Great People

"I kept not getting a high enough score until I realized that there were a few trick questions,” Thompson said. “Once I figured that out, I passed.”

While he had experience as a school bus driver, he began his career as a vault puller because there wasn’t a need for more operators. He enjoyed the job, but it was his next career move that gave him his calling.  

“Being a cleaner is my career, and I loved doing it,” Thompson said. “My goal every day was to have the cleanest buses in the system, the region, and the nation.” 

He enjoyed it so much that others took notice, and he helped train in new cleaners that came onboard. Thompson also sees his work as integral to setting the mood for everyone in the system. As a customer himself, he was always checking every bus he rode to and from work.  

“When a bus operator gets onboard a dirty bus, it puts them in a bad mood to start the day,” he said. “And it impacts the customers who ride that bus, too. I just wanted to make sure everyone was happy onboard.”  

During the pandemic, the role of cleaner became the cornerstone of helping deliver essential rides to customers who had no other options. “We were cleaning, sanitizing, and fogging buses as often as possible,” Thompson said.  

Retiring after 34 years of service, Thompson plans to take up woodworking inside his new barn next to his home on about five acres of land. And as he leaves, he knows that his time here set him up for his retirement that he’ll spend with his wife, four kids, and grandchild.  

“I got my pension from a good company with great pay and good hours,” Thompson said. “I wish I would have started earlier.”  

John Dillery’s passion for transit began in childhood growing up in Mahtomedi. “My neighbors and family members often told streetcar stories,” Dillery said. “I was curious about it, so I walked the abandoned line and I often found streetcar track artifacts.”

In college, he became a volunteer at the Como Streetcar Museum. As he approached graduation, his supervisor suggested applying at Metro Transit. “I wanted to get into the transit business, so I figured I’d start as a bus operator,” he said. “However, unlike today, there was a hiring freeze.”

Lucky for Dillery, they did have an opening for a research assistant. In 1978, he began in planning. After 44 years of service, he celebrated his retirement in November 2022. 

Dillery’s time at Metro Transit has been transformational.

He worked on studies that helped bring rail back to the metro and has supported planning around the opening of new light rail, commuter rail and Bus Rapid Transit services. He also organized the bus route number system and helped define service planning.

“Transit is most successful when planned under a set of well-specified guidelines indicating what sort of conditions are required for different service levels,” he said. “Adding clear guidelines and goals has made transit stronger.”

For his efforts, Dillery and fellow long-serving planners Scott Thompson and Steve Mahowald were recognized in 2019 with the Minnesota Public Transportation Association's Distinguished Career Award. 

Throughout his career, Dillery has remained customer-focused. “Looking at data or a map at high altitude can only tell you so much,” he said. “You need to get out and ride to understand your customers and the system.”

And that’s where you’ll still find him in retirement – riding Metro Transit around the metro area – except when he takes an occasional train trip across Europe with his wife, that is.

When Cha Vang’s college professor encouraged him to apply for an internship at the Metropolitan Transit Commission, he didn’t really know what he was getting into. But the organization’s name sounded important, he thought, so he decided to give it a shot. In 1987, he began working in the commission’s nascent security department. Turns out Vang was on the vanguard of what would become one of the state’s largest law enforcement agencies, the Metro Transit Police Department. It was, he said, a remarkable thing to be a part of over the course of his 35-year career. “It’s really been a privilege to be a part of the growth,” Vang said shortly before retiring in September 2022. “Everything was growing right in front of our eyes, which was pretty exciting.”

Vang came to the MTC, the precursor to Metro Transit, with no law enforcement experience and limited knowledge of what law enforcement involved. Working alongside him was a security manager and a small team of security officers. Among his first projects was coding intersections so the agency could start tracking police incidents. Even then, though, he could see that something bigger was on the horizon. And, he was assured that if he stuck around he could be a part of it. After his internship ended, Vang joined the department in a part-time role; in 1990, he went full-time.

After the state legislature acted to create the Metro Transit Police Department, Vang started to see the promised growth play out. He helped organize and train new department members, including the agency’s first part-time police officers, and got operations setup at the department’s first home on Minnehaha Avenue. Vang also played a key role in introducing the growing department to other Metro Transit staff, organizing outreach events at garages. Later, Vang helped the department move into its new headquarters at the Metro Transit Campus. Record entry and management remained a large part of his work throughout his career, and leaders often turned to Vang for his institutional knowledge.

At the time of his retirement, Vang was the longest-serving Metro Transit Police Department employee. In retirement, he planned to spend time volunteering, working on house projects, and enjoying his family, including his wife and four children. Vang said the police department had become “like a second family,” but that he looked forward to the next chapter. “I might not have known what I was getting into at the beginning,” he said. “But looking back I think I made the right decision.”

As a child growing up on Saint Paul’s East Side, Steve Jaeger liked to imagine himself as a bus driver, using a circular piano stool for a steering wheel and his sister and her dolls as his passengers. Later in life, he didn’t have to imagine. After seeing an ad in the paper, he applied for and got a job shuttling commuters between Cottage Grove and St. Paul, traveling along Highway 61 while trying not to get caught at one of the road's many stoplights. Between those early morning and afternoon runs, he also drove school and charter buses. In 1975, after the company he was working for sold its fixed routes, he moved to the Metropolitan Transit Commission, starting what would become a 47-year career with the organization (which later became Metro Transit). Jaeger retired in September 2022 as the agency’s longest-serving transportation manager.

At first, Jaeger wasn’t sure he wanted to come to the MTC. But with two young daughters, the benefits were too good to pass up. After the change, he found himself navigating unfamiliar streets in Minneapolis for the first time. “If I lost sight of the Foshay Tower, I was lost,” Jaeger recalled. But his comfort level grew and, after two years, he was recognized as someone who was capable of doing more. With some encouragement, he applied for and was offered a role as a dispatcher at the Shingle Creek Garage (now Ruter Garage). Not long after that, he was pushed to apply for an assistant transportation manager role, a position he held at the old Nicollet, Snelling, Northside, and Heywood garages. Opportunity knocked again when a garage manager position opened. Convinced that it wouldn’t hurt to try, he applied and, to his surprise, got the job.

As a manager, Jaeger spent several years at Shingle Creek and Heywood before being transferred to South. At the time, he wasn’t especially excited about the change. One conversation with a terminally ill operator who came to him seeking faith and wisdom changed all that. “You could have knocked me over with a feather,” he said, remembering the meeting. “I said, ‘Now I know I am where I am for a reason.’” Though not every relationship was quite as profound, the opportunity to make an impact in other peoples’ lives, he said, is what sustained him as a manager over his 35-plus years in the position. To encourage operators, Jaeger liked to pull out a pair of golden handcuffs and make a point about choosing to enjoy the job instead of seeing it as a burden. “When your heads in the right place and your hearts in the right place, you don’t need these (handcuffs),” he would say.

In addition to his work as a manager, Jaeger served as an informal mentor, spent 14 years as president of the Transit Managers’ and Supervisors’ Association (TMSA), and was part of the group that provided input during the design of the East Metro Garage. 

In retirement, Jaeger planned to spend more time with family, including his wife, daughters, sons-in-law and six grandchildren, and to get more involved in church activities. Looking back, he said he was grateful for the chance to lead so many people for so long. “I’m confident that this is what I was created to do,” he said.

There were a few principles Tim Bell tried to uphold during his 35-year career in transit – pay attention to detail, see the good in those around you, leave the place better than you found it. During his tenure as a dispatcher, he also did his best to support the operators who greeted him each day. “The one thing I always thought as a dispatcher was that my number one job was to help operators succeed,” he said.

Tim’s commitment to his work and his co-workers made it hard for him to retire. But on his last day on the job, he had plenty to look forward to. Immediate plans included moving to northern Minnesota, spending more time with family, and traveling the country with his wife. “My stop’s come up and I’m ringing the bell,” he said. “It’s time to end this chapter and start a new one.”

Encouraged by a family connection, Tim applied to what was then the Metropolitan Transit Commission and began his career as a part-time bus operator in 1987. He enjoyed the work but, after 14 years, found himself staring at a job board and wondering what might come next. Garage Manager Steve Jaeger gave him the nudge he needed to become a relief dispatcher. With strong analytical and interpersonal skills, he excelled at and enjoyed the work. “Good dispatchers set the tone for the entire garage,” Tim said. “You can stop a lot of problems right at that window.”

Tim began and ended his career at the same garage, though its name had changed from Shingle Creek to Ruter by the time he retired. He also worked at Heywood, South and Nicollet.