When Roch Westendorf was a boy riding the bus to Bishop Creek School, a farmer named Herb Pruemer sat behind the wheel.

Herb was the real deal—bib overalls, trucker hat, hair always growing out a little. He'd installed his own eight-track tape player on the bus, and most days the only tape he had was the Beatles. Once in a while a kid would bring in ELO or ABBA, but for the most part, it was the Beatles, rolling down the rural roads southeast of Teutopolis, morning and afternoon, year after year.

Every St. Patrick's Day, Herb dyed his hair green. He'd reach into his pocket and hand out bubble gum. He made kids feel like they mattered.

"He was always approachable," Roch says. "That always stuck with me."

Decades later, Roch is behind the wheel of a Teutopolis school bus himself—and every St. Patrick's Day, his hair turns green.

It took a long road to get there. Roch graduated from Teutopolis High School in 1983, attended Lake Land College, and held a string of jobs—selling truck parts, selling potato chips—before landing with the U.S. Postal Service in 1991. He became postmaster in Dieterich in 1999, then postmaster of Teutopolis in 2012, running that office for nearly a decade.

By the summer of 2021, he knew retirement was coming at year's end. Rather than wait, he walked into the Teutopolis bus garage and asked about a route. By August he had his commercial driver's license. That fall, still finishing his postal career, he was already driving afternoon routes on lighter days—clocking out at three, climbing into a bus by 3:30. He picked up Saturday sporting event runs during the Christmas rush. By mid-January, he was driving full time.

"Keeps me out of the tavern," he says with a grin.

His mornings now begin with a route sheet and a mirror full of students. He greets each one by name as they climb the steps.

"I've read one time that hearing your name is music to people's ears," Roch says. "To them it means, hey, he's taking the time to know who I am. Not just Student A, Student B."

He tries to guess the names of the three sets of twins on his route. He's not always successful. The kids don't seem to mind.

A bus driver sees things few others do—the homes students come from, the look on a child's face as they cross the yard. Roch understands that he's often the first adult interaction of their day.

"If a child doesn't have a very good home life, you try to make it good for them when they get on the bus," he says.

Between runs, Roch works three days a week at McMahon Meats, a local shop doing retail and custom cutting. His very first paying job was cleaning up after hours at the same place—back when it was run by the current owner's father. After retiring from the post office, Roch joked about going back. Word got around to the son, Brent. "He asked me, hey, you want to come work for us?" Roch says. "I said, sure."

When a little kid trails a parent into the shop, Roch will open the walk-in freezer and say, "You want to see how cold it is in here?"—just so they feel like they matter. It's the same instinct he brings to the bus: notice people, especially the small ones.

Roch and his wife, Janice—a Dieterich girl who grew up just two miles down the road—have been married since 1988. They raised three sons, all Teutopolis graduates. Their family recently grew with the arrival of granddaughter Ella James.

Ask Roch what holds Teutopolis together and he doesn't hesitate: "It's the one church mentality." Nearly everyone shares a parish—St. Francis—and that common ground shapes everything. Parish picnics, KC picnics, Oktoberfest. "Very few times they have to really reach out to find volunteers," he says. "Everybody's raised to work hard and chip in."

And each morning, before most of the town has stirred, one small expression of that ethic rolls quietly down the road. At the wheel is a man who remembers what it felt like to hear the Beatles through a crackling eight-track, to see his driver's hair turn green, to be greeted by name on a cold morning—and who makes sure the next generation feels that, too.

REX: Somewhere in the story — it could be a simple mention at the very bottom of the story, just do a copy and paste of who these people are, left or right as follows: L to R — son Ryan, daughter-in-law Courtney, granddaughter Lainey, daughter-in-law Lyndsey, son Tyler, Roch, wife Janice, daughter-in-law Liz, son Adam