For years, Young Life had rented or borrowed buses to transport kids to and from the camps. Because of tight budgets, the staff needed to find economical means of transportation, which often meant the buses were “lacking” in dependability. Joe Shelly, a mechanic who worked at Frontier, proposed Young Life purchase its own fleet of buses, which would give Young Life better control over the transportation process and costs. The mission agreed and purchased six 41-passenger buses, with Shelly presiding over the process.
Shelly built a network of drivers by hiring and training college students. A typical week might feature a team of two drivers picking up a Young Life group in Chicago and taking them to Frontier in Colorado. Once there, the drivers would pick up another group and take them back to Philadelphia. Then they would pick up yet another group to take them to Saranac. “Those buses covered about a million miles a year,” said Larry Entwistle, director of Properties.
By 1972, Young Life owned 18 buses, which made up 40 percent of the total camp transportation. The program, however, proved to be too expensive to sustain, and by 1975 had to be discontinued. “In the end, we really couldn’t continue because of liability issues,” Entwistle said. “It was one of those wonderful eras in the mission, where God, in his timing, took an idea and hundreds of thousands of kids ended up getting to camp because of it. In retrospect, it was an unbelievable deal.”
