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Cable Car Carnival By Beebe & Clegg Hard Cover 1951 SECOND edition
Cable Car Carnival By Beebe & Clegg Hard Cover Copyright 1951 130 Pages Second Edition
The genius of the cable car, in the classic meaning of the word: i.e., the titular spirit of a place or being, is the genius of San Francisco. Although cable cars flourished briefly elsewhere in the land, their native habitat is San Francisco and a cable car in Chicago or Kansas City is as out of place as one of Boston's celebrated swan boats would be anywhere save in its proper Public Garden bounded by Charles and Arlington Streets.
In a grandiose moment San Francisco selected as its heraldic emblem the phoenix rising from the ashes, although, as the most combustible of American municipalities, an Amoskeag steam fire engine would have seemed equally appropriate. But better than either of these 4-11 alarm symbols, had the town's civic herald been possessed of an authentic sense of fitness, would have been the image which to the world at large is the quintessential expression of San Francisco's altogether admirable individualism, a cable car nosing abruptly over the profile of one of its incomparable hills. After all, has not the adjacent state of Nevada incorporated into its Great Seal the image of the once fragrant Virginia & Truckee Railroad as it spanned Gold Canyon in the days of the Big Bonanza?
It has seemed to the authors of this brief chronicle that in the story of San Francisco's cable cars the mere factual record of events and institutions is not enough. There are several recognized source books concerned for the evolution, flowering and gradual decline of the cables, their philosophy, economic structure and mechanical detail. What interests the authors more than the mere existence of an engaging and characteristic type of transportation is some glimpse of the times and people it served, the institutions with which it was coeval and the part it played in the lives, imaginations, habits and manners of the people who rode it.
Alone and in a vacuum the cable car is interesting enough as a venture into the realm of transcendental transport. Integrated to the pattern of San Francisco during the splendid era which saw its rise, it is possessed of a compelling fascination and heart-warming intimacy.
It is with apologies, therefore, to the tractive force, cylinder dimension and drawbar pull school of railroad aficionado, that we commend this book to the even more numerous readers to whom the fact of San Francisco itself must always be a dominant article of faith and the cable car its native manifestation and most distinguishing symbol.
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