Are there people in your past you never really got to know very well but they still had a positive impact on your life?

Although she is now a teacher and a mother of two, Trina Wilcox still remembers Dale Dawes, her school bus driver when she was a student at Cedar Junior Secondary. Last week, all these years later, she nominated him as a Neighbourhood Hero.

Trina is sure that when Dale first took over that route more than twenty years ago, he got it because none of the more senior drivers wanted it. The kids on the run, especially the boys, had built quite a reputation for their rowdiness but that didn't seem to bother Dale.

"He had a constant smile on his face and he was always fair," Tina recalls, "even when the kids were defiant and rude. He'd simply remain calm and say, 'When you are ready to calm down, we'll talk'. But we often spent a lot of time stopped on the side of the road waiting for that to happen!"

It's interesting that Dale had such an impact on Trina because they never really talked that much.

"It was just the special way he would greet us all as we got on or off the bus," Trina recalls. "It always amazed me how he could remember all of our names because he had over 150 kids a day to deal with and yet he'd always have a special greeting and he'd remember so many little things about our families and our school lives.

"He was the first school person I met at the beginning of my day and the last to see me safely home at the end and he always made me feel good."

Every Christmas Trina would bake Dale a tray of cookies and now, she says every time she puts a batch of cookies in the oven, she thinks of how lucky the students are who ride his bus.

"Even on my bad days," Trina smiled, "the kind all teenagers have from time to time, as long as Dale was in the driver's seat when I got on the bus, I knew I'd be fine."

It seems Dale's easy to get along with personality doesn't disappear when he gets off the bus either. Both Dave Prevost, his supervisor, and fellow driver, Joy Hunter, spoke of him as being the type of guy that's a lot of fun to work with. "You can always count on him to liven the place up," Prevost concluded.

Although he was pleased to be nominated, like most of our Neighbourhood Heroes, Dale was reluctant to have this column written about him. He definitely does not think of himself as any kind of "hero". But, like all of the others I've written about over the past two years, he's a role model from whom we can all learn - There's a lot of power in a consistent smile-filled greeting for instance -- Also, by telling his and other stories, my hope is that we motivate you to notice, and acknowledge, the Neighbourhood Heroes in your life.

In the next week or so Trina will be dropping by the bus depot to see Dale and give him his Neighbourhood Heroes certificate. I wouldn't be surprised if she had a box of cookies for him too.

By the way, Trina's nomination was drawn from all of those sent in over the past few months so she is the winner of our weekend for two at Tauca Lea by the Sea in Ucluelet.