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Cleveland's Dynamic Transit Heritage By Blaine Hays Commemorating the first 10 y
Clevelands Dynamic Transit Heritage By Blaine Hays Commemorating the first 10 years of RTA
Soft Cover Stapled
Date unknown
35 pages
In 1949, when I was four years old, my mother asked what I wanted for Christmas, and I replied "a toy street car." From those early times on I have been an avid student of mass transportation. I attended the College of Fine Arts of Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh in the mid 1960s in pursuit of a theatre career, which didn't work out. While in Pittsburgh I witnessed the changeover from private transit ownership (Pittsburgh Railways) to public (Port Authority Transit) and the attendent conversion of the system from streetcars to buses.
This experience was very important in my life and resulted, in 1980, in completion of a 174,000 word manuscript on the story of transit in Pittsburgh and of light rail transit in the United States.
I am a life-long Clevelander and have had a varied life. I have worked in hospitals, for newspapers and on railroads and at the Cleveland Playhouse! I finally ended up with the old Cleveland Transit System, my first interest. During my years with RTA, I worked closely with the late Harry Christiansen on his local transit history books the Trolley Tails series. All transit historians owe a tremendous debt to the often-times controversial but never monotonous Christiansen.
Publication of this book has been a longtime desire of mine. The transit story in Cleveland has been misunderstood for years and this makes the procession of events clear.
I wish to thank poet Evan Lodge, who just turned 80, for his kind permission to reprint his colorful transit poems. I want to thank Arlene Butler. employed by transit systems in Cleveland since 1938 and present Public Relations Director for RTA for her assistance. I want to mention four old friends, who have "trollied.' with me for years and have certainly been a help with this book: Rabbi Jeffery Marker from Carnegie Tech, Bruce Dzeda of Kent who's been through a lot with me, Steve Heister of Viacom Cable, whose video program "Cleveland Commuting" is a transit gem. and Larry Podwoski of Pittsburgh. whose fine scale models of the Cleveland streetcar fleet are unmatched.
For continued inspiration, I wish to sincerely thank Walt Stoner. President of NO.R.M. and Charles G. Herbruck, Sr. for constructive criticism and Morris Stone of American Greetings Corporation for financing the book. Special thanks to my fiancee. Joan A. Johnson, for her suggestions and support.
The author is an Administrative Assistant with the Regional Transit Authority and is Public Relations Director of the Northern Ohio Railway Museum. He has one son, David, and resides in Parma.
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