ustxtxb_obs_1977_08_26_50_00009-00000_000.pdf

Page 28

August 26, 1977, 12:00 AM, CDT

9 THE TEXAS OBSERVER A4

<div id="pico"><p>9  THE TEXAS OBSERVER A4<m:swatimaizsgiamAmwmetauK  she remembers vividly the interurban's  convenience. She can still go to Port Arthur, but now only on a superhighway,  with a mass of cars, a cacophony of  horns and brakes, a cloud of exhaust  fumes, and a tangle of jangled nerves.  Romance  Colleen Kain, the Texas State Historical Association's administrative assistant, came along during the final days of  the interurban run out of Denison. She  remembers that it was her mother's link  to Dallas, and that as a girl she was fascinated by the sparks that shot from the  electric lines above, and could hardly  wait till the train passed Carrie Jane Martin's farm and the old workhorse, Mary,  that she sometimes rode. Colleen  squealed with delight as the car swayed  on curves and badgered her mother to  open the lunch that was always packed  for such trips.  The late Ike Moore, former director of  the San Jacinto Museum of History outside Houston, and Elizabeth Knight, of  Hillsboro, loved to recount how in the  early 1940s their interurban from Dallas  to Waco stalled in the middle of a pasture  somewhere south of Waxahachie, while  they waited beneath a broiling sun for  hours without food. They survived to  marry.  How many rode the interurban from  Houston to Galveston's beaches for an  inexpensive outing that wasn't complicated by radiators boiling over, tires  going flat, or fenders being sideswiped?  Just zip down, zip backat your convenience. No worry that you can't find a  mechanic on Sunday or that you might  wind up in a crummy hospital in some  god-forsaken town, the way Bill Stern,  the sports announcer did when his car  was wrecked outside of Teague, and he  paid for the trip with an unnecessarily  amputated leg and a longtime dope  addiction.  Convenience, fun  So much for sentimentality. The fact is  that railroads and interurbans provided a  way of life that was convenient and often  fun. A whole system built up around  themstations, drayers, even railroad  hotels. On a dull day you could always  walk down to the corner and watch the  interurban blare by. In smaller towns,  the thing to do was to go down to the  station and see who alighted. But best of  all, trains were worry-free and reasonably nonpolluting. And they moved  people. Recently I took a taxi from midtown New York to LaGuardia via the  Queens Midtown Tunnel, which is two-'  way. With nothing else to look at, I  started counting the oncoming cars and  kept tab on how many carried drivers  only: 53 out of 86. Fifty-three more cars  into the middle of Manhattan, 53 fewer  parking spaces, 53 more tailpipes  spewingwhen one interurban, one bus,  or one electric train would easily have   sufficed. Multiply that momentary experience by all the towns and cities in the  country, and you perceive the waste that  we generate, the waste that threatens to  choke us all.  American settlers didn't reach the  Mississippi River until 1820, two hundred years after Plymouth Rock. At that  rate of migrationone-third of the way  across the continent in two centuriesit  should have taken Americans another  four hundred years to reach the Pacific  Ocean. But we cut the time to seventy  years, and we did it with railroads. Railroads reached the Mississippi late, in  1854, but then streaked across the  western plains and mountains, importing  men and supplies,. ending isolation, diminishing inconvenience, and making  life in the West endurable and eventually  profitable.  The train soon became king, and its  owners behaved imperially. The direct  lifeline of more than a thousand communities, trains serviced thousands more  indirectly, bringing in machinery and  household goods, taking out crops,  lumber and minerals. A railroad could  make or break a region. A town without  a train would likely die. When the  Southern Pacific missed by thirty miles a  struggling burg called Los Angeles, the  village fathers convinced the railroad  managers to build a spur to their town.  The result is the current Los Angeles,  which may not represent progress, but  which is at least economically convincing.  Trackage, which reached its peak in  the period between 1910 and 1920, has  been going downhill ever since. The automobile and truckespecially the  
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