Steve Rosenow is the founder, lead archivist, and originator behind the website "GilligCoachesNET."

My interest in Gillig school buses began at the age of six while riding a 1965 GIllig in the South Kitsap School District. I was five years old, and in fact, I can still remember the number of that bus. Good ol' "#1," and it was driven by a man named Fred (or Freddy) Shay. He was a longtime friend of my grandparents. My substitute bus on the route was a 1951 Kenworth-Pacific School Coach (bus number 17 if I remember correctly) and I'll never forget feeling how weird it was having the dashboard almost right to the floor on that bus. Never in my life had I ever seen anything like it, especially with that (what I thought was awkward) window design!

Throughout my childhood, I was exposed to Gilligs, Crown Supercoaches, and a few Kenworth-Pacifics in nearly every single school district I attended school. When I moved to the Peninsula School District in 1987, I was in awe. I had never seen a school bus with a mid-mounted engine and never heard of engines being mounted on their sides. The Gillig I got assigned to (bus number 20) had been built with a mid-mounted Cummins NHH220, and it was a beast of a bus. With the exception of two school districts, every single district was a predominant mix of Gillig buses and buses from another California manufacturer known as Crown Coach. In fact, I never heard of Blue Bird buses until I moved to Hood Canal School District in 1991, and what a disappointment it was riding one of those!

In late 1999, I stumbled upon a website devoted to Crown Coach buses on a community of personal theme-based websites known as GeoCities. Known as "The Buskid's Webpage," I remember seeing pictures of Gilligs on a tiny section of it, and I was instantly amazed to find that I was not alone in my unusual interest in what many call a "yellow crackerbox on wheels" or a "yellow twinkie on wheels." It set in motion for me, a plan to create my own website. 

On March 9, 2001, after a lot of trial and error, (and having to learn manual HTML coding the hard way!) I opened the first version of GilligCoachesNET. The original website's name was "The Gillig Transit Coach Webpage," which I loosely modeled after The Buskid's Webpage." It only had fifteen images, a very small history section, and a lot of missing information. It wasn't long, however, when information (and new photos) began pouring in to the website. Contributions from other Gillig owners, drivers, and other fans filled in those missing gaps and within five years, GilligCoachesNET (which by then was named The Gillig Transit Coach/Pacific SchoolCoach Online Museum) became the largest resource for Gillig Transit Coach school bus information anywhere online. 

Soon, I began receiving requests from industry trade magazines, especially School Bus Fleet and Student Transportation News. Historical information was used by Gillig's own web design team. After I bought the domain name "gilligcoaches.net" (which I trademarked in the State of Washington at the time), GilligCoachesNET was my single biggest achievement.

When not maintaining GilligCoachesNET, I can be found at the eyepiece (or imaging apparatus) of one of my telescopes, behind the lens of my camera, or driving around in my 1996 Ford Explorer XLT. I'm also a published author in the field of astronomy, and I've been a credentialed photographer in the Pacific Northwest for over a decade. My contributions have been published in Ripley's Believe it or Not, ABC and NBC News documentaries, and local TV stations in the Pacific Northwest.

A former Gillig owner, it is my hope to find one in intact condition to restore once again.

I can be contacted through the contact form, or on social media by going to Facebook and searching for the "Gillig Classic School Bus" group.