Kittitas County - She's 86. For 30 years, she has run the Greyhound agency here.

And when Theresa McKnight closes the depot for the final time, probably Monday, it will mean the oldest and longest-working Greyhound agent in the country is off the job.

The end of McKnight's work also is evidence of the way transportation changed, as railroad tracks disappeared, car ownership mushroomed and jet airliners replaced buses.

"We had 15 buses a day" when she started, says McKnight. "Now we're down to eight."

Still, a vestige of what Greyhound once meant, and still means for thousands of small towns without airline service, can be found in this modest community about 90 miles from Seattle.

The depot here is the kind of place where a copy of Time magazine on a table instantly attracts attention. "After the SST: Picking up the pieces of the aerospace industry," says the cover. A closer look shows the date: April 5, 1971.

McKnight was born here in 1906, went to college in Ellensburg, became a teacher, and took over the depot with her husband after her cousin gave up because it was such hard work.

For 29 years, the depot was open seven days a week, thanks to help from Edith Gaspari, an orphan adopted by the McKnight family who died last year at 76.

"If she had not been here, we would never have survived the Greyhound," said McKnight, whose husband, Tom, died in 1964. "She loved the Greyhound."

The McKnights also ran a service station and the local Ford dealership. They got 10 percent of bus ticket sales, at times making only $130 a month, and once getting up to $6,000 a year.

Now the station is closed Sundays.

"This has acted as a living room for so many people. You don't find waiting rooms like this anymore," she says, sitting in the sunny wood-paneled depot, remembering how generations of Cle Elum kids used to come in after school and spend hours talking and hanging out.

"We never had a bad boy," she says. "It was the only place in town they could go."

There were some bad times. One year a young man who had escaped from a King County youth center robbed them at gunpoint.

The depot often provided shelter for bus riders in winter storms. Once two men were stranded there, and Theresa found a place for them to stay. Ever since, she's received a Christmas card from one of them.

For most of her riders, she says, the attraction was Seattle.

"The bus going east is not very good," she said. "The bus going west is much busier. People are always going to Seattle."

That's still true today.

"Most of the people are going to the doctor in Seattle," she says.

Now a new kind of traveler is appearing, like Eloise Johnson, who lived for 25 years in Bellevue and has never driven a car. She moved to Cle Elum a year ago to be close to her family, and partly because of economics.

Johnson's Bellevue apartment cost $645 a month, while a "nice place" in Roslyn, a town near Cle Elum where the TV show "Northern Exposure" is filmed, costs $158. Now she rides the bus several times a year to visit Bellevue friends.

Such commutes are becoming more common.

An estimated 400 people commute daily from the Cle Elum area to Seattle and Bellevue. The lure of cheap housing makes the 90-minute drive on I-90 preferable to sitting about the same time in unmoving Seattle traffic.

Through all the changes, McKnight and her family kept the station going.

Prosperity, bankruptcy

Greyhound went through prosperity and bankruptcy and strikes. In 1951, the company had 6,280 buses. Now it has about 2,300 and is making money again, but even the Seattle depot, a fixture since 1927, is for sale for $9.2 million.

But such cataclysmic national events had little effect on the depot here.

Even the station itself is a lesson in history and perseverance.

A 1918 fire destroyed most of Cle Elum, including the building where Theresa's father, Anton Mus, had run a business. An unburned tailor shop was rolled on logs to the present site, and now forms the back wall of the depot waiting room.

The Mus Motel next door was built 56 years ago, recalls Theresa, when Highway 10, the main road between Seattle and Spokane, went right past their door. The Northern Pacific tracks were across the street, and all through the Depression, the Mus family never turned away a hungry person.

Now the train tracks are gone. I-90 has replaced Highway 10.

Had plans to quit

And Theresa says she has twice told Greyhound she's going to quit at the end of this month, although neighbors have urged her to stay.

She says she doesn't know what's going to be done to keep bus service in Cle Elum, although Greyhound is looking for a new agent.

"What did they do in North Bend for years?" she asks, telling how that town didn't have a Greyhound agency:

"They stood in the street."