That big yellow school bus winding its way around the rural roads of the Georgia countryside and up and down the suburban streets outside the town of Senoia just south of Atlanta is being driven by a guy named George, a 63-year-old retired industrial products salesman with a knack for names. 

If you’re one of the school kids boarding his bus, he’ll most likely know your name, and if you’re a parent standing outside his bus waving your kids off to school, he’ll probably know your name too.  And that, George says, is a good part of how he keeps the peace on a bus that seats 72 kids on their way to school and back home again.

“I tell you what, this has got to be the best retirement job ever,” he says. “Especially if you like kids. You know, kids can be rambunctious. But I found that my trick is to make contact with the kids and their parents by learning their names early on. And if you can do that, and the kids know you can do that, pretty soon their behavior is going to change for the better.”

George found his school bus-driving job after casting about a bit trying to adjust to not having very much to do after stepping away from a long career in sales.

George explains, “My wife works from home so when I retired, I just hung around the house and she kind of kicked me out because I was interfering with her work life. So I went out and got a part-time job unloading trucks at night for one of those big box stores. And when I hired on it was January and they said, you know we've got the perfect job for you. You work two or three hours a day. You have weekends off. And that's the way it started but as March and April came along, and the patio furniture and lawn equipment started coming in and pretty soon it wasn't one truck but sometimes two or three. I wouldn't get out of there until two or three in the morning.”

He adds, “So I gave that up and started driving a school bus in 2017. And, you know, as I grew a little older I kind of found that, okay, I'm not remembering things like I used to. My memory just wasn’t as sharp, as can happen with age.  So a couple of years ago, one of my counterpart bus drivers said they use Prevagen."

“After I started taking it, I found that I don’t have as much trouble with my memory.”