A fisherman, and a retired engineer, Perry Whitney, 69, these days is a school bus driver. He lives in Big Lake, just northwest of the Twin Cities, and every day for five hours, he picks up kids and drops them off. Driving a school bus in retirement is a good thing, he says. He likes it.
Whitney's bus is the smaller size, the kind that carries relatively few kids. But the bus is yellow and has all the bells and whistles, including a lift for kids in wheelchairs. That's important because the kids Whitney picks up and drops off often have particular needs. Or, as they are sometimes called, special needs.
For a few years now, Whitney has stopped at a house in Corcoran, also northwest of the Twin Cities, to pick up three brothers: Omar, Justas and Vanya Emery.
"It wasn't long after I met them," Whitney said, "that on Mondays, the boys would ask me what I did over the weekend. I'd tell them I went fishing."
The brothers couldn't have known, but their bus driver was a bit of an angling expert. As a kid growing up in Minneapolis, he often traveled with his father to Mille Lacs to chase walleyes, and can remember catching stringers of the fat fish.
"Dad started me out with a cane pole," he said. "I could catch more fish with that old cane pole than a lot of people could trolling."
Such expertise would prove useful years later when, at his church, Whitney belonged to a fishing club, and on Wednesday evenings would load his boat with kids to see what was biting.
Watching the little ones' eyes twinkle when they caught sunnies or crappies or bass was priceless, Whitney said, and he replicated those expressions many times over years later when he helped form the Minnesota chapter of a national bass fishing club that pairs adults with kids for angling competitions.
