Eighty Memories for Eighty Years: #13 Public Transportation

PhotoCredit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calgary_municipal_railway
This 1947 photo shows a soon to be retired streetcar 
passing a new electric trolley bus, the kind of vehicle 
that would replace it.

Public transportation played a big part, always in the background of my growing up – it was the way to the movies on Saturday, the way to piano lessons on Wednesdays evenings, the way to and from Crescent Heights High School, the way to shopping at the downtown Bay and Woolworths, the way for me to go to Bowness Park, the way to the home of my friend, Else, who lived in Montgomery.

I am pretty sure that I was taking the bus alone by the time I was 7 years old.

In fact it was not a bus.

I was on trolley cars that rode on rails and the ticket was 5 cent.

Even today when I need to go someplace, I am never out of sorts if I have to take public transportation. I welcome the ride along streets I might never travel, otherwise.

I am reminded of another lost bus ticket and public transportation.

I had taken my library books back to the Central Library down near 4th Street and 10th Avenue SW. I had my return bus ticket tucked into the pages of one of the books I returned. I forgot to take the ticket out when I put it through the book return.

I didn’t exactly know the way home, if I were to walk from there back up to Hounsfield Heights. But I did figure out that I could follow the trolley lines of the bus I should have taken. When I came to an intersection where the trolley lines split and buses went one way or maybe another, that is when I stopped at a bus stop and waited for my bus to come. When it did, I watched which way it turned and then I continued walking home always following the trolley lines until I got to the 10th Street Bridge and then I knew my way home from there.

I am curious about that child when I look back on her. I know I was afraid to ask the librarian to get that ticket out of the book for me. I could never have endured the shame of telling her I had left that ticket in a book. A little bit of fear in me about being bawled out, and also, I was not sure she could get that book out of the book drop. I envisioned it as a secure mailbox into which only someone very important could go.

And why didn’t I call my mother? Well, there were times when my dad was out of town and she didn’t have a car, so I can see why I might not have called her. At any rate, I figured out how to get home, and I doubt that I told anyone of my lost bus ticket adventure when I got there.

Arta