John Madden’s bus trips meant learning plays and plenty of food

It was 8 on a fall morning in the late-1980s, and Lesley Visser was doing what she did dozens of times for a decade, hailing a cab from her Upper East Side New York City neighborhood to cross Central Park to meet a bus parked outside the venerable Dakota apartment building by 10 a.m. This wasn’t just any old bus. It was the one with John Madden inside.