"Image courtesy of www.PicturesNow.com"
Transportation
Over sixty years later, I look back at
ciity-life in the 1930's, and it wasn't anything like city life
today.
Oh, people still ran for a streetcar, but
there weren't many automobiles and no subways, so if you missed
the old rackety Toronto Transit, you might miss an appointment
while waiting for the next streetcar to come along.
The cars weren't jammed full like they
are today. You actually sat in a seat, even if it was wooden and
very hard.
The streetcars, themselves, were made of
wood. You entered by the front door, but you paid the "ticket
man" your fare. He was stationed half-way down the car and
beside him was a pot-belly stove, for heat. When the streetcar
came to the end of the line, the driver would get out and switch
the trolley and go to the back of the car and drive back from
there, to the other end of the line.
My brother recalls that adult fares were
four tickets for twenty-five cents at one time. I remember a nickel-fare
for me on the rare occasions that I rode.
People walked, if they could, and I was
one of them. I walked to school, day in and day out, through all
of my school years. In the evening when going out anywhere, unless
it was right downtown, people walked.
More of us went out evenings just 'for'
a walk, and usually it was for miles. To walk alone after dark
in Toronto, didn't make me nervous because I lived in "Toronto
The Good" and did not even think about it. It is, however,
something that I would not do today. I guess I am looking back
at Toronto as more of an overgrown small town, compared with today's
city.
Roller skates were one of my favourite
things, and my mother thought nothing of sending me on errands
on my skates, even knowing that I skated on the road. By the way,
the roller skates. then, did not have boots; they were an extendable
metal plate so that they could be adjusted for the size of your
shoe and you carried a key to tighten the four clamps that held
your shoed foot tightly in place. I carried my key on a string
around my neck.
Traffic, today, has difficulty dealing
with bicycles, but, sixty years ago those who had bicycles made
good use of them. They were as much a part of the traffic as horse-drawn
wagons, which will be another story.
So, transportation included automobiles,
streetcars, bicycles, roller skates and definitely "shank's
pony" (walking).
~Joan Adams Burchell~ (copyright)
