Article published June 07, 2009
Wauseon business owner is a bus driver to the stars
Ed Meier has ferried actors, singers, and politicians in his luxury coaches
Ed Meier, owner of Gold Star Celebrity Coaches, inside one of his vehicles.
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THE BLADE/LORI KING
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By ANN WEBER
BLADE STAFF WRITER
Don’t waste your breath asking Ed Meier who’s riding in his gleaming white chariot to the stars.
The owner of Gold Star Celebrity Coaches in Wauseon won’t tell you.
But just between us? It’s probably Aretha Franklin. Could be the Four Tops.
They’re regular clients of Mr. Meier’s low-profile operation, which doesn’t even have a sign to mark its location on Fulton County Road 14. Two huge, luxurious coaches — more than $1 million worth of equipment — are parked in a utilitarian metal building off a paved driveway.
The building also houses his office, which he shares with Solid Rock Missions, a nonprofit organization that supports Dominican-run ministries.
For nine years Mr. Meier, 55, has been ferrying famous passengers from Points A to B to C, protecting and respecting the privacy of the clients who range from actors (Denzel Washington, Mark Harmon, Whoopi Goldberg) to entertainers (Toni Braxton, Mary J. Blige, Deep Purple, Martina McBride, Marshall Tucker Band, Maxwell, and Brian Wilson among them) to politicians (Howard Dean during his run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004).
"Some are demanding, but a majority of them aren’t," he said. "The majority of them that have been on the road awhile enjoy a smooth, safe ride and just the little things that you do."
By that he means gestures such as buying garlic bologna at a local market along with other groceries to stock the bus for a Four Tops tour. Mr. Meier and his buddies used to take it on fishing trips, and he thought the singers would like it, too. He was right: "I got them hooked on it."
His relationship with clients starts as a business, but evolves into "more of a family-type thing," Mr. Meier said. "You get to know what they want and what they don’t like."
He’s not a star-struck kind of guy.
"I guess I look at people for what they are, not who they are," said the Wauseon native who graduated with an associate degree in business administration from International Business College in Fort Wayne, Ind.
22 seconds of fame
You won’t see his office decorated with numerous photos of him grinning with this entertainer or that. "The only time I ever asked for an autograph was the Four Tops, just to have something to hang on the wall," he said.
Mr. Meier can claim a share of celebrity himself, having appeared in a snippet of the 2004 television movie Blue Collar Comedy Tour Rides Again.
That came about because he got the job of picking up an agent and his family and driving them to Denver, where comedians Bill Engvall, Jeff Foxworthy, Larry the Cable Guy, and Ron White were to be videotaped for the film.
In the movie, "I think there’s 22 seconds of the bus and me driving it through the mountains," he said. "We started at 7 in the morning and finished at like 9 at night."
The segment was shot by a videographer who was hanging out the side of a helicopter. "I’d be going down the road and the helicopter would be coming toward me and fan off at the last second," he said.
Mr. Meier also has learned a lot about the grueling life of politicians hunting for votes.
The Howard Dean experience "was a killer," he recalled.
"I don’t know how politicians do what they do, because we’d start at 6 in the morning and they’d go to a breakfast someplace, then finish up at midnight, and do that for weeks on end.
"It wasn’t a lot of driving, but it was a lot of hours. You’d drive to a VFW hall, then you’d drive to a school for a program, then you’d drive to some business. It may be only 5, 10 miles, and then you’d sit there for an hour, and it just made for long days."
(By the way, Mr. Meier was in the audience in Iowa when Mr. Dean let out his much-ridiculed war whoop. "I thought he got a bum rap on that deal," Mr. Meier said. "If you had been there, it was appropriate.")
Working days and nights
Those marathon campaign days required having a second driver on board, he said, because of legal limits on a driver’s schedule: 15 hours on duty, including a maximum of 10 hours of driving, with eight hours off.
It’s not your usual 9-to-5, so a driver has to learn to sleep whenever the schedule permits, day or night.
When he’s driving the Four Tops, the coach typically arrives at the hotel by noon, with the show at 8 or 9 that evening. He’s off from the time the bus is unloaded and cleaned until midnight or so, when everyone gets on the bus and Mr. Meier drives through the night to the next stop.
"You have to get your days and nights turned around. The older I get, the harder that gets," he admitted.
The travel schedule for the Queen of Soul — who refuses to fly, Mr. Meier said — usually involves a noon departure and an evening stop. She’s generally on the road for a couple weeks at a time, then home for a week or 10 days, then out again — a schedule Mr. Meier said he likes because it gives him time to catch up on things at home.
He also takes time off work in January or February every winter, spending at least a month fishing at his place in Texas. This year he didn’t get his break until February, because he had to drive Franklin’s family to Washington to meet the star for the inaugural festivities in late January.
Luxurious digs
Gold Star Celebrity Coaches (1gscc.com) also has provided buses to serve as dressing rooms on movie sets. Denzel Washington has used them during filming of four, Mr. Meier said: Training Day (2001), The Manchurian Candidate (2004) Deja Vu (2006), and American Gangster (2007).
The bus that he used has a touch of home: the wallpaper in the front lounge was chosen to match the wallpaper in Washington’s basement, Mr. Meier said.
Both coaches measure 45 feet long and 13 feet high, and have custom modular pieces inside that can be moved to accommodate a client’s needs. In the front lounge, creamy-tan, soft leather couches along the side walls can be replaced with a table and chairs. In the rear lounge, the leather couches on the side and back walls can be removed to make way for a table and chairs, open space for meetings, or a queen-size bed, night tables, and lamps.
The two carpeted lounges are equipped with day/night shades on the windows, flat-screen TVs with satellite hookup, and sophisticated sound system. In between the two, in the midsection of each coach, is a kitchenette with upper and lower cabinets, pantry, apartment-size refrigerator, coffee maker, convection/microwave oven, hardwood floors, and a cooktop.
Off the kitchen is a surprisingly big bathroom with a shower and flush toilet. (The bus carries fresh water and waste water tanks.)
Walking back from the kitchen, there’s a sleeping area that can be arranged with a stack of two or three bunks on each side. Each has a privacy curtain, drop-down television, and headphones, so someone in one bunk can watch TV without disturbing an occupant in another bunk who’s watching a DVD or trying to sleep. Closets are built into both sides of the bus.
Pocket doors can be pulled out to close off the bunk area from the rear lounge. Mr. Meier’s company also travels in the corporate world. Firms including Discover Card, Sauza Tequila, and Vogue magazine have leased the buses for projects such as cross-country marketing tours.
Connections
So how does a little outfit in rural northwest Ohio land such high-visibility corporate and celebrity clients?
Some jobs are lined up through intermediary companies that book equipment for corporate promotional tours, create graphics and wraps for the bus, and collaborate with Mr. Meier on itineraries. Otherwise, jobs come directly via connections and word of mouth, he said.
Many of those connections were made through a life-long friend, Reg Frey, who had worked as a driver for a company in the Carolinas and now drives for Gold Star Celebrity Coaches. The two men got together after Mr. Frey’s former employer went bankrupt and Mr. Meier sold his trucking business.
"He had the contacts with people that he had been hauling, and I had a little money, so we decided to build the [first] bus," Mr. Meier said. That bus immediately was leased for a year to a company, so a second one was built.
Just as business was starting to pick up speed, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, brought it to a standstill. "Both buses sat in the shop, never moved a wheel," Mr. Meier said. "We started getting a few things the next year. It was pretty lean."
The company now employs a third driver in addition to Mr. Meier and Mr. Frey, and hires a mechanic on an as-needed basis to help with maintenance when the buses roll back into the garage.
Mr. Meier could do it himself, but "Usually when I get home the last thing I want to do is be around a bus. I just want to get away and do something different for awhile."
Summer is his busy time of year, and as he speaks he’s just days away from his next trip with Aretha Franklin.
He’ll take her to New York City for a short stay, then leave soon after that to transport her to concerts in Oklahoma, Texas, Nevada, and California, then straight back to Washington to perform in the July 4 special A Capitol Fourth, which will air on PBS.
Fortunately, Mr. Meier likes to drive.
While it would be tempting for many people to pass the time by eavesdropping on conversations back in the coach, that doesn’t interest him.
"Celebrity doesn’t mean a lot to me. They do their job, I do my job."
Contact Ann Weber at: aweber@theblade.com
or 419-724-6126.
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