[PRCo] Following up on last nights e-mail.

[Fred Schneider]

Share of the business:

I found my population data file ... there were 8.,7 million people of
all ages living in Pennsylvania in April 1920.  Just using very rough
techniques ... somewhere between 700,000 and 1 million were age 5 or
under and didn't pay a fare.  The electric railways collected 5.041
million fares a day.  That would be omewhere around 2.52 million
passengers on trolleys  (unduplicated passengers would be somewhere near
one half the fares lifted because most people need to come home) ...
somewhere depending on how reliable the reports were.

Therefore, 2.52 / 7.9 =  .316.  About one third of the people in
Pennsylvania made a trolley round trip each and every day. This is not
like large cities ... Baltimore, for example, had fewer than a million
people which generated two million fares a day.  But when we consider
that vast numbers of rural people in Pennsylvania at that time probably
never saw a trolley car ... all those people in truly counties such as
Greene, Fulton, Bedford, Pike, Mifflin and many in counties where the
nearest trolley was beyond range in an era when most people's entire
lives were played out within a circle with a radius of ten miles, I
think having one out of three on the cars every day is a truly huge
number.

How did people outside the cities live?  Farmers were almost self
reliant and what they didn't produce could be bought in the next village
general store or from the Sears and Roebuck catalog.   I found a story
in a 1902 Lancaster New Era when, even though most people didn't go far,
they had interviewed a man from Stevens in northeastern Lancaster County
who had been to Lancaster twice in his 90+ years ... he was there that
day because the court summoned him for jury duty.  The county seat was
beyond the ten mile circle ... it was close to 20 miles so he simply
didn't go there.   Even in cities travel was unusual for some people.
Twenty years ago I met an African American man who managed the state
unemployment claims office in McKeesport ... in his youth he said they
went to Pittsburgh once each year when his uncle would get them a free
pass on the B&O.   Read a few of these kind of stories and the 1/3rd
value becomes even more impressive.

And I wonder what my dad's parents, who died 40 years ago, would have
thought if they knew I spent 12 weeks this year on two trips to Europe,
one to the west coast, and one so trivial as going to North Carolina
just to look at the colored leaves.  They would have never understood,
would they....

Have a nice day.