After 33 years of driving the school bus at Northport Public School, Rick Deering, 72, is turning in the keys and is ready to retire. Other “work” projects could arise in the future, but for now, Deering wrapped up his last day on June 6, the district’s final day of instruction for the 2023-2024 academic year.
“I like to fish and I like the creek, and when you’re in the school bus, you can go by the creek and see if there’s any fish in there,” Deering said. “When you go by the pond you can stop there and look down and you can see some rainbow (trout), brook trout, and it’s just awesome. I made my last stop there today with the bus — I usually go every day.”
The son of cherry farmers Richard and Georgia Deering, Rick grew up in the village, with his three siblings and himself all attending and graduating from Northport school. Rick and his siblings were taught how to work on a cherry farm from when they were young, and it’s where he also learned how to drive a tractor and car as a kid. In addition to the farm work that never ended, he took up another job at Deering’s Market until he was 15-yearsold, the place where his father worked as a meat cutter for 24 years.
Deering went away for college in 1970, attending Muskegon Business College, now known as Baker College, for two years, and then transferring to Ferris State University to study business administration and accounting. When he graduated from Ferris in 1975, Deering found his way back to his hometown, where he raised his own children, who also attended Northport school.
“I’m a farmer, and I didn’t like the inside work, but I worked at a CPA firm for a while in Traverse City. Then I didn’t like that, so I went to Cone Drive Operations, it’s a manufacturing place. I was there and I thought I had it made,” he said. “Then both my parents got sick, my mother got cancer and my father got Parkinson’s.”
Deering focused much of his energy on being a farmer when his father got sick, noting that he didn’t want him to have to sell the farm. While the farming continued, it wouldn’t be until Deering’s kids got into sports in the 1990s that he would take on a job as a bus driver at Northport. Both jobs were easier to handle in the winter time, but as soon as summer hit, the workload would be enormous.
“It would take 28 tanks to spray all the orchards at one time. Now it takes four tanks to spray everything — now those other orchards are gone and I couldn’t do them anyhow,” he said. “When I used to do it, I used to spray for 20 hours straight. It was a lot. The farm is still there, the orchard is not.”
In the school bus, Deering has driven several times from Northport to as far as Chicago and Ontario, Canada for class field trips. Seeing a need for bus drivers in the community, he continued year after year through severe weather and snowstorms, greeting students in the morning right before school and at the end of the day to take them home. He would see familiar and new faces fill the bus seats each year, with many of the kids growing up before his very eyes.
“This year has been the best year for driving on snow because there wasn’t any and it was great,” he said. “You know them all (the kids) — you always know them… I liked driving the kids the best. One day, I had some preschoolers that wanted to go pick apples at somebody’s farm out here. They were little and I took a busload of them out there, and you should have seen the smiles on their faces — they put their apples in their hoods and they were happy — it was really kind of neat. It was great just watching them.”
That need for bus drivers hasn’t changed, Deering said, but not everyone can do it. Covering a bus route often means both the mornings and afternoons being occupied, making it hard to get by if that’s the only job you have. He said he would encourage people to take on the job if they are retirees and want something to keep them busy and make them feel good.
“The kids have changed, the buses ride about the same, and there’s lots of good times,” he said. “The bus drivers on their route, they get to know them (the kids) really well, probably better than the teachers know them because you get them twice — one in the morning when it’s either good or bad, or in the afternoon when it’s either good or bad.”
Now that Deering has retired from fulltime bus driving, he plans to keep working on his family’s cherry farm, finishing honey-do projects around the homestead, while also visiting with his grandkids who aren’t so little anymore.
“There’s always something, and that’s the trouble with farming because there’s no one that’s going to take over…” he said. “I have some property that overlooks Lake Michigan, the Manitou Islands, and you just go back and forth (on the tractor) and watch the boats go by… My mom was born there, that’s why I don’t want to sell it — There’s a spot up there that I like where I can see both sides of the hill, it’s higher up behind the barn and it’s just awesome. You can see M-22 and the cars going by and then you can see the boats going by, and if you go up there during sunsets, they’re never the same ever. It’s just absolutely nice. It’s even better when the cherries are in blossom and lilacs are out, and it smells so nice.”
