H&S scene;

              Custom commuters
Forget about fighting traffic. Relax and read your paper. No need to worry about getting a seat on the bus.
In the H&S San Francisco office, partner Dale Schmid, MAS manager John Nixon and tax senior Doug Sobolik are among the new breed of big city commuters who have conquered at least some of their difficulties. They live in San Rafael in Marin County and ride comfortably between home and the H&S office in the San Francisco financial district by chartered bus.
The H&S men are members of the Custom Commute Club, now four years old. The bus service was organized as a commuter's cooperative by people living in the same residential area and working in the same downtown district, John joined the service first and introduced Dale to it. Both are regulars, and Doug joins the party on occasion.
"The cost of having our own bus service is comparable to other commercial transportation," Dale says, but it's considerably less than driving your own car " Passengers pay $35 a month, which comes to about $1.65 daily for the typical month.
The bus follows a route taking it through the neighborhoods of its riders in San Rafael and adjacent communities, so that no one needs to walk more than a block or two to meet it. In the city it deposits each member-rider at his place of business or very close to it.
"This is really a kind of pick-up and delivery service," Dale explains. "Or you could look on it as a huge taxi,"
Most of the riders are old-timers and practically everyone knows everyone else aboard. There is a coordinator who sits up front and if a stranger appears, he asks whose place the
newcomer is taking today. If a member is on vacation, or for some reason does not commute for a while, he can assign his seat to a friend temporarily without losing his place.
The bus is chartered from the East Shore Line and the revenue from the service represents a comfortable recovery of the owners" fixed cost. Anything else that the charter line can make on the use of the vehicle and driver during the day is gravy. Dale describes the group as "very loosely structured." Little needs to be done in the way of organizing the rider group, The coordinator keeps a list of applicants eager to fill spaces that are vacated, handles the paperwork for new arrivals and departures, and collects the monthly checks.
The H&S men catch the bus at about 7 a.m. in San Rafael, pass over the Golden Gate Bridge and reach downtown San Francisco by 8 a.m. This is an earlier start than many people are used to, but the financial district people in San Francisco and elsewhere on the Pacific Coast usually start early in order to coordinate their work with financial activity in the East.
Departure time is shortly after 5 p.m. On Friday afternoons there is often a touch of merriment on board. Frequently a case of liquids appears, sponsored by someone celebrating a promotion, or merely the arrival of the weekend. At other times riders can, and do. read the paper, play bridge, chat or snooze, Dale Schmid sums it up:
"This is a very sensible approach to cutting down on commuter traffic, and bus chartering continues to grow as waiting lists get longer. When they have enough names, the coordinators can organize another bus. And one bus probably replaces twenty or thirty cars." •
Long count
Most of us don't get fired up by a radio deejay. But Bob Jirovec, H&S principal, did while he was driving to the Cleveland office one day last spring. Inspired by what he had heard, he called the station ten minutes after arrival at the office. A few days later he was up to his elbows in a deal totaling more than $100,000.
The pitchman was disc jockey Don Imus on station WGAR, who was plugging a public service campaign that immediately aroused Bob's interest. The disc jockey was saying that the Narcotic Drug and Education Program, a non-profit organization, had been doing such a fine job in Cleveland that" I propose that we have a fund raising marathon for 60 hours and I'll continuously broadcast until we raise the$l00,000 that they need:
As Bob Jirovec remembers the incident after an interval of some months: "As soon as I got to the office I checked with Elmer Beamer. and then called the radio station. I introduced myself to the general manager and to Don Imus and told them that we at H&S could help in the tabulation of the cash and pledges that would come in during the marathon. This disc jockey, who had started the whole thing on his own initiative, was very happy to hear that we would assist in this work.
We assigned our volunteers to the tabulation job in three-hour shifts. The hardest to fill was the 3:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. graveyard shift! All together fifteen or twenty people from Haskins & Sells spent some time on this fund ( raising marathon. The broadcast was not conducted from the radio station, but rather from an automobile showroom that was donated so that passers-by could see the action. The marathon attracted a big crowd to the showroom,