In 1912, the Titanic sank, Fenway Park opened, and John T. Cyr started a transportation company in Old Town, Maine.
“They tell me that we had 32 horses at one time in the livery stable,” says Joe Cyr, the founder’s grandson, who now owns and operates the company and its fleet of 250 vehicles. “We did everything from funerals to taxis.”
The name Cyr is familiar to any parent in the greater Bangor area who has watched kids getting on or off a school bus. It also adorns the colorful coaches that make the daily trip between Bangor and Aroostook County, and the chartered tour buses that take New Englanders on guided trips from the Canadian Maritimes to California.
“We’ve become pretty well famous for our colorful coaches,” Cyr says. He took over the business from his father, Harvey S. Cyr, in 1967. In 2012, in recognition of the company’s 100th anniversary, he plans to order a custom-designed coach and add decorative lettering to the buses already in service.
Cyr got into the family business early. “In those days you could start at 10 or 11 years old,” he recalls. “They needed me for some jobs where a little guy could get into tight spaces. We worked for Old Town Canoe, hauling their lumber off the train, and I would get into boxcars where a bigger fellow couldn’t get in, and start pulling the lumber out.” Cyr learned to drive a truck around the yard at the train station. “When I was 16 years old I had a license to drive a bus.”
After brief stints at the University of Maine at Farmington and what is now Husson University in Bangor, Cyr went to work for his father in 1962. “I was a driver, mechanic, grease monkey, tire changer,” he says. “I came to work full-time for my father after he lost his nephew, who was his bookkeeper. I was a bookkeeper for two days a week and a mechanic for three.”
Local trucking was the backbone of the business back then. Beginning in the late 1960s, however, the company began shifting its resources into school buses and coaches, finally getting out of trucking altogether in the 1970s.
Cyr credits the company’s success to a laid-back business philosophy. “We’ve taken what’s come,” he says. “We haven’t gone looking a whole lot, but if people come to us, we look at it. I got to a point where we had 130 to 140 vehicles and I thought we were maybe big enough, but it didn’t take me long to realize that if we didn’t grow, we’d fall behind.”
Cyr landed the school bus contract for Bangor in 1978. The company now serves 17 different school districts, including Veazie, Milford, Old Town, Indian Island, Hallowell, Pittsfield, Detroit, Burnham, and a recent contract with Trenton.
“School bus contracts are 60–70% of our business, along with the field trips and athletic trips that go along with the schools,” Cyr says. “Most of the contracts are full service; in some instances we lease just the bus to the school district and they perform the service.”
The company offers more than 120 guided coach tours, some on a regular basis, some every few years, depending on demand. Among the most popular are trips to Red Sox games at Fenway Park. California and Florida are frequent destinations, though the availability of cheap flights has cut into the Florida business in recent years. But that’s been offset by the expanded cruise ship business in Bar Harbor. “We’ve had as many as 20 coaches down there when the big ships are in,” Cyr says. “They provide the tour guide and collect the money from the cruise ship, and we send them a bill.”
With all of this going on, Cyr has turned for help to the logical source: the next generation of the family. His son Mike has been with the company since 1991 and now runs the coach department. And his daughter Becky signed on three years ago for his old job as the bookkeeper.
“There’s a lot more to do now than when I had that job,” Cyr says.
