THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, July 8, 1996 TAG: 9607070416
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KURT KENT, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 65 lines
SADIE DAUGHTRY had fun riding the railbus. That much is clear.
When the topic turned to her youthful trips, the former Miss Daughtry, now Sadie L. Shaw, sat straight in her overstuffed chair at her brick-front home on Norfolk Avenue in Virginia Beach.
Her eyes sparkled behind tortoise-shell glasses, and she leaned forward as she recounted morning rituals gone some 60 years.
Now ``in her 70s,'' Sadie is retired after a long teaching career at Trantwood Elementary School.
But her mind quickly turned to a winter morning in the 1930s. Catching the railcar then posed a daily challenge.
That morning, the Daughtry youngsters were hurrying to meet the Green Hornet, the railbus that carried them from their Seatack home to high school in Norfolk.
Their mother, Sarah, was their alarm. But she was soft-spoken. The children didn't always get started when they should.
``We would have one sister listening,'' Sadie recalled, `` `Do you hear the train blowing down the line?' '' The sentry would cock an ear at the bedroom's dormer window, straining for the railbus's distinctive herald that would tell the kids it was time to hustle.
The train blew warnings at every crossing. They sounded like a goose in the distance - honk, honk, honk - said Sadie's husband, Cylester W. Shaw.
Sadie's parents raised six girls and three boys in their farm along the Norfolk-Southern tracks. Their mother, who was graduated from Hampton Institute in 1902, started the first elementary school for blacks in Virginia Beach, Sadie said.
When Sadie finished primary school, there was no high school for blacks in Virginia Beach. The Beach's black high-schoolers had to travel into Norfolk. Sadie started high school at St. Joseph's, a name that has since disappeared from the roster of area schools, and finished at Booker T. Washington.
That put her and her siblings on the railbus.
``We knew the schedule,'' she said. ``We knew what time it was supposed to come. But we would be late some-times.
The station was a half block away on the corner at Birdneck Road.
Sadie would rush down the stairs, grab something to eat from the breakfast table, then burst out the front door of the two-story, white frame home. She'd be wearing her favorite brown plaid coat with matching cap.
Feet pumping in her leather high-tops, her brother Isaac close behind, they'd rush to the tracks in front of their home.
``We would be running and waving and waving . . . we wanted to catch the bus, you know.
``And the conductor and the motorman had become so accustomed to us running to catch the bus, they would be looking toward the house as they came. And if they saw us running out of the house, they would stop and pick us up in right in front of the house.''
Even that wasn't the end of railbus helpfulness. Sadie continued, the conductor's kindness still lighting in her eyes after six decades.
``But, if they didn't see us when they got to the station and we were not there, you would see them looking back to see if we were running behind the bus, trying to get there. And if we were, they would wait for us.'' MEMO: [For a related story, see page E1 of The Virginian-Pilot for this
date.] ILLUSTRATION: Photo by L. TODD SPENCER
As schoolchildren, Sadie Shaw took turns with her sisters listening
for the railbus's horn, so they wouldn't miss their ride. by CNB