A Spy on the Bus

Book excerpt: It was 1946, I was 18, a college graduate, and about to become a spy. I was going to 'hit the road'. But what was it like this road when I had hardly been out of Kalamazoo? writes Margean Gladysz in her letters to her parents written from 1946 to 1949. Unearthed from an attic trunk in 2003, these letters detail her employment with The Great Lakes Greyhound Bus Company as a company rat. As a collection, they form the contents of A Spy on the Bus. Eventually, Margean travels all over the country, meets many many people, lives out of a suitcase, makes tons of money and grows in self-reliance and self-confidence. She shows us a life before Interstates, before TV, before everyone had a car. We see 1940s America through the window of a bus, a room at the Y and letters sent home to the farm in Kalamazoo. This is a doozy of a story.