[PRCo] Re: Committee Work

[Fred Schneider]

And to amplify Ed's statement, his is a problem which each and every  
historical society in this country faces.  It's not just applicable  
to trolley museum libraries.   All historical societies need  
volunteers and most of them have incredibly limited knowledge.   When  
a local society or museum finds someone with brains who sticks around  
for 50 years, they have a real find.   It doesn't happen often.    
Sadly, many societies crumble when the brain dies.

  I have great fun, from time to time, poking at the dean of  
historians at the Lancaster County Historical Society.   It's fun to  
tell him he has misidentified a photo in the LCHS Journal and that  
the house in question still stands miles from where he thought it  
was.  But he seldom makes a mistake  It's fun to catch him making one  
because he makes so few.   But he knows me and I know him and I think  
we both appreciate each other.   I know he has problems, just as Ed  
has stated, with an army of volunteer file catalogers who simply have  
no background whatsoever.

I remember the day I went in to see him with an old picture of a  
Lancaster trolley about 1895 with some mansions behind it.   None of  
them exist today but I thought, based on ground contours, that it had  
to be the 500 block of North Duke Street, where the General Hospital  
is today.   If so, those houses were torn down about 1952.  Few would  
remember today.  I asked showed Mr. Loose the picture and asked him,  
"Jack, where was this taken.   I think I know but I'm not going to  
prejudice your answer by telling you what I think."   He came back  
immediately.  "Why that's where the General Hospital is today."   We  
have bounced many things off each other.  It's fun.   And I have  
blanket approval to xerox any picture in their files and drive around  
the county hunting locations of anything I don't think looks right.

That's why I don't get something else done.   But if the Freds and  
the Eds don't do that, there will be that many more unidentified  
pictures for the next generation.  Besides, its a whole lot of fun.

Maybe the reasons I like PTM so much are

1. The people

2.  The fact that I can play with the trolleys

3.  And the fact that I can work as an archivist too.

4.  And Hamley and the roster.   I would love to choke the S. O. B.  
that decided we didn't need to keep the individual car record cars.   
They may represent headaches like the route cards but they might also  
answer a lot of questions about Jones control.

On the other hand, we probably still have far more than we can ever  
hope to preserve.  Derrick knows I've cut at him because he wanted to  
preserve more steel mills for the future people to look at.  I  
suggested he find the best one that is already preserved and put his  
money in that.   I suspect that, in the next 100 years we will see  
half or more than half of the currently preserved streetcars in  
museums cut up for scrap.  None of us will see it happen.

fws


On Sep 7, 2007, at 3:31 PM, Edward H. Lybarger wrote:

> As someone has spent my share of time prowling through PRCo  
> records, I have
> to completely endorse what Fred is saying.  That company must have  
> kept an
> army of scribes with quill pens and green eyeshades on hand to keep  
> all the
> details.  The route histories are something Ollie Miller struggled  
> with for
> years, and he didn't make much headway.  Just the street name  
> changes could
> drive you crazy, let alone the temporary diversions.  And then  
> there all the
> discontinued routings to consider...like the north bank of the  
> Monongahela
> River from Glenwood to Homestead, and trippers to mills and factories.
>
> Ask Dave Hamley how easy the roster has been, too!
>
> It has been embarrassingly difficult for me to assign work to  
> volunteers who
> have no knowledge of the system, simply because they don't know  
> what they're
> looking at or how to interpret it.  I have to give them such  
> mundane jobs as
> filing Westinghouse catalog sheets by style (model) number or  
> entering data
> from envelopes containing photo negatives into databases.  They get  
> bored
> and I don't blame them, but how do I give them a quickie course in  
> something
> that took me 40 years of osmosis to learn?
>
> The company had departments with specialists in each.  We don't  
> have that
> luxury, unfortunately.  Unless, of course, everyone moves back to  
> Pittsburgh
> and adopts one!
>
> Ed
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: pittsburgh-railways-bounce at lists.dementia.org
> [mailto:pittsburgh-railways-bounce at lists.dementia.org]On Behalf Of  
> Fred
> Schneider
> Sent: Friday, September 07, 2007 12:58 PM
> To: pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org
> Subject: [PRCo] Re: Committee Work
>
>
> I'm going to get off track here, Jim,
>
>                      because I know you are talking about the 12th
> Street wye and the route cards are peripheral.   But this goes with
> your idea of a committee....
>
> Please indulge me while I make up an example.   This is  not a real
> case, just a fabricated one similar to what you might find.  One of
> the problems with dealing with the route cards is something like a
> change in route from
>
> Penn, German, George, 12th
>
> And on the next column the route changes to Penn, Able, George, 12th.
>
> The routing was changed.   Or was it?   If it was around 1914, 1915,
> 1916, 1917, 1918 I would bet that the city or borough simply changed
> a German sounding street name to something more palatable to its
> citizens and the route didn't change.
>
> You will also get a lot of similar changes when boroughs were
> absorbed into Pittsburgh because the fire department does not want
> two streets in Pittsburgh with the same name.   Then in 1907 we merge
> the city of Allegheny into the City of Pittsburgh and we have another
> spate of street name changes.
>
> So when you review route cards for Pittsburgh Railways, you also need
> maps of Pittsburgh and Allegheny and the boroughs at perhaps 10 year
> intervals simply to determine that the list streets over which a line
> runs really changed or simply the names of the streets only changed
> but route stayed the same.
>
> To make sense of the route cards in a hurry, perhaps a group of ten
> people, all looking a maps of the city, while the eleventh person
> attempts to read the names from the route cards, and a twelfth scribe
> reenters it into a computer and a 13th person peering over his
> shoulder makes certain what he heard is what he sees on the computer
> screen....
>
> Why do you think it's only a dream on my part?
>
> And then comes the subject of illegible script.
>
> Perhaps ten years ago I got interested in family genealogy.   A
> relative finished something I had started ... I did the leg work in a
> certain town hall in Marburg, Germany and a cousin finished it and
> came home with the bacon.   Skip also found a whole host of documents
> for relatives in Pforzheim and Karlsruhe, Germany.   Now we had to
> translate them.  You think route cards are hard?   You have not tried
> anything difficult until you try to translate hand written Fractur
> script from the early to middle 1800s from Wurtemburg and Bayern.
> It just looked like a million up and down lines.  I finally found
> examples of all the Fractur letters in an old German dictionary in
> the stacks in Franklin and Marshall College's library here in
> Lancaster.  Then I started going through the words trying to identify
> every one of each letter.   I would look for every letter A on the
> page.   Then every Ä.   Then ever B, Then ever C, and so forth.  I
> finally got so exhausted I went to my German tutor.   Guess what, she
> started doing it the same way I did, one letter at a time.   The only
> difference is, she is actually skilled at Fractur, espectially when
> it is printed in a book.   And she has one advantage I don't have.
> She knew usages of words used in government certficates, like
> baptismal records, that simply are not used today and which I would
> not have recognized or even found in a contemporary dictionary.
>
> I did one route completely from the route cards ... either route 1
> Spring Garden or 2 Etna ... with the idea of making the book.   That
> was when I found out how difficult it was.   I was dealing with The
> City of Pittsburgh and the City of Allegheny.   I think at one point
> in time the line ran on a street that doesn't even appear on the
> PERC / PRM map that Mac McGrew drew.  It's a street that doesn't even
> exist today because it was wiped out by the expressway construction
> on the northside.  It took several days to do just one relatively
> simple line.   Of course I was also eliminating any non significant
> changes, i.e. temporary changes because of fires, parades, and  minor
> street contruction. And that guys is when I said, to hell with it.
> This isn't fun.
>
> But if someone wants to sit down with me for several months and
> ponder the mysteries of the route cards, I might be convinced to go
> back to it.   Sometimes I work better when I have someone pushing me
> and I can also push the other person.
>
> f3
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sep 7, 2007, at 6:07 AM, Jim Holland wrote:
>
>> This is a Very ImPerfect World -- no one individual knows it all
>> nor has
>> access to all information - not even with the Inet~!~!~!
>> .
>> Thus the formation of committees, Good and Bad.     A few ideas on
>> Committees follow  (but Very Far From Exhaustive)   and how each  
>> of us
>> can participate as a member.
>> .
>> Each Committee Member has a different way of looking at information
>> and
>> brings a unique perspective to a situation.     A committee will
>> assemble  A~L~L  the information, facts, observations, thoughts,
>> ideas,
>> good and bad that pertain to a certain topic and then sift these
>> through
>> a set of criteria for the topic to formulate a plan of action,
>> probable
>> cause // effect, or possible scenario, etc.     This involves but is
>> certainly not limited to dissecting what is available to gain an
>> understanding, reading / learning about habits, customs,  
>> priorities Of
>> The Day // Time in question, and this involves getting into minutia
>> which can be exasperating at times.     We should avoid minutia for
>> the
>> sake of minutia but the tedium of this approach can still be draining
>> and test the mettle of our civility.
>> .
>> Those who have studied  *-Legible Writings-*  (as opposed to
>> Scrawl~!~!)  of the past, those over 100 years old, will still find
>> the
>> Grammar, sentence construction, expressions and Many etc.'s a
>> challenge
>> and Very Different from standards of today.     But going back to the
>> old English practice of Diagramming the Sentence to identify to whom
>> pronouns belong, tense of verbs, subj., object, modifiers  --
>> Dissecting and tedium  --  and reading about and understanding the
>> customs etc. of the day will then bring about a great enlightening &
>> Understanding to the study.
>> .
>> We need to know ourselves as well.     Forget Fast Food  --  the Inet
>> and Instant availability of info makes one think that any question  
>> can
>> be answered in the snap of the fingers  --  or even faster.     We  
>> are
>> prone to impatience and tend to accept most any quick fix.      
>> Humanly
>> we live Very Much By Experience and if an observation is outside that
>> experience then it must be wrong or unworthy of consideration.     We
>> need to be able to set this And Much More Aside, advance ideas for  
>> the
>> sake of the idea, and forget personalities.
>> .
>> When Inet email lists first formed, it was often stated that the
>> person
>> who asks a question should monitor the answers and after a reasonable
>> time make a summary.     Rarely  I~F  Ever  is this done  --  and
>> maybe
>> more rarely do the questions remain on topic.
>> .
>> In A Small Way, Committee Work is what we were doing in looking at  
>> the
>> Single Track Wye at 12th Avenue.     We looked at a variety of
>> possibilities for the street, direction of travel, problems in the
>> area,
>> a few etc.s and at Matt's suggestion we could work back to make an
>> Understanding that this could be for Emergency use because any
>> other use
>> could be ruled out.
>> .
>> Please:      lettuce not make minutia of the above -- but  
>> constructive
>> comments on Good Committee Behavior / Altitude / Approach / etc. are
>> always warranted.
>> --
>> *Jim Holland*
>>
>> Studying *Pittsburgh Railways Company*
>>
>> ....................From 1930 -- 1950
>>
>> *Pennsylvania Trolley Museum (PTM)*
>>
>> http://www.pa-trolley.org/
>>
>> *N.M.R.A.*
>>
>> http://www.nmra.org/
>>
>>
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