Trolley Thursday 10/29/20 - Charlie on the MTA

Talk to any musically-minded rail enthusiast and you'll be met with plenty of hits that celebrate the colorful history and identity of America's railroads. From bittersweet ballads like Arlo Guthrie's "City of New Orleans" to joyful hobo songs like the "Wabash Cannonball", it seems all of America's railroads has its identity and popularity set in musical form. Oddly, the same cannot be said for street railways; perhaps it's their mundane nature that keeps them from being romanticized in song, or it's the fact that Meet Me In St. Louis' famous "Trolley Song" is enough to fill the nostalgic void. However, in the City of Boston, there is one song that's lived on in fame, and infamy, about what was once one of the most confusing fare systems ever implemented on a street railroad. On today's Trolley Thursday, make sure you take along an extra dime as we look at the odd and colorful history of Boston's most famous subway song: "Charlie on the MTA."

The Fares Ain't Fair

A Boston "Type Two" car on the 152 Elevated Line,
proudly proclaiming its status as a "Prepayment" car.
The term was BERy nomenclature for a
"Pay as you Enter" streetcar.
(Public Domain)

The song's origins are both incredibly humble and absolutely ridiculous for our modern, car-driving tastes. In the late 1940s, the Metropolitan Transit Authority (better known as the MTA at the time) devised a fare increase for the rapid transit subways. Simply put, if a subway rider who paid ten cents to ride desired to then transfer onto a streetcar, the conductor would have to charge them five cents more to exit. Understandably, both operators and passengers in Boston was perplexed (and enraged) by the fare increase, as charging an exit fare was tantamount to kidnapping and highway robbery! The MTA, undeterred, chose instead to explain their new system to the citizens and operators of Boston's subway in an almost-mythical 9-page (some sources say 15!) informational booklet. However, it doesn't take 9-15 pages, or even a single sentence as I summarized here, to show that exit fares are a bad idea. As Boston was in the midst of a mayoral election in 1949, it made sense for the candidates to make the fare grievances a campaign plank and understand the pain of the people. 

The Man Who Never Became Mayor

Walter A. O'Brien in his campaign office, 1949.
The sign behind him reads "Walter O'Brien says: NO FARE INCREASE."
The man in the photo is unknown.
(Yale Joel, LIFE Magazine)

One of these mayoral hopefuls was Walter A. O'Brien, an Irish-American candidate representing the Progressive Party. O'Brien desired to make the public's opposition to the fare increase a major part of his campaign, but the problem was he lacked any money to campaign on his own. To get around this, O'Brien began commissioning local folk artists to write his campaign songs, and play them on the radio to drum up support. Two of these songwriters were Manhattan native Jacquelin Steiner and Texas woman Bess Lomax Hawes (of the Lomax family of folklorists and ethnomusicologists). Both had heard about O'Brien's left-leaning political beliefs and decided to offer their songwriting talents in support. Steiner wrote the lyrics, while Hawes borrowed the tune from the old folk song, "The Ship That Never Returned" (known better to railroaders as "The Wreck of the Old 97".

Jacqueline Steiner later in life.
(New York Times)

Bess Lomax Hawes meeting with President Bill and First Lady Hillary Clinton
in 1993, when Hawes received the National Medal of the Arts.

Steiner and Hawes recorded the song, then titled "Charlie on the MTA", quickly and O'Brien was very proud of the end result. As the campaign wore on in Boston, he drove around town in a truck armed with a loudspeaker and blasted it to all who would hear him. Unfortunately, the Boston Police Department also heard O'Brien's sonic campaign and fined him $10 for "disturbing the peace". Worse still, when the race had finished, O'Brien came out dead last with only 1.2% of the votes. With his progressive politics further denigrated as "Communism" into the 1950s, O'Brien disappeared into obscurity. Similarly, Steiner and Hawes both moved onto different things, both safe in the assumption that their campaign song would be forgotten like the candidate they wrote it for. 

An October 1949 snippet of the Boston Globe, eagerly reporting on Walter O'Brien's
many supporters at the time.
(Boston Globe)

The Hit Transit Song of 1959

The Kingston Trio At Large, 1959.
From left to right: Dave Guard, Bob Shane,
and Nick Reynolds.
(Capitol Records)

Enter the Kingston Trio, one of the first bands to ring in the folk revival of the late 1950s. Originally formed in Palo Alto, California, in 1954, David Guard, Bob Shane, and Nick Reynolds included the song on their fourth album, "The Kingston Trio At Large". The first and only single released was the song "Charlie on the MTA", now renamed to "M.T.A.", in 1959, and with that came some changed lyrics. Presumably, the group's interest in calypso music drew them to the subway song as it mentioned a "Jamaica Plain" among the lyrics, but the lyric extolling "Walter O'Brien" for the listener's vote was changed to a more generic "George O'Brien". The change was due to the Kingston Trio wanting to avoid being seen/heard promoting a "communist" candidate, which actually got the song banned from being covered thanks to Will Holt, who recorded a version that got him blacklisted in 1957. Nevertheless, the song spent eleven weeks on the Billboard Singles Chart and made "At Large" the number-one album in the US for fifteen weeks. But what made this silly little satire about the Boston Subway resonate with listeners all over the world?

Charlie's Journey Home

Kendall/MIT Station on the Red Line today.
(Curbed Boston)

Submitted for your approval: one "Charlie", a married man with a loving wife who wants nothing but to get from Kendall Square (now Kendall/MIT on the MBTA Red Line) to his home in Jamaica Plain (a streetcar suburb 4 miles southwest of Boston's North End and accessed now by the Orange Line's Green Street station). After paying his ten-cent fare, he desires to transfer but the conductor immediately stops him, demanding a nickel. Now the poor man is trapped on board, unable to exit at all!

MBTA PCC no. 3001 (nicknamed "Queen Mary") takes Charlie for a ride in a 1950
Boston Globe cartoon, with his poor wife chasing after with a sandwich in hand.
(Boston Globe)

As the song progresses, Charlie laments being unable to see his "sister in Chelsea/or [his] cousin in Roxbury", with his only other point of contact being his wife that meets him at the Scollay Square Station (now the Green/Blue Lines' Government Center station) to give him a sandwich. For want of a nickel, poor old Charlie is now stuck on a one-way trip into... the Twilight Zone. Wait, no. Not the Twilight zone, umm...

Three different modes of public transit meet at Arborway Yard, Jamaica Plain.
The PCC is one of the 25 double-ended cars purchased from Dallas' streetcar system.
Notably, none of these vehicles carry anyone named "Charlie" aboard.
(Jamaica Plain Historical Society)

In any case, the journey he makes is not completely impossible. At the time (1949), he would have changed at Park Street for a streetcar and boarded the what is now  the Green Line "E" Branch for Jamaica Plain (this line was later cut back to the town's northern edge in 1985). Prior to the introduction of the confusing fare increase, transfer points were considered "pre-payment" zones, with only the showing of a fare enough to allow transfer between subway and streetcar. Still, the comical tragedy of Charlie, forever lost in a sea of confusion, resonated with many listeners who heeded the song's warning that "it could happen to you" as they too most likely felt frustration with their local public transit. 

Charlie-mania (Covers, Tributes, And More)

A children's book adaptation of the song was produced by
Walter O'Brien's daughter, Julia, in 2017 that retells both
the song and its backstory to a wonderful illustrated backstop
of Boston. It can be bought here.
(Commonwealth Editions)

The song's popularity spread immediately, surprising its original songwriters and the transit agency it was written in protest of. Many musicians began referencing the song dealing with themes of people being lost in almost impossible places, such as songwriter Fred Small who parodied the song as "Sergei in the Milky Way", referencing the Soviet cosmonaut Sergei Krikalyov, who was momentarily stranded in space when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 for 311 days. Other artists, like the Front Porch Country Band and even former Kingston Trio member Bob Haworth wrote sequel songs, of Charlie finally getting off the MTA train. Even the band that some say defines Boston, the Dropkick Murphys, recorded their own punk version with a skinhead hi-jacking the train instead. Outside the world of music, the feelings evoked by Charlie's hapless voyage came to be shorthand for "getting confusingly lost in the system", and his name was a catchall for criticism of local Boston city hall politics.

The Charlie Card

The CharlieCard's illustration, showing a man on a Green Line-schemed train
 clutching his ticket to freedom triumphantly. 
(MBTA)

The biggest boost in the song's popularity came in 2004, the MBTA finally canonized the song's popularity by creating the contactless fare system known as the "CharlieCard". Originally planned as the "Fare Cod" (punning on both the infamous Boston Accent and the city's association with cod fishing), then the "T-Go", the card was intended to replace forms of paper fare with a contactless system allowing for refillable fares and no paper waste. Further improvements included less staff to distribute tickets, and an expiration date on Charlie Cards to dissuade losses from riders continuing to use the same card over and over.

Not even the children are safe as the MBTA unleashes
a terrifying costumed mascot into its subway stations,
promoting the Charlie Card system in 2012.
(Boston Globe)

With the MBTA's Green Line being one of the busiest light rail lines in America (230,000 riders per weekday can't go wrong), the card also needed to be secure to combat fare evasion. Fare validation was done on a small pad that scanned the card for the appropriate amount, and a paper receipt was then dispensed showing a proof of fare. When the cards were publicly unveiled, then-Governor Mitt Romney joined the then-current members of the Kingston Trio to sing the song. Today, ten transit agencies across the Greater Boston Area accept transfers and fares via CharlieCard, especially if one's going from Kendall/MIT to Jamaica Plain by way of the new Downtown Crossing Station. 

But Did He Ever Return...?

Today, no folk band repertoire is complete without the comical tragedy of "Charlie on the MTA", and Charlie Cards continue to see use in and around Boston as it's the only fare besides relevant passes and coinage still accepted on public transit. Walter O'Brien died in 1998 at age 83, by then entertaining reporters who found his name in the song and wanted to interview him. Jacqueline Steiner, who lived in Cambridge, MA, when the song was written, died on February 5, 2019 at age 94, while Bess Lomax Hawes became a noted folklorist who died on November 30, 2009 at age 88. All three came to terms with their funny little song by the time they transferred into that great connecting service in the sky, and who knows? Maybe they're riding along with Charlie now, offering to at least pay for his exit fare.

Et tu, Charlie?
(Brian Solomon)

Thank you for reading today's Trolley post, and watch your step as you alight on the platform. I hope Halloween is good for you all, and we've been able to entertain you just in time for the spookiest time of the month. My resources today included two New York Times obituaries on the songwriters of "Charlie on the MTA", a Dissent Magazine article detailing how the song was banned and what happened to Walter O'Brien after, and of course a link to actually listen to the song here, plus the Dropkick Murphys' version. On Tuesday, we start our look at Washington DC's rich streetcar and rapid transit history! Until then, you can follow myself or my editor on Twitter, buy a shirt or sticker from our Redbubble stand, or purchase my editor's self-developed board game! It's like Ticket to Ride, but cooler! (and you get to support him through it!) Ride safe!