From Chicago Bus Driver to The God Man

As a night shift bus driver I went to work at twenty minutes to nine at night and then I was finished at twenty minutes to six in the morning. One time, probably in the 1960s, I came out of the loop carrying enough passengers to comprise a small group of seated people. When I came to Clark Street at Division Street a black man, who looked to be middle aged, boarded the bus. He had been drinking but he did not make a fuss. He paid his fare and went back and sat down in the middle of the bus. I continued delivering people home. He kind of dozed off. When I arrived up north, near the northern end of my run, near Howard Street, I had only two little old ladies left on the bus besides this man. The ladies got off a couple of blocks apart and then this fellow woke up and came up to the front near my driver’s seat. "Where's I at?" he said.
I said, "You're right near the city limits on the north side," I said, "Where do you want to go, where do you want to get off?"
He looked at me and said, "Well," he said, "Maybe I's gonna hold you up."
"Oh, man," I said, "That's a bad thought." I said, "Do you know if you hold up a bus driver while he's in the process of driving a bus you get a year in jail and a ten thousand dollar fine?"
He pulled out a knife and opened it up and said, "Well," he said "Maybe I's gonna hold you up."
To be perfectly honest, I was frightened. I looked out, looked to see if there was some kind of patrol car going by. I was ready to flash my lights or do something but I had to bear up. There was nobody in sight. I said, "Man, you're making a big mistake." Now let me pause here.
I am convinced that God gave me a certain amount of discernment where I could line up a situation and somehow or other make a decision on how to approach it one way or another and step right into it. When this man took out his knife, I said, "Boy, that's a big mistake, it ain't gonna work, and you're going to be in deep trouble.” In the meantime I reached down into my bag and pulled out my little pen knife that I sharpen pencils with and opened it up. I flung it full force into the wooden tray next to my register. It stuck there and quivered! Then I reached out and pulled it out of there, holding it in my hand and I said, "You know, fella, when I was in the Marines, they taught me how to cut a man's heart out and throw it in his face before he died" and I just glared at him as mean as I could look.
He said, "Do you know how to use that knife?" He looked at me with a surprised look on his face and said, "Yessir, I believes ya." He closed up his knife and put it back in his pocket. I took a deep sigh down to my toes. A couple of blocks later he said, "I'll get off here," and he got off my bus. When I went south again I looked for him because I was not going to pick him up again.
I called the dispatcher. Telephones had been installed in the busses in the last years that I worked although I did not use them much. Sometimes I made a pretense of using one by holding the button down to scare off some people that might be threatening me but I seldom used it unless there was actually an emergency. But, that was one experience I had on the bus.