The former school bus could legally carry 59 passengers but often a few more would squeeze in, especially for Lincoln Stars games.
The 1988 GMC served P.O. Pears for nearly a decade, as ruby-red and iconic as the restaurant’s lip-shaped service counter. It hauled customers to football and hockey games, Christmas light tours and occasional weddings.
Thousands and thousands of customers, said Bob Jergensen, the restaurant’s former owner. And it seemed like all of them signed their names on the bus ceiling. “We called it artwork.â€
Jergensen had picked up the bus — the bar’s second, because the first one lost most of its floor — from a car lot on Cornhusker Highway, and sold it at auction when he closed the restaurant nearly a dozen years ago.
It’s not clear where it went immediately after that. But it reappeared years ago in the Home Depot parking lot on North 27th Street, a for-sale sign in its window, and it was what Colleen Lecher and her then-husband — owners of Midwest Demolition — were looking for.
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“We thought it would be a cool thing for our employees and families to go to Nebraska games and tailgate,†she said.
But first, they replaced the floor and added tables, mounted TVs inside and out and installed a freezer to keep the keg cool, running the tap outside.
They even looked up the woman who’d bought the lips from the restaurant at auction, because they thought about mounting them on the grille. But she’d already turned them into a basement bar.
Over the next few years, they didn’t just drive it to the North Bottoms neighborhood on game days. Their Big Red Bus took them on tours of small-town bars, to Hastings, up to Chadron for Fur Trade Days.
“It’s been on the road. It does work,†she said. “It’s just old.â€
And it’s for sale. Their lives changed, and they no longer tailgate. Their son, Mike, in is charge of marketing the rolling piece of local history. As a boy, he rode the original P.O. Pears bus to Husker football games with his father.
He created a Facebook page, PO Pears Big RED Bus. He thought he’d sold it on eBay last fall, but the winning bidder backed out.
He’s dropped the price to $2,000.
“It’s rusting on our property and I want to get rid of it real bad,†he said. “Lots of people are interested, but no one is buying it.â€
Jergensen hadn’t thought much about his old business until recently, when he heard a developer plans to demolish the restaurant and replace it with a seven-story apartment building. And he hadn’t been aware his bus was back on the market, still bearing his old logo.
“I wish him luck,†he said. “It’s been a while since that name drew people into buying stuff.â€