OM226 - The Death of Trolleys

This week, Ken and John talk about:

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John’s dad grew up in Seattle in the 1920s and 1930s and he couldn’t afford the $0.05 to ride the street car, but in his knickers and leather shoes that required some stange wood-handled hook to tie he would run after, grab ahold of the cow catcher on the back an crouch down and ride. A fare of $0.05 (Nickel-fare) became the mandated national standard-cost of a street-car ride.

Decomissioned trolleys sitting in a barn in Portland (OM226)

In the early 1970s when John was a kid there was a trolley barn in Portland, Oregon where all the retired wodden trolleys from the Portland trolley system were stacked one on top of another, piled up, because they had never gotten around to set them on fire. Throughout the 1960s and 70s you would see these big dumping grounds of old trolley cars at the outskirts of American towns. Some of the trolleys got converted to busses and they are beautiful to see, a little thing that clearly used to be a train that now is a bus.

Even by the time they were retired those trolleys were pretty decrepit and they just sat stacked one atop the other. John has a picture of himself and his sister when he was probably 5 and she was 3. For whatever reason they were in their Sunday best, she was in a white ankle-length dress and John was in a little white suit with a blue bow-tie, and they were standing inside of a very old trolley car with the windows all busted out, the floor and ceilings made of very weathered wood, and that car was sitting on top of another car and there was a car on top of it. Their dad had hoisted them up there somehow for this photograph, child safety not having been invented yet.

John getting a baseball cap that says Précisément from a listener (OM226)

A listener sent John a flat-brimmed baseball hat saying Précisément. John totally loses it because he is so happy about this gift. A few years ago he was dating a San Francisco tech company lawyer who moved to Los Angeles to become a lawyer for an even bigger tech company. She is known on John’s other shows as Millennial Girlfriend. The other lawyers in her office used to listen to some of the shows and they would tease her and call John peepaw.

At one point she bought John a baseball hat that had been custom-made by some Internet entrepreneur, some young rich guy who owned a tech company that was worth $1 billion and who had a couple of black baseball hats made form himself and his friends that said Entrepreneur across the front. She got John one of those hats through her insider trading and gave it to John as a gift, which she thought was funny. For a long time he wore this baseball hat around in order to please her and there was a picture of him in his Entrepreneur baseball hat

In response to someone who had said something that is correct John will often say Précisément. It is just another affirmation. Someone on the Internet was goofing around and photoshopped John in his entrepreneur hat so that it said Précisément and John loved it because it looked so cool. At some point along the way he said that he really wished that this hat was actually a real hat and not just a photoshop.

Now some friend out in the world has made a Précisément hat made and it looks exactly like the picture and it is really embroidered into the hat. John can’t think of a gift that has made him happier than this hat!

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