City traffic was disrupted and thousands of commuters couldn’t get to work.
Exploding bombs were sailing into the windows of public buses, sending passengers to the hospital.
Gun blasts tore through the bedroom windows of sleeping children.
Dynamite rocked quiet neighborhoods.
A Mideast war zone?
Some modern, urban battlefield?
Would you believe the streets of Augusta in 1953 during the first summer of the Eisenhower administration?
It all centered on a city bus strike, and it turned ugly fast and stayed that way.
Today public transportation rarely commands much attention among city services, but Augusta in 1953 was a bustling place. Expansion of both the military base south of town and the “bomb plant” over in Aiken, plus a number of other construction projects brought jobs, and the streets and roads were crowded.
Workers came here from around the Southeast, and many found the bus an easy way to their jobs.
The strike changed that.
“Thousands of Augustans are without adequate transportation,” The Chronicle reported.
The strike began June 1 when more than 90 drivers and mechanics of the local union did not report for work. The Augusta Coach Co. hired non-union drivers, and violence broke out. Things got so bad, the city began to assign police and firemen to ride city buses as security.
Security was needed.
On July 2 a man approached a bus in broad daylight at Ninth and Ellis and hurled a tear gas bomb into its window.
It landed in the lap of Sarah Lee Bryant, of Florence Street, The Chronicle reported. She ended up in University Hospital with burns and arm injuries. Five other bus passengers were hospitalized, as well.
Police Chief F.P. Green said he would do what he could to stop the violence, which didn’t calm longtime lawmaker Roy Harris, who happened to be the very vocal secretary of Augusta Coach Co.
“The city of Augusta is in the throes of mob rule ...” Harris insisted. “The police have not made a single case ... “
They didn’t make a case on July 16, either -- at least not immediately -- when several buses came under fire while driving down the 800 block of Broad Street.
On the night of July 19, someone fired a shotgun into the Emmett Street home of non-union bus driver Lester Bufford. He was sleeping in another room, but told police the shotgun blast ripped through the window, cutting the venetian blinds in two and just missing his sleeping wife and child.
There was an even bigger bang that night over on Whitney Street when someone tossed a stick of dynamite onto the lawn of J.H. Shoffner, general manager of the bus company.
By July 31, police were ordered to start riding the buses as a security measure.
Things appeared to calm down through August, but on Sept. 2, someone threw dynamite through a parked bus window.
The dynamite no doubt sent a message, but also led to the union’s undoing.
Police traced its residue to R.S. Dixon, the secretary-treasurer of the union. He was arrested, charged and on Oct. 13 found guilty of possession of dynamite and sentenced to prison.
Quiet negotiations began, however, and a week before Christmas, Dixon was released from custody, but ordered to pay damages. It was a deal worked out by Roy Harris, the old lawyer-lawmaker affiliated with the bus company.
That story appeared on The Chronicle’s front page Dec. 19.
It was played above a national story out of Washington announcing that President Eisenhower planned to urge world peace in his Christmas Eve message before coming to Augusta to spend a quiet holiday.
