Story Archive

Freak of Nomenclature, Protest Department

A group of women from Athens and Marietta, Ohio, chartered a bus to take them to Washington D.C. to participate in the Women’s March protest the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration. A few days before the trip, the assigned bus driver, an apparent Trump supporter, solicited feedback on her Facebook page as to what she should do. The consensus: make sure the women didn’t get to Washington, maybe by sabotaging her bus. “Lol all good ideas,” the bus driver replied. “Humm thinking that serpentine belt just broke... 24-hour road-side service lol it’s a 6-foot belt... lol.” When the women arrived for the trip, the driver told them the bus’s battery was dead. In the hours that followed while waiting for a service truck, the group found a copy of the driver’s Facebook posts and confronted her. Then, “the bus miraculously started working again and was ready to go within 10 minutes,” said one of the riders, bartender Sierra Crenshaw. Still, most didn’t feel safe riding with the driver, and either didn’t make it to Washington or used alternative transportation. The post has since been deleted from Facebook. The Athens News wouldn’t print the name of the S&S Coach driver involved, but other media weren’t so shy: she was Donna Hinderer. (RC/Athens News, Parkersburg News and Sentinel) ...There has been no word about her fate from her boss, Ida Fireder.