Bus service stops
Acombination of restraints will see Katikati’s community shopping bus service come to an end today in its present state, after about 37 years.
Go Bus has been supplying aminibus for the Thursday shopping service and it is with reluctance the service has come to an end, says Katikati Lions Club member and co-ordinator Gerald Paterson.
The Katikati Lions Club is pursuing avenues to reinstate this service as soon as possible, Gerald says.
The Thursday shopping service started in the early 1980s and has continued under different guises since then. David Murray, who had a garage opposite Diggelmann Park supplied a 20-seater bus to take elderly folk from the RSA Village and Radius Lexham Park, once a week to do shopping in Katikati on Thursdays. The use of the bus was donated by Mr Murray who was a member of the Lions Club of Katikati for many years. Any travel donations went to the Lions club and later these donations went to the company supplying the bus.
Other non-RSA residents in town came on board until there was a waiting list to fill the bus.
The first and only driver for 20 years was Tom Cunningham, also a Lion.
He drove a nine-seater Lions courtesy van supplied in association with Craig Strong, formerly from the Katikati Bus Company. He retired from driving at 91 and said there had been very few incidents during those two decades.
One he recalled was poking a clothesline arm through the back window of the van at Eunice Thorburn’s place, a terrible place to back round.
“I was not at all pleased about that,” he said, at an afternoon tea held in his honour in 2011.
Another was leaving Main St to go to Woolworths supermarket to discover he had left one lady behind.
As the years went by additional drivers came on board and now there are six Lions filling the task each Thursday. For many of the elderly passengers, it is the only outing they get.
“The drivers all love the interaction with the ladies in the bus,” says Gerald.
“Originally the bus went 18km— we now do 26km to pick up passengers and take them to mainstreet to visit the chemist, Paper Plus, banks, and then to Countdown supermarket with a little drive to Smokey’s for their fresh fish,” he says.