Arnold Wollschlaeger

Arnold Wollschlaeger was the founder of the company that became Orion Bus Industries, a private Ontario bus builder, and died in 1979. By the mid 1970s he had spent two decades building and repairing buses and trucks under the name Ontario Truck and Bus Industries, and a provincial contract to retrofit Rek-Vee vehicles for the Ontario Dial-a-Bus experiment, which proved unreliable in transit service, inspired him to build a heavy-duty medium-sized bus of his own. With a team of tradespeople he hand-built the prototype of the Orion I in 1975, renamed the firm Ontario Bus Industries and sold over 100 Orion Is in its first couple of years. For lack of financial backing he sold the American and world manufacturing rights to Greyhound in 1978, and after his death in 1979 the company passed to Donald Sheardown, who bought it from the Wollschlaeger family.