Richard was 12 at the time. Watching the newsreel before an afternoon matinee with his pals, he got an unwelcome surprise. “All of a sudden this splashed up, my father with the handcuffs and two cops,” he said. “It was tough for me at school. I used to get ribbed a lot. ‘You know who this kid is? The bus driver’s son.’ I used to shy away.”

The elder Mr. Cimillo returned home to an indictment for grand larceny, but he got something else, too: a hero’s welcome. The boys at Surface Transportation voted to host a dance to raise money for his legal fees. The charges were later dropped.

“The public was enormously in his corner,” Richard Cimillo said. “He became a celebrity. He was walking around like a movie star. Networks flew him to California. He went on a couple of shows  ‘Can you guess who this is?’ ”

And, three years later, the highest of honors: a copycat. In 1950, another driver, George Geddes, “fed up with bus driving,” as he later explained, took his Bronx bus on a less extravagant holiday. He stopped off for a few drinks and drove around, winding up in Kingston, N.Y., where he “came to my senses” and hailed a passing priest, who advised him to turn himself in.

EIGHT years after that, in 1958, Elizabeth Taylor and her stepson Michael Todd Jr. announced plans to make a movie about the Cimillo adventure: “Busman’s Holiday.” Ms. Taylor was to play a beauty pageant winner who joined the bus driver on his journey, and was to make her singing debut in the picture. But whatever happens when deals like this fall apart happened  in one account, the script burned in an airplane crash  and the movie was never made. “It seemed to just peter out, and died,” Richard Cimillo said.

Sadie Cimillo, the busman’s wife, forgave him. “Out of the bad came a lot of good,” their son said. “She got a trip to California, which she’d have never had.”

As for William Cimillo, he wound up receiving what could be seen as the ultimate punishment  an outcome that might give Steven Slater chills. They gave him his old job back.

And he took it, without any more stunts.

“You tell somebody a joke the second time,” he told The New York Times in 1960, “and it’s not always so funny.”