Take The Greyhound Trivia Quiz

Answer: Minnesota

In 1905, Carl Eric Wickman moved to the USA at the age of 18. After being laid off from a mine in Minnesota in 1914 he tried his hand at selling cars.

When that did not work out, he and two others started to use a seven-seater car to take workers to and from an iron ore mine at Alice, Minnesota.

On that first trip in 1914 Wickman collected a grand total of $2.25, charging 15c a time for the 15 people packed into the car. Within a century Greyhound was a billion dollar a year company.

Answer: 1920s

Several bus company names were in use for differing routes until Ed Stone, proprietor of Blue Goose Lines, saw the reflection of his 1920s bus in a store window on the inaugural run between Superior, Wisconsin and Wausau, Wisconsin. It reminded him of a greyhound dog, and he adopted that name for that segment.

By 1930, the company was running 100 buses and had adopted Greyhound as a memorable name to cover all the routes. In 2019, the company announced that it had 1,700 buses.

Answer: Five billion

That figure comes from the company itself. It served 2,400 destinations across the USA and Canada.

The company said it "took an industry-leading step in 2009 when we installed three-point safety belts on all of our new buses." That became a legal requirement in the USA in 2016.
From the website:
"Key Corporate Facts

2,400 destinations offering over 245,000 city pair combinations across our nationwide network
First international coach operator to launch domestic service in Mexico
5,900 employees
16 million passengers a year
5 billion passenger miles a year
1,700 vehicles in our fleet."

Answer: Aberdeen, Scotland

FirstGroup bought Greyhound for $3.6 billion but as a result of increasing competition from low-cost airlines, put Greyhound up for sale in May 2019.

At that time, Greyhound was the biggest operator of scheduled intercity coaches in North America, carrying around 17 million passengers a year and serving 2,400 destinations.

FirstGroup was one of the United Kingdom"s leading bus companies and its First Bus subsidiary had more vehicles than Greyhound - 5,700. It also owned three railway franchises carrying 345 million passengers in 2018/19.*

Another subsidiary, First Student, was the largest provider of student transportation in North America, carrying five million students a year.

*Caveat: In the UK, rail franchises on different routes are granted by the Government, are time-limited and may be subject to termination at any time

Answer: Chicago, Illinois

The first headquarters had been at Duluth, Minnesota.

In 1971 the headquarters were moved from Chicago to Phoenix Arizona, and in 1987 the bus operations moved to Dallas, Texas.

Answer: 14

The event occurred at an amusement park in Ohio.

It was featured on ABC's 'Wide World of Sport', attracting the largest viewership to that time.

Answer: Miami, Florida and Seattle, Washington

Three days and 16 hours was the transit time, a journey that even Jonathan Richman might have baulked at:
"But Jonathan
You're crazy for taking the bus"
"Well, I'm crazy, so what's the fuss?"
"Two whole days on that stinking bus?"
"Yes, and I sleep fine
So you take the plane, I'll take the bus this time," he famously sang.

The route was 3,300 miles long and there were 45 stops along the way. The route was still being operated in 2019, according to checkmybus.com.

Answer: Midnight Cowboy

Jon Voight starred as a naive, idealistic Texan who travelled to New York City to find a brighter and more exciting way of life. Dustin Hoffman played a beaten-down conman who quickly showed him the streets of New York were not paved with gold.

I am not going to reveal any more about the plot, except to say the final scenes showed the two on a Greyhound bus headed from New York to Florida.

The scene was played out to the haunting strains of Harry Nilsson singing the Fred Neil song "Everybody's Talking".

This was not the only movie, nor indeed the only Oscar-winner, to feature a Greyhound bus.

In 1934, Clark Gable's and Claudette Colbert starred in "It Happened One Night", directed by Frank Capra. That movie featured a trip from Florida to NYC, and was described by one reviewer as an "unimprovably bubbly romcom". It won all five Academy Awards it was nominated for.

Meanwhile, "The Graduate" (1967) was also an Oscar winner that featured a memorable bus scene. The bus there belonged to the Santa Barbara Municipal Bus Line.

And, the 1946 musical "No Leave, No Love" featured the song "Love On A Greyhound Bus". Chuck Berry's "Promised Land" also name-checked the American icon.

Answer: Women drivers introduced

"This Army Moves By Greyhound," was another wartime slogan.

With many of its male drivers drafted into the armed services, Greyhound began to use women drivers

In his review "100 Years on a Dirty Dog: The History of Greyhound" in 2013, Gary Belsky commented this was "... arguably the first time America confronted such a wholesale substitution of traditionally male authority figures."

The wrong answer of helicopter buses may seem outlandish, but Greyhound did suggest them at one time.

Answer: Three years

That strike almost brought Greyhound to its knees and the company filed for bankruptcy protection.

It also embarked on some massive cost cutting that curtailed operations.

That strike was one of the longest and nastiest in American history but Greyhound survived, despite making massive losses.

Answer: False

The bus, in fact, belonged to Montgomery City Lines.

Greyhound had a mixed record on race relations. It did employ many black workers, but mainly on the lower paid maintenance jobs rather than as drivers.

The company also tried to improve relations with black people - who travelled in large numbers on the buses - by employing Joe Black, a former Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher, as a director.

Answer: Burger King

Dial Soap and Purex bleach were among the brand names also part of the Greyhound stable at one time or another.

"Greyhound was generating massive amounts of cash that probably wasn't best invested in a slow-growth business like bus travel. Shareholders did very well during those years," says Craig Lentzsch, Greyhound's CEO between 1994 and 2003 later said.

But Greyhound also took its eye of the ball and the core bus business suffered.

With deteriorating vehicles and crumbling depots, passengers stopped calling it 'The Hound' and started calling it 'The Dirty Dog'.

Answer: Trailways

Laidlaw Inc was a Canadian firm that Greyhound merged with in 1999.

Megabus was also a US coach company. It was set up in 2006 by Stagecoach, a UK company, and had 30 routes in the USA and Canada. In April 2019, it was put up for sale by Stagecoach.

Trailways was a network of independent bus companies set up in 1936.

Answer: Lady Greyhound

The TV career began as a puppy when she featured in a Greyhound television commercial during 'The Steve Allen Show' on NBC television.

Lady Greyhound soon had her own fan club.

The Lady Greyhound mascot continued through the original dog and two successors until 1970.

Answer: Harry Chapin

Eventually, some wiser heads pointed out that "Take The Greyhound" was actually not that complementary a song:

"Take the Greyhound.
It's a dog of a way to get around.
Take the Greyhound.
It's a dog gone easy way to get you down..."

The management's predecessors were also far from happy with the 1937 song "Me and the Devil Blues" by Robert Johnson. It was a bleak blues suicide note in which the singer beats his lover senseless and is collected by the devil for his trouble, and instructs that his body be deposited by the roadside so his "old evil spirit can catch a Greyhound bus and ride".