The Magazine Streetcar

I was eleven the first time I rode the Magazine Streetcar without being held in tow by an adult or older sister. On many Saturday mornings that year, 1935, I would take one of my three younger brothers, Don, Bob or Tom, to a movie downtown, usually at the Orpheum, the most ornate of a half dozen theaters on Canal Street in the Thirties. Of course, as was customary then, we dressed up for the occasion, sporting ties, white shirts, and patent leather Sunday go-to-church shoes. This was long before blue jeans and tank tops; Canal Street was our Fifth Avenue, a fashion show that never ended.
     I funded this extravagance by dint of diligence: For eighteen months to the end of grade school, I worked 25 hours at a drugstore as a delivery boy and soda fountain clerk for $2.50 per week. The $2.00 went to my mother to supplement the family food budget. The 50 cents I kept for binges on movies complete with 5 cent Milky Way and Butterfinger bars.
     The movies I selected from The New Orleans Times Picayune (my parents always subscribed to two daily newspapers: the Picayune and the afternoon New Orleans Item). Sometimes I'd make a poor choice, like the Saturday with my youngest brother, Tom, I sat clueless through two hours of Shakespeare's “A Midsummer Night's Dream”.
     “What was that all about?” Tom asked me outside.
     “It was about a dream somebody had one summer.” I said. “Didn't you understand it?”
     “Sure,” Tom said. “That was great.”
     ”Man, really great.” I said. “Especially Mickey Rooney.” I was eleven; Tom was six. Back then great movie critics weren't made: we were natural born.
      Sometimes, being exposed to all the glitter and temptations of Canal Street, I got careless with the math, and we might end up short on carfare to get back home. In these emergencies we had three options: beg from other passengers; sneak aboard if the boarding crowd was large enough to provide cover; or walk home. I walked the 45 or 50 odd blocks home many times later on, but not at age eleven, and certainly not with an even younger brother in my charge Begging was the safest, but the most dreadful. On one of the few occasions when it became necessary, my brother Bob was with me and volunteered, with no objections from me, to panhandle for the 10 cents shortage.
     There was usually a sizable group waiting at Canal, so choosing a mark was no problem. We started with the more prosperous and worked down to the seersucker suits and finally the longshoremen.
     “We're orphans,” Bob told our would-be donor when he'd hesitated to fork over the dime. “Our daddy was killed in the war.”
      “Sorry to hear that,” our target-man said. He was obviously not impressed with Bob's approach and countered with something to the effect: “Where's your mother, son. Does she know you're out here on Canal Street mooching carfare?”
      “She's in the hospital having a baby,” said Bob, who had a way in these situations of going for the juggler.   Bob had the big brown eyes at age eight that could make believers out of born-again cynics. We all knew, even then, that he would go far. The man rolled his eyes, smiling; I smiled in gratitude, and he gave up the dime and gave Bob a fatherly pat on his head.
     Watching the Magazine Streetcar approach from a distance, you noticed the slight waddle of its hunter green coat, a cartoon image that made it appear endearingly tipsy but forever reliable. The car picked up its first load of passengers at Canal and Camp Streets. The 7-cent fare was collected in the rear of the car; the passengers advancing toward the front. I always liked standing at the front window with the conductor and entertaining him with the latest trivia from the world of sports...like how the New Orleans Pelicans, should have won Friday's game against the Birmingham Barons.
      Straining on its steel tracks, the car executed a U-turn from Camp to Canal to Magazine Street. It then followed the river bend---just blocks away---on its four to five mile trip uptown. Much of the old architecture near the downtown area housed the urban working class in block after block of quaint two-story shotgun houses. Community life thrived on the banisters and porch swings both upstairs and down. The heart of the trolley route was the Irish Channel that teemed with churches and bars, not to mention pretty girls and tough looking kids (wearing home made crew cuts) who would give you the finger if you stared too long at their sidewalk clowning.
     We lived on the fringe past the Channel heading to the park. As the car would stop every block or so to let passengers on or off, you might nod to a neighbor you knew, or come face to face suddenly with a former “uncle” who'd deserted your mother's pregnant sister two years before. Everything and everyone seemed to converge or disperse from the Magazine Streetcar until it arrived at its uptown destination: Audubon Park. There the conductor would reposition himself at the other end of the car---both ends being identical including the trolley contacts with the overhead electric cable---then guide it back to Canal Street, a routine he would repeat a half-dozen or more times on his eight hour shift.


     And so, from the 1880's to the end of World War II, the Magazine Streetcar---of the world class New Orleans public transit system---was the primary means of transportation and the one public, egalitarian service that united thousands of families living along the deep crescent curve of the Mississippi. Then suddenly the streetcars disappeared to be replaced by buses and the ubiquitous, horn-blowing motor cars (also known as automobiles). And somehow, indefinably, life never seemed the same.