By Steve Seepersaud
John Dreyer, MS ’76, lights up when talking about “Maxwell,” a Chevy school bus painted dark green.
“You had to double clutch it and, with experience, you could shift gears without using the clutch if you hit the RPM just right,” he said.
“Maxwell” was the first Off Campus College Transport (OCCT) bus; it hit the roads of Binghamton a half century ago to provide safe and convenient transportation for students off campus.
“It was a very egalitarian thing back in those days,” said Dreyer, who was one of the managers after coming to Binghamton in 1973 to study under the G.I. Bill. “Anybody who needed a ride could hop on, no ID needed. It didn’t matter if you were a student or not.”
Jack Sperling ’67 says that was typical of the Off Campus College (OCC) ethic.
“We were an activist group bound by the idea of students creating and running their own programs and the importance of bridging the campus and community,” Sperling said. “We placed students in public service agencies throughout the area, fought for stronger housing codes and distributed an OCC self-help manual that stressed community engagement.”
To Sperling, the strength and beauty of OCCT was that it was rooted in, but not controlled by, the University. OCCT got state funding and built up its fleet to a total of three discarded school buses prone to frequent breakdowns. Sperling credits Jack Berman, owner of Berman Motors in Vestal, with keeping OCCT functional by volunteering to repair the buses.
Before long, dark green turned into OCCT’s trademark blue. Whether they transported hospital patients, inmates or college students, state-purchased buses had to be blue, Dreyer said.
Sperling, a psychotherapist in Binghamton, frequently sees the buses near his West Side office. With a contemporary look including Binghamton’s green, the buses aren’t what he knew. Though he laments the loss of OCCT’s autonomy in the 1980s when student activism lost its steam, he salutes the OCCT students and staff.
“We didn’t think of ourselves as building transportation for the University. We were our own people, and it felt great that we could build programs and make progressive change.”
