Verna Hills Bayley wrote "The Wheels on the Bus" poem in 1930s

The Boston Globe · Beth Bayley · 2026-11-06 10:00 UTC

Verna Hills Bayley’s name may not be famous, but her 1930s poem became a song kids everywhere still sing.

The last thing she gave me was a Jordan almond, candy that someone had given her but was too hard for her old teeth. It was the late 1980s, and I was a little kid visiting my great-grandmother in a nursing home. Her beautiful crown braid had been cut into a short bob, and even I knew it meant she wasn’t long for this earth.

Verna Hills Bayley’s life and mine barely overlapped. By the time I was born, she seemed already ancient, with translucent skin and old bones too fragile to play in the icy Atlantic waves with me, near the cottage her husband, my great-grandfather Herbert, had built on the North Shore.

Then she was gone. We had copies of the children’s books she’d written, including Martin and Judy in Their Two Little Houses, published in 1939, which we enjoyed but nobody else had ever heard of. My older family members had lots of memories, but I had just a few.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe · All coverage of this story