IT’S BEEN A LONG RIDE FOR BENNY THE BUS
A tiny bus named Benny took its creators Reg and Rose Tecofsky on a ride that lasted more than three decades.
The 82-year-old panelbeater, mechanic and backyard engineer built the tiny bus in the 1980s as a hobby, and it quickly became very popular giving rides at gala days and community events.
They started around their hometown of Hawera but were soon chugging to shows around the North Island.
‘‘Nine and a half months it took Rosie and I to build it.
‘‘Very little new went into it. ‘‘There were actually typewriter pieces in the speedometer and the little cover that the gears are inside was an aeroplane propeller.
‘‘I’m a great one for recycling.’’ It was warranted and registered for on road use and was New Zealand’s smallest bus, he said.
‘‘The little bus has done the distance from here to Australia and it carried well over 36,000 passengers.’’
He went on to build a small ferris wheel and then a merry-goround.
During the week they ran a panelbeating business, but come Friday night they’d be off for the weekend with one of the big attractions and a bouncy castle in tow.
‘‘We were never out to make money, we did it for the lifestyle.
‘‘If the weather was bad, we’d come back from a trip and say ‘well, we’ve had a good weekend,’’ he said.
One memorable day at a country fair in the King Country, a topdressing plane delivered a bountiful lolly scramble, and some of the children asked if they could trade lollies for rides instead of money.
Another time, he remembers seeing a small wheelchair-bound boy watching other children going for rides.
‘‘We took the wheels off the chair, and we had about a half centimetre clearance to get him in the door, but we got that boy and his dad inside.
‘‘I looked back and it brought a tear to my eye seeing that kid’s face.’’
The oldest passengers to ride the ferris wheel were a couple both aged 95.
‘‘We took all comers, from the womb to the tomb, and even a few dogs,’’ he said.
Only once did they feel unsafe at a show venue. ‘‘She was a really wild place. ‘‘We packed up halfway through, the kids there were so sharp at pinching stuff.
‘‘There was a murder there a couple of months later.’’
Some health setbacks in recent months, along with the increasing cost of meeting health and safety regulations have brought the couple’s entertainment career mostly to an end.
A recent story about Stratford farmer Dave Hunger closing his farm-based homemade amusement park because of expensive and and ongoing regulations struck a chord, he said.
For many years they donated half their takings to the schools and groups running the shows, but certification costs rose so high, they had to cut the donation to 20 per cent.
Just the inspection cost for keeping the ferris wheel certified rose from $160 to $1100 in one year, and to $2130 the next year.
‘‘That takes a hell of a lot to get back at $3 a ride,’’ he said.
Reg said he was considering selling the equipment and the bus, but he still has projects on the go.
He’s thinking about building a smaller merry go round, and there’s a partly-built aeroplane in his workshop that’s been waiting 30 years for him to have time to get round to completing it, he said.