SALEM, Ore. — It’s dark outside, and Cory Dent rolls up the door to his garage and gets out of the rain. This is the back way in, he explains, and you have to walk around the corner to see the bus.
“The bus” is a rebuilt Gillig Phantom model that Dent, who owns an auto repair shop nearby and is a lifetime Oregon fan, dubbed “Duck Force One” when he bought it at auction in 2015. It hit the national spotlight a few weeks ago when a creator met Dent at an Oregon game and posted a video that got more than 300,000 views on Instagram. This room, though, is a world of Dent’s own creation, and the bus is his magnum opus.
For 10 seasons, Dent has driven the bus weekly from Salem to Eugene. He’s picked up people along the way, and met others there — he’s guessing that 50 or so will join him for Oregon’s Friday night game against Minnesota on Nov. 14. He’s spent time with the bus — slept in it, driven it to two of Oregon’s Rose Bowl appearances and given it a home in his garage. But just over a decade later, as Dent prepares to let the bus exit his life, he’s not concerned about losing the weekends that he loves. It’s not the bus that kept him going to games, he stressed. It was the people…