Connections and Coincidences

Alice Kay left a comment on the recent entry about riding a trolley car with my dad saying, "I've got a story to tell you someday. It's about an old trolley car that was being restored in an old building in Dushore quite a few years ago by a guy my dad knew. He had Steamtown connections."

So when time permitted, Alice Kay told me about a friend of her father's named Ed Blossom that had a trolley car renovation and repair shop in Dushore, Pennsylvania. As you might know, her father owned a short-line railroad called the Towanda Monroeton Shippers Lifeline, which was part of a branch line of the Lehigh Valley Railroad that ran to Dushore, Pennsylvania and further south.


Ed Blossom, with the help from some friends, purchased the remains of the Lehigh Valley Transit Company's trolley car #801 as well as some other train and trolley cars, and established the Dushore Car Company in the small Sullivan County, Pennsylvania town. Ed was well known in the trolley restoration world from coast to coast and he was recognized as an authority on the value of transit vehicles.


After some rumination, Alice Kay decided that in 1976, shortly after she married her husband Terri but before her oldest child was born, she and Terri visited Ed's repair shop in Dushore and saw LVT #801 upclose and firsthand.

In 1977, the Dushore Car Co. restoration shop was moved to a two-track car barn built adjacent to the Topton-Kutztown branch of the former Reading Railroad in Berks County, Pennsylvania now the tourist Hawk Mountain Line running a steam engine.


On September 24, 2000, after spending 33 years seeing to it that the (then) 88-year-old trolley car built in 1912 by the Jewett Car Company in Newark, Ohio would be preserved for future generations, 71 year old Ed, watched the trolley car loaded onto a a flat-bed trailer near a rail car barn on the outskirts of Topton to begin a new chapter of its life in the Electric City Trolley Station & Museum in Scranton.


Its exterior restored, right down the the distinctive LVT Co. gold-leaf lettering and arched "stained-glass" windows, the 65-passenger, 41-ton car is undergoing mechanical and interior restoration in the museum's car shop where I saw it on May 1, 2010.

The power of people behind the blogosphere and the Internet awe me.

We are all connected to each other in many ways and many ways in which we are not aware.

Something prompted me to take a closer look at LVT #801 - I couldn't put my finger on the "what caused me to do that?" and it was only later, harnessing the power of Internet searching, that this connection - this link between me and someone else - surfaced.

In memory of Edward Henry Blossom, October 20, 1930 - November 22, 2004. I think I would have greatly enjoyed sharing a lunch hour or two with the man.

Source one
Source two

A Bedtime Story

The crowd gathers...


The chanting starts....

"IGGY! Read us a CHARLIE story! IGGY! Read us a CHARLIE story! IGGY! Read us a CHARLIE story!"

So I pulled out the book I received in the mail yesterday from someone that just somehow knew I was going to be needing a good story to read to the gang.

...and so it was, I settled in and started to read them the tale of "The Forgetful Squirrel".


In my deep, sonorous John Forsythe-like voice, I read, "Once upon a time (I always start a story that way even if the stories don't actually go that way) snow glittered on the branches of the trees in Southfield Wood. Their leaves had long ago fallen, and the bare bark looked cold and grey beneath its white frosting...."

"Oooooooh," trilled the Bluebird of Happiness from Virginia, "I love how this story starts! Especially that 'Once upon a time' part!"

"Eeeekkkkhheeeeee eeeeeeekkkkk meeeee ooooooooot oooot tooooo," replied Bluebird's buddy, the Banana-toting Monkey with a big grin.

"Chirp chirp! Good story choice!" tweeted the Robin in the Nest.

I looked up and saw the Conas Bothers acting disinterested and "too cool" for little kiddie stories although they elbowed their idol, Gene Simmons, out of the way so they could hear better.

Sippy the OCHA just smiled and rubbed the Pooh stickers on his belly.

The beauty pageant Queens were all behaving prim and proper, one might of thought they were performing at the Miss America pageant.

Stinky, the gassy OCHA from Mobile, Alabama, towered behind the rest of the crowd, pushing them all closer in his eagerness to hear more about the forgetful squirrel.

As I continued to read, one by one, their eyes slowly lowered as they nodded off and journeyed into the land of the sleepy dreams, their heads filled with misplaced acorns. Quietly, I placed a soul comfort bookmark at the page on which I left off and headed to the sofa to do the very same.

Everyone was looking at... (SBE or NIBE)

Walking as much as I do, I usually try to find new places to walk now and then as I either get bored with the scenery or the regular folks mad at me and my insisting on hogging the right-of-way as a pedestrian.

The bikers soon get tired of me watching them run off the path when I won't get over. But with Spring once again here, I have this urge to re-visit some of my favorite places to walk - just to check things out and to make sure things are still where I left them when the dark cold winter months came.

And so it was yesterday I was walking the other way on the Schuylkill River Trail, from Betzwood toward Norristown, eager to see how some of my favorite little buddies had survived a rather hard winter.


When I encountered these Orange ConeHead Aliens (OCHAs) trying to stand on the other's shoulders to get a better view, I had to chuckle... being cone-shaped means needing about a dozen fellow cones to cooperate in order to get a better view, and the ones down below can't see anything at all!

It didn't really occur to me to check and see what the silly OCHAs were looking at - I mean, from past experience, I know that they like looking into holes in the ground and into car tailpipes.


But then I saw these Orange Round Barrel Aliens (ORBAs) trying to get a better view by standing on each other's shoulder too. Hmmm, something was definitely afoot. I slowly turned and peered around, looking for what it was that held their attention, and saw...


...a very rare and very hungry quintet of Plutoian Orange Black-Mouthed Suckers (POBS) waving in the breeze, trying to attract some unsuspecting prey into their mouths. They too were looking around. I heard one say, "Num, num, num, I like my orange juice freshly squeezed and pulpy."


I had first pictured in my mind, given the ill-orange blood between the OCHAs and the ORBAs, some gang of ORBAs had cornered a solitary cone and was heckling and kicking it while they had superior numbers. Those nasty ORBAs are such cowards! But this wasn't the case - this time.


Of course, those disgusting ORBAs must know better than pick on an OCHA. Some of those OCHAs are really, really strong and powerful, like this one that I once saw, able to hold back an automobile simply by leaning on it.

I decided to cross the street to see if I could get a better look of what the stacked OCHAs and ORBAs were looking at. Under my feet I saw some...


...very strange markings. Two white arrows pointing to a half closed, all-seeing eye surrounded by fresh OCHA blood... Was this the scene of a ritual offering to the OCHA gods? Or was it a crime scene waiting for Horatio to arrive in his Hummer? I tried to read the lettering, u-w-d-1? The longer I looked at it, the more I decided reading Mayan glyphs was easier.

My head was about to explode as my two surviving brain cells overheated and started smoking from the deciphering effort. Don't laugh...


...it's happened before, see? This poor OCHA stands next to the remains of its long time mate who's brains have exploded. Or perhaps the destroyed OCHA was the victim of this...


A Quadra-headed Ray of Light Beam Alien (QHROLBA, trust me, you need to speak Klingon to pronounce this one). You may have seen one of these before, remember the movie, War of the Worlds? H. G. Wells (or even Tom Cruise) might be able to tell us if the dead, shredded OCHA was killed by a QHROLBA, but my feeble powers observation and deduction were stymied.

And then I saw what everyone was looking at...


...out in the green meadow, surrounded by flowers, basking in the warm sunshine, were my rusty balls... Oh my.

All photographs except the last one supplied by Photojournalist, LadyStyx.

A Melancholy Day

As some of you know, my Dad had a mild heart attack recently, and the medication they put him on has left him anemic, short of breath, and in general, easily tired. With Mother's Day coming up, he has been sort of "out of it" - and I'm not sure just why.

Perhaps it's because of the recent loss of his "second" mother. I don't know, my Dad is about as close to the vest kind of person as they come.

He mentioned wanting to go to Scranton (the home of the TV show, Office) to see the old trolley and street cars there. The Electric City Trolley Museum is located next to Steamtown, a National Historic site preserving and explaining steam locomotives.

Regardless of the steam heritage, Scranton calls itself "the Electric City" since it was the first city in the USA to have an entire system of street cars operating entirely by electric.

I told my Dad I would be glad to join him in a trip to the museum and yesterday, the first of May, and the first day the museum's trolley car resumed excursions for the summer season, we went.

When we pulled into the parking lot, my Dad's tired eyes lit up.


The green trolley car to the left, with a destination sign in the upper-left window saying "Erie Avenue" was one of many similar ones that my Dad rode to High School and other places during the immediate post-WWII era. When he and my Mom moved into the Philadelphia suburbs (it was the country side back then), they saw the orange "freight" trolley regularly. The freight trolley was used by the Lehigh Valley Transit Company to bring milk and bread to the city and take mail and hardware out to the farmers.


Just a little further down the track was red, white and blue Car #206 (built by J.G. Brill Co. of Philadelphia in 1931) is one of the Philadelphia & Western’s (P&W)famed "Bullet" cars, named for their pointed streamlined ends.

Bullet car #206 continued to rocket along the P&W tracks under Red Arrow and later Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority (SEPTA) management where it got its garish paint job.

My Dad nudge me in the side and said, "You and your older brother probably rode in that car." It seems that when my older brother was "fussy" as a toddler, my Mom would take him for a ride on the "P&W" from Norristown into Philadelphia and back - letting the gentle sway of the car and the rhythmic clackety-clack of the rail soothe my brother and ease him into a nap.

Apparently it worked, and my Mom did the same with me.


On a bright sunny day, the excursion trolley waits for some riders to board. Car #76 (built by J.G. Brill Co. in 1926) is a "Center Door" car originally built for the Philadelphia and West Chester Traction Co.


This trolley roamed the "Red Arrow Lines" system from 69th Street Terminal in Upper Darby (Philadelphia) to suburban terminals in West Chester, Ardmore, Norristown, Media and Sharon Hill.


My Dad found the exhibit of trolley wheels to be great interest. My dad pointed out that the "trolley" is actually the round wheel at the end of the pole - the word stems from the word "troller", the device that allows an electrical current to pass from an overhead wire to a streetcar. The trolley car is the vehicle. My dad's like that.

At any rate, he and his father made many of the trolley wheels used by Brill trolley cars, along with repair and replacement parts in the family's brass foundry. He pointed out a couple in the display case "he might of made."


My dad says he might of rode this trolley back in the day with his father. He sat on the wicker trolley seat a bit winded from the walk from the museum building to the trolley station grinning like a two year old.


The excursion trolley ride went along a couple tributaries of the Lackawanna, a stream that flows into the Susquehanna River in Wilkes-Barre. The trolley line was once called "The Laurel Run Line" as it went from Scranton to Laurel Run just east of Wilkes-Barre.


The pride of the museum is P&W trolley car #46 which was built by the St. Louis Car Co. in 1907. This trolley was found abandoned in a field being used as a storage shed. Now restored, it literally gleams from the loving attention it garners from the volunteers that work at the museum.

I put a poor quality, short video of the ride we took on the trolley (here). The first part was shot in the "Crown Avenue Tunnel" which was completed in 1905. This tunnel is one of the longest interurban trolley tunnels ever built at 4750 feet. The second part shows the seemingly ruralness of the ride through the valley. The last part shows the far end of the trolley ride - the car barn at the baseball stadium where the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees, the AAA affiliate of the New York Yankees play.


For much of the ride back to the museum, I watched my Dad looking out the trolley car window and pondered. Was he lost in the many memories of trolley riding in his youth? Was he contemplating obsolescence, the passing of the trolley car and the no-longer used trolley wheels that he and his father made? Or was he just enjoying the passing scenery, happy to be able to take this ride?

I don't know. I do know one thing. He's my dad and I'm glad he felt good enough to go to the museum and spend the day with me.