by Paul Pintarich

Though brilliantly colored and streamlined as Easter Eggs, a far cry from the clang-banging Victorian Gothic trolleys of my youth, Portland’s new streetcars are nevertheless evocative of a time when city residents moved at a much slower pace while all of Oregon was a much sweeter place to be.

At first hearing of the new streetcars’ bell, the squeaky sound of braking wheels on steel rails, a timeless sound, I felt like Proust chomping into that madeleine. A sense of the past flooded my memory and I was there again, downtown at Southwest Fifth Avenue and Morrison Street where the old trolleys converged over double tracks and cluttered traffic on streets far less crowded than today.

If you waited there by the Meier & Frank building, then as now the city’s urban core, you could catch a trolley that would take you just about anywhere. Trolley cars went westward to Northwest Portland and the old Vaughn Street Ballpark, home of the perennially hapless Portland Beavers. They went up Vista Avenue, winding through idyllic Portland Heights’ neighborhoods to Council Crest, where once there was an amusement park, built by the trolley company to attract riders (as was Oaks
Amusement Park, built in 1905 and still alive and well).

(Years later, after the trolleys had disappeared and I lived along Southwest Vista Avenue, I would see oldtimers waiting at bus stops--but on the wrong side of the street, since you could board the trolleys from either side. Graciously, the bus drivers would always stop.)

Ironically, trolleys would take you to Gresham in those days; there were trolley cars to Vancouver, Wash., at one time, even as far east as Estacada, then really out in the boondocks.   The “Inter-urban,” which ran along the east bank of the Willamette River, would take you as far south as Oregon City, with stops at Oaks Park, Waverly Country Club (“Golf Junction”), Gladstone and other stops along the way. This was a really “clickety clack” conveyance, though a bit more streamlined than the old trolleys downtown, and at night, from my grandparents’ house in South Portland, you could look across the river and see lights from the inter-urban’s windows and sparks from its trolley (which is actually the bar that brings down electricity from the overhead wires).

My grandfather, an immigrant from Croatia, was a custom tailor in Portland for many years, and, alas, a not-so-successful fisherman for most of those same years. He preferred the pursuit of catfish, or bullheads, and one of my first memories is a trip we took to a swampy lake behind Oaks Park (now
Oaks Bottom).  We left early of course, my grandfather dressed immaculately in a three-piece suit, tie, hat and leather gaiters (he was his own best advertisement, after all); me in little kid clothes and a sack lunch of pimento-cheese sandwiches (tuna is bad luck if you’re going fishing) to board the inter-urban at the old station at the west end of the Hawthorne Bridge. This was a dark, creepy place which contained the first and probably oldest “Foosball” game, a cast-iron contraption,  I have ever seen.

After boarding the trolley, we clickety clacked along the river, my grandfather explaining to me the arcane art of fishing, which I never quite understood since his English was poor and I understood no
Serbo-Croatian. Nor did I understand German or Hungarian, which he spoke as well, but I got the drift and have been fishing ever since.
 On those first trolley rides as a little kid I scooched up on the yellow wicker seats, my feet far from the floor; looking through tall windows that were usually smeared with rain that seemed to fall heavier and more frequently, giving the state its legendary reputation for web feet and dampness. 

The old trolley cars were mostly wood, dark and polished wood inside, little white porcelain call bells inset alongside the seats, and overhead bars with straps for standing riders. When I was small I was always told to give up my seat to ladies or my elders, and so I gained “sea legs” as the cars rollicked along, navigating the streets and stopping and starting at the motorman’s clanging bell.  Positioned forward or aft, depending on which way you were going, the motorman was the captain, spiffy in a navy blue suit and stiff hat and controlling the car with a small steel lever he could carry about. He rang the bell with a cord, and if the trolley jumped the wire overhead, he would swear, stop the car, swear some more, especially if it was raining and snowing, and go out to set things straight, which he could do with a long line that hung down from the trolley arm.

 Kids were always messing around with trolleys. They would place pennies on the tracks to squish them flat, they would jump on the back for free rides or, worse, throw things over the wires to derail the trolley, then pelt the motorman with snowballs or such when he was forced outside.

The trolleys worst enemy, however, turned out to be the automobile. In the 1930s, just before I was born, the oil and bus companies collaborated on wiping out the old electric railways that once ran beyond where the new light-rail systems are being redeveloped today: as far south as Eugene, along a route that is now I-5, and west along a route similar to Tri-Met’s Max line into the Tualatin Valley, and elsewhere.  It was thought in those enlightened days of the 1950s that anything old should be discarded, defaced or obliterated, as were the wonderful old 19th century cast-iron facades that once adorned Front Avenue. 

Trolleys simply couldn’t co-exist with automobiles--ostensibly because of the rails--so they were removed from Portland streets in 1950 (the inter-urban lasted a bit longer), the rails buried in asphalt and rush hour enhanced by thousands of cars.  For some years afterward, the old Portland Traction Company operated electric buses, quiet, rubber-wheeled vehicles that were powered by the old overhead wires--as they still are in Seattle--but they were never the same. No clanging and banging.

Years later, while covering urban affairs for a major Portland newspaper, I made an attempt to track the old rails, but was told by a city official that, while they knew they were there, like the old tunnels under the city, no one knew the extent of the old rail system.  Ironically, during construction of the new Portland Streetcar tracks, workmen uncovered sections of the old trolley rails still in good condition.  And, again ironically, in a time when automobiles-cell phones-SUVs seem to have overwhelmed our culture, streetcar-trolley-light-rail is coming back as a challenge and a symbol of revived humanism.

In Portland, where I was born and lived all my life so far, I love to recollect those things which are Portland, and why so many people (too many, in fact) want to come here. The more people, the less rain, it seems. But, perhaps, the more people who recognize our now mythical “lifestyle” may be concerned about preserving and enhancing what used to be taken for granted. 

“Clang, clang, clang goes the trolley. . .” Now if we could only do something about the salmon.

                                                ####