When Clarence Hawker graduated from Amsterdam’s Lynch High School, the inscription he selected to be posted alongside his senior picture read, “There’s a place and means for every man alive.” After serving his country during World War II, Clarence found that his place in life was meant to be in the driver’s seat of a bus, specifically a school bus, where over the next four decades, he became a local celebrity.
He drove the Cranesville route for the Greater Amsterdam School District for many years and if you ask any of the students he transported what they thought about “Hawker” many would tell you that those daily rides to and from school were among their fondest memories…