ABSTRACT
Bus transport emerged in the USA in the 1910s and 1920s primarily as a small-scale, often family, enterprise. Bus pioneers were usually men. Of the few women who did take up the challenge, the majority inherited their businesses from their husbands or their fathers and continued to run the undertakings as local ventures. Among the most prominent of those pioneers was an Iowa woman who came to be known nationally at the time as ‘Iowa’s Bus Queen’. Helen Schultz and the Red Ball Transportation Company, which she established in 1922, encountered a number of challenges in the pioneering era in bus transport. Schultz needed a capital sum of $500 for a vehicle, a reserve to cover the monthly payments on the bus and some cash to pay her drivers, to advertise in the local newspapers and to rent an office and depot. She hoped the line would quickly return some income from which she could furnish her subsequent running costs.
