First route forewoman for the Port Authority
One doesn’t often think of breaking the glass ceiling in terms of the rubber hitting the road of a PAT bus.
But in taking on a second career in a male-dominated field at age 45, Elizabeth “Betty” Bauer put her own tiny crack in the proverbial pane in becoming first a Port Authority of Allegheny County bus driver and eventually the agency’s first route forewoman.
Mrs. Bauer died Friday after a prolonged struggle with heart problems. She was 85.
Raised in a foster family, the Shaler High School graduate would pursue secretarial work before marrying Raymond Bauer and raising a family of four boys. She had a small clothing boutique in Bellevue called My Girl, but she found herself looking for work when that went out of business. So in 1977 she applied with the Port Authority, and became a bus driver — one of the few women on the roads at the time, working out of the East Liberty garage with routes in the East End.
“She loved it,” her son Raymond Bauer Jr. said, adding that she would work her way through the ranks to become PAT’s first route forewoman in the early 1980s. She worked out of the South Hills Junction garage.
“They were the supervisors out on the road,” he explained. “She made sure people got where they were going. She made sure the mechanics got there on time, she supervised the bus drivers and she was physically out on the road helping. One of the tests that she had to pass was get to a jack up onto the back of a streetcar,” he said, so that she could get the trolley pole hooked back to the electric overhead wiring if they had become disengaged.
“That was hard enough for a strong man to do, let alone for a woman” of her age, Mr. Bauer said. She spent 20 years with the Port Authority before retiring in 1997 at age 65.
Mrs. Bauer is survived by her sons Raymond (Amy) Bauer, John (Mimi) Bauer, Richard (Karen) Bauer and Stephen (Liana) BauerBalel. She is also survived by nine grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.
Family and friends can be received from 2-4 p.m. and 68 p.m. Tuesday at the George A. Thoma Funeral Home, 10418 Perry Highway, McCandless. A burial Mass will take place at 1 p.m. Wednesday at St. Alexis Church, 10090 Old Perry Highway, McCandless.