This Amazing America ~ 1955 Greyhound Bus Travelogue

more at http://quickfound.net/

Originally a public domain film, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyhound_Lines

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Greyhound Lines, Inc., usually shortened to Greyhound, is an intercity bus common carrier serving over 3,800 destinations across North America. The company's first route began in Hibbing, Minnesota in 1914, and the company adopted the Greyhound name in 1929. Since October 2007, Greyhound has been a subsidiary of British transportation company FirstGroup, but continues to be based in Dallas, Texas, where it has been headquartered since 1987. Greyhound and its sister companies in FirstGroup America are the largest motorcoach operators in the United States and Canada...

Carl Eric Wickman was born in Sweden in 1887. In 1905, he moved to the United States where he worked as a drill operator at a mine in Alice, Minnesota, until he was laid off in 1914. That same year, he became a Hupmobile salesman in Hibbing, Minnesota.[5] Although unsuccessful as a car salesman, Wickman used a 7-passenger car to begin a bus service with Andy "Bus Andy" Anderson and C.A.A. "Arvid" Heed in 1914. The fledgling company transported iron ore miners from Hibbing to Alice at 15 cents a ride.

In 1915, Wickman joined forces with Ralph Bogan, who was running a similar service from Hibbing to Duluth, Minnesota, to form the Mesaba Transportation Company. The company made $8,000 in profit in its first year.

By the end of World War I in 1918, Wickman owned 18 buses and was making an annual profit of $40,000. In 1922, Wickman joined forces with Orville Caesar, the owner of Superior White Bus Lines. Four years later, Wickman purchased two West Coast operations, the Pioneer Yelloway System (the operator of the nation's first transcontinental bus) and the Pickwick Lines, creating a national intercity bus company.

The Greyhound name had its origins in the inaugural run of a route from Superior, Wisconsin to Wausau, Wisconsin. While passing through a small town, Ed Stone, the route's operator, saw the reflection of his 1920s era bus in a store window. The reflection reminded him of a greyhound dog, and he adopted that name for that segment of the Blue Goose Lines. The Greyhound name became popular and later applied to the entire bus network. Stone later became General Sales Manager of Yellow Truck and Coach, a division of General Motors (GM), which built Greyhound buses. As president of the company, Wickman continued to expand it so that by 1927, his buses were making transcontinental trips from California to New York. In 1928, Greyhound had a gross annual income of $6 million...

By the outbreak of World War II, the company had 4,750 stations and nearly 10,000 employees...

Greyhound commissioned noted industrial designer Raymond Loewy and General Motors to design several distinctive buses from the 1930s through the 1950s. Loewy's first was the GM PD-3751, the Greyhound Silversides produced in 1940 - 1941. 1954 saw the debut of the first of Greyhound's distinctive hump-backed buses. In 1944 Loewy had produced drawings for the GM GX-1, a full double-decker parlor bus with the first prototype built in 1953. The Scenicruiser was designed Loewy and built by General Motors as model PD-4501. The front of the bus was distinctly lower than its rear section.

After World War II, and the building of the Interstate Highway System beginning in 1956, automobile travel became a preferred mode of travel in the United States. This, combined with the increasing affordability of air travel, spelled trouble for Greyhound and other intercity bus carriers.

In October 1953, Greyhound announced the acquisition of the Tennessee Coach Company's entire operation, and the negotiations for the Blue Ridge Lines, and its affiliate White Star Lines, that operated between Cleveland and the Mid Atlantic Seaboard...