End of Line for Bonanza Name
By Lynn Arditi, The Providence Journal, R.I.
May 24–PROVIDENCE — He waited at the crowded bus terminal for his name to be called.
When it finally was, the man who has been described as an icon in the transportation business seemed reluctant yesterday to move to the front.
George M. Sage, founder of Bonanza Bus Lines — a man who now travels the world, often stopping to check out the local bus terminal — paused and motioned to his wife in the seat next to him. She declined to come along.
This was George’s ride.
At 74, he is broad-shouldered and balding, with oversized glasses and a wide smile. He adjusted his tie and stepped up to the podium.
He watched as the brown paper was torn off the wall to reveal a vinyl-painted mural done by local artist Frank Galasso honoring the Bonanza and Peter Pan bus lines.
Sage’s company, named after his favorite 1970s TV cowboy serial, was bought by Peter Pan Bus Lines in 2003. But the Bonanza name had remained plastered on the buses and above the terminal.
Now, the Bonanza name is taking a back seat on its buses to its corporate parent, Peter Pan. Peter Pan, based in Springfield, Mass., is officially retiring the Bonanza Bus Lines brand. The terminal off North Main Street is being renamed after Sage.
Peter Pan’s youthful, spiky-haired president, Peter A. Picknelly IV, said he wanted to thank Sage, who knew Picknelly’s dad in 1963, when the company grossed its first $1 million. So he also named one of the Peter Pan buses after him. It’s called Sage’s Stages.
Picknelly called Sage an “icon,” to which Sage replied, with characteristic humility, “I had to look it up in the dictionary to see what it meant!”
Sage, who lives in Bristol, offered his audience, a host of state dignitaries among them, the two simple rules in business he has lived by. “Treat others the way you want to be treated yourself,” he said, “and use common sense.”
Common sense for Sage means sizing up a business by counting passengers. A friend who ran into him once at LaGuardia Airport was enlisted to stake out the exit to count passengers as they deplaned.
Sage, standing near his wife and traveling companions after the ceremony, laughed but insisted that’s still the best way to judge a business. He would know. He started out busing migrant workers to and from the tomato fields in Albion, N.Y.
“I used to stuff that bus full at a quarter a head,” Sage said.
That’s where it all began. Sweaty workers packed into a bus. A hundred heads. Six round trips a day.
George Sage was counting.
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