[PRCo] Re: Speaking of Arthur Godfrey

[Fred Schneider]

What's off topic?    In order to understand trolleys you also have to  
understand the entire environment in which they operated.

To my way of thinking, Mark, this is not the least bit off topic.   
Leave it to Beaver was the 1950s and television was driving away the  
evening transit business.

If you are explaining trolleys to the public in a museum, you need to  
take them back to how people lived in that era.   The parents of  
young children today were born in the late 1970s or early 1980s.    
Some grandparents are your own age.   Great grandparents are my  
age.   As of two months ago, I am a great grand dad.   You have to go  
back to great great grandparents before they begin to understand  
truly understand the trolley era.

If you want to go back to when the trolleys made money ... prior to  
1920 ... then you need to explain concepts that todays youth are  
clueless about:

1.   People shopped for groceries every day because they had no  
mechanical refrigeration before 1930.   They had ice boxes.   That  
kept food cool, not cold.   Home freezers and frozen foods are a post  
World War II invention.  The first time I ever saw the deep green  
color of frozen peas was probably in a restaurant in Wilkinsburg  
about 1948.   So many people either went to the corner grocery store  
to shop every day or rode the trolley to places like the Diamond  
Market downtown on Forbes (or Diamond Street as it was called before  
being renamed).   When did ice trucks disappear completely?   I  
remember them in Baltimore in the early 1950s.   C. D. Herr's Ice  
plant in Lancaster closed in 1948  and one of their trucks is in the  
state museum in Harrisburg.   I can remember that Jim and Mattie Aird  
in Glasgow, Scotland, had no refrigerator in 1960 because the climate  
was cool enough that they could simply leave the milk sit on the  
stoop.   They shopped every day for perishables.  There is a great  
picture of a lady carrying home a complete chicken, unwrapped, from  
the Lafayette Market on a Baltimore Peter Witt car in the 1930s.

2.  Commercial radio dates to KDKA in Pittsburgh coming on the air in  
1920.   Television was introduced in 1939 at the New York World's  
Fair but it did not become a commercial success until the early  
1950s.   Most people still went out to movie theaters once a week  
until about 1948-1952, when television viewing caused people to stay  
home.   This was highly detrimental to urban transit riding.

3.  President Eisenhower signed the legislation creating the  
Interstate Highway program in 1956.   The first such highway that I  
ever saw was I-35 south of Dallas in 1959.   Today there are over  
46,000 miles of interstates in the U. S. and many thousands of  
additional miles of turnpikes and urban expressways that were not  
built under the interstate program.   We have had Interstate highways  
for half a century and good paved roads for about 30 additional  
years.  Todays parents do not have a clue that the interurban lines  
were built because the roads between towns were nothing but mud in  
the spring and dust in the summer.  That needs to be explained to  
them. Most of us living today don't even understand because by 1930  
three out of every four families in Pennsylvania owned an  
automobile.    But when the trolley lines were built between 1890 and  
1910, few if any people owned anything unless they were rich or a  
farmer.  Private transportation was the shoe leather express.

4.  Because of the automobile, cities collapsed in the 1960s.   East  
Liberty fell apart before todays parents were born, aye only the  
grandparents remember when places like East Liberty, Homestead,  
McKeesport, West Philadelphia, Wilkinsburg, Kensington, downtowntown  
Johnstown, Altoona, Wilkes-Barre, Scranton and so forth were  
viable.   Today's adults know shopping malls ... enclosed and strip  
malls.   Hell buys, when I grew up in Penn Hills, there was a tiny  
convenience store at the top of the development across from the  
police station.   If you wanted groceries, you went to Edgewood or  
Wilkinsburg.   The Miracle Mile out in Monroeville didn't exist ...  
Monroeville was where you went on Sunday to buy milk from the farmer  
when the blue laws had everything else shut down.  So you need to  
explain to the public that people shopped in Wilkinsburg, East  
Liberty, Dawntawn, and all sorts of neighborhood shopping districts  
along the car tracks.   Millvale or Perrysville and East.  There were  
dozens of places.

5.   Because all the industry collapsed before todays parents were  
born, you also need to explain where the industry was.   Oh lets, go  
back and explain what industry means.   A factory is a place where  
you build something.   A mill is a long factory.   A steel mill might  
be a mile long along a river and it might employ 10,000 people....    
And U. S. Steel had a mill in Homestead, another in Duquesne, a pipe  
works in McKeesport ... on and on and on.   And J&L had a mill on  
Carson St., another on 2nd Ave., a coke works on 2nd Avenue, another  
mill in Alliquippa.   Oh yes, how about U. S. Steel's American Bridge  
subsidiary in Ambridge.   Then there was Dick Mellon's big local  
company called Gulf Oil with its refinery down on Neville Island.    
Gee daddy, what's a refinery?   Well, son, it's a place where you  
take crude oil, a distill off benzine, gasoline, diesel oil,  
kerosene, grease, plastic resins.   Daddy, what do you mean  
distill?   See. this can go on for ever.

6.   But you need to know where the industries were just to explain  
why the trolleys were there because if we didn't have automobiles,  
then the trolleys had to take people to work.  And those factories  
have all been demolished.   Some, like Armstrong's old loft building  
in the Strip District, was to be turned into an apartment or  
condominium complex.   But for the most part we need to even explain  
where they were.   See that big shopping center in Homestead?    
Thousands of steel workers used to toil there.   That's why the  
streetcars ran there on route 55 and 68 and 60 and 59.   Oh yes, and  
Mesta Machine was also there.   Remember Pearl Mesta on television.   
No they don't.   They/re too young to remember.

7.   And remember those Sunday Only Car Stops.   We had them at  
churches.   People used to go to churches.   I went there this  
morning.  But people also used to go somewhere else on Sundays.    
They went to cemeteries to pay respects to the departed relatives.    
So there were also Sunday Only Car Stops at places like Homewood  
Cemetery along Forbes Avenue.

8.   You also need to understand how the automobile has made it  
possible for people to be oblivious to actual travel costs.   When  
they had to pay a zone fare to a conductor, they didn't do it.   I  
have to admit I found some conflicts in some of my street railway  
research.   When I read the Lancaster newspapers around 1900 I found  
glowing comments about how the trolleys brought customers from the  
outlying downs into Lancaster to shop.   The merchants were  
delighted.   However, when I looked at the company's reports to the  
state Department of Internal Affairs, I found that the average fare  
collected was only 20% higher than a one zone ride.   The shortest  
ride was 5 cents, Millersville was 10 cents, Lititz was 20 cents,  
Manheim was 25 cents, Coatesville was 45 cents, Elizabethtown was 40  
cents ... you get the picture.   Most people left the farm and went  
into the nearest village to buy what they needed and went home.   I  
suspect that was typical everywhere.   People watched their pennies  
then, just as they do now, when they see them going out day by day.    
But once they bought the car and paid for it, they all they saw was  
the gasoline.   The long trips suddenly because cheap in their  
minds.   The real expense didn't come until they wore the automobile  
out and had to finance a new one.   But recognizing it after the fact  
didn't alter their habits.   Americans have gone from a few thousand  
miles a year to 10,000 to 12,000.

If you really want to understand trolleys, there isn't much between  
1859 and 2007 that's off topic.

Did I make my point Mark?





On Oct 7, 2007, at 3:05 PM, Mark McGuire wrote:

>  I was up late last night. Was flipping channels and noticed an ad  
> on a certain channel that they would air the pilot episode of Leave  
> It To Beaver. I have seen many episodes of LITB, but need less to  
> say I was intrigued. Much to my amazement, there was Arthur Godfrey  
> playing the part of Ward Cleever, along with some other boy as  
> Wally. I just thought it was kind of strange that this happened  
> right after a thread was started about Mr. Godfrey. Sorry for the  
> off-topic thread. Carry on.
>
>
>