I found some old train/transit pictures I took 1976-1981 of some terminals. In it were pics of people boarding trains or sitting on a train.
Some clothes styles were definitely dated -- some men still wore fedora hats (very narrow brim by those days), some women had their hair in a 1960s curl. But the younger people looked pretty much the same -- styles have reverted back to the 1970s look. Some of the people, even on a rush hour train, looked like senior citizens or close to it.
When I looked at the people, I realized 25-30 years had passed. A teenager then would be a full adult today, a 20 year old would be 50. It makes one wonder what happened to those people. The older people may no longer be with us.
I also wondered how many of those people are still living in those towns and if any are still commuting. Given that so many businesses have moved out of the central city to the suburbs I tend to doubt it. Also, many of the residential neighborhoods served have changed.
At the time the telephone company was a major employer. It needed service representatives, operators, and accounting clerks. Undoubtedly some of the commuters I saw were Bell employees (the neighborhood served was a rich source of that type of worker that Bell preferred). Today billing functions are consolidated in large service centers as are the service reps where labor and real estate are cheap. Two large Bell office buildings downtown were vacated.
(Sometimes I wonder how geographically dispersed my own high school class has become -- how many still live within the city, how many live within the metro area, and how many moved out of town. For those that moved away, why? Was it voluntary to seek something better, or was it forced as the only option?)
I believe geographic stability -- multi generations staying within an area -- is a healthy things. Developing roots to a community gives a community stability and a richness.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Sometimes it was voluntary, other times it was essentially forced (as in, move to town X if you want to continue your employment with us; don't bother if you wish to seek employment elsewhere.) During World War 2 my grandparents and my mother just assumed we would always live in Coffeyville. One thing about that war was that soldiers therein were _guarenteed_ their jobs back when they returned. That was the law, at least in those times. My grandfather was too old to be in the war, of course, but my father was the right age. In 1946 when there were _massive_ discharges of troops, the guys came back home and went back to work. The law said 'you get your job back if desired, even if the person(s) who were hired in your place have to get dumped.' In the oil industry, they took that to mean 'same pay or better, same job or better' and with the technology improving even back then, there had to be a lot of movement around the country and elsewhere. My father was offered his choice of staying in Coffeyville at same pay for six months (all the government required) _or_ accept a transfer to East Chicago, IN at the refinery there, _or__ accept a transfer to Caracas, Venezuala, where Sinclair had an operation going, _or_ accept a year's pay and get lost. In the latter two cases, 'Chicago area' (as they described the refinery operation in the north) or Caracas, Venezuala the job would be 'permanent' with a substantial raise in pay.I was only four years old, maybe five. My grandfather made the decision for us; he was offered a position in Whiting at a raise in pay (so that his old job in Neodesha, KS could be made available to whomever had done it prior to the war). He grabbed it up; mother wanted to be with her parents, so the decision was made to 'relocate north'. Dad and grandpa came first, to find us homes; mother and grandmother stayed behind to sell our old homes, then came the day when the three of us boarded the AT&SF train in Coffeyville to join dad and grandpa in the 'Chicago area' which was totally foreign to mother and grandmother, and me as well, then being about 7 I think. Little did I expect I would be around the area for a half-century. Grandpa died in the early 1960's; my dad stayed on with the refinery until 1978 when he reached retirement age. He and my mother brought grandmother back here to Independence to live where the company known as Sinclair had become Atlantic-Richfield. Grandmother died in 1980, dad followed her in 1991; _still_ I chose to remain in Chicago until it just got to be too rough for me there; in 1999 I found a job oppor- tunity I liked much better in Junction City, KS and happily moved away from the Chicago area, I think 52 years after I had gotten transplanted there.
People who have been here in Independence say the town appears to be 'stuck in 1940s mode' and to some extent that is true. But my brother, (named Daniel, in his early 40's) tells me all the changes which have happened in Chicago since I moved away; it is hard to imagine. PAT]