Dreams or Memories?

[Fred W. Schneider III]

This one's for you, Jim Holland:

I'm certain that looking at that beautiful St. Petersburg PCC caused my
mind to flash back, when I awakened at 1:30 this morning, to an event
that took place in September 1952 when I was 12.  Dinner that evening
had been upset by a phone call from my grandparents neighbor telling us
that grandpa had fallen off the grape arbor and broke his hip.  As soon
as dinner was finished we set out from Lancaster to Marietta, Ohio.  I'm
sure dad was having a hard time of it because we stopped twice for
coffee, the second time in Elm Grove (near Wheeling) and the first in
Monongahela.

We had finished the rest stop in Monongahela (remember folks ... no
McDonalds ... you looked for coffee shops in towns) and were walking
back to the car.  Along came this brightly lighted, welcoming, PCC car
gliding seemingly effortlessly around a gradual curve downtown.
Probably symbolically the last car of the evening going back to
Pittsburgh but maybe the next to last.  I had one more chance to
associate the trolley with Monongahela; the next Easter week I talked
dad out of the money to ride to make round trips from Pittsburgh to
Roscoe and to Washington.  And it was over.  Nothing left but memories
and some not so great 35mm negatives. Then comes the recognition that
this event took place almost a half century ago and fits chronologically
into my life like one of my father's memories...

In his later years he was reminded of driving the '27 Chevy along the
old National Pike west of Wheeling and being overtaken by an Ohio
Electric interurban car, shabby in its age, rocking from side to side so
vigorously because of the neglected roadbed that the unmaintained
trolley wire was also swinging left and right and the trolley pole was
swinging like a thrashing whip.  But even as rundown as it was, the
interurban was going faster than he could in the Chevrolet.

Perhaps it was events like that which caused dad to be a model builder
and closet railfan who could accept though not always appreciate my own
interests.  As a electrical engineer who worked most of his life as a
mechanical engineer and who had trained himself to be a rather decent
machinist, we would have appreciated the attention to detail and
precision that went into the dies for the St. Petersburg car.

Enough.  The grandfather, by the way, through his stubborn attitude,
recovered when the doctors said he would never again walk, and he lived
eight more years.  Dad died three years ago.  And I'm now becoming the
babbling old man.