One of our most popular blogs is “HOW DID ONE GET TO THE PENTAGON IN 1944?”
I finally got the “real scoop” from Marie Early:
“I am 93 years old and went to work for the War Dept in Washington DC in June of 1941 five months before the start of WW II. I was 18 years old and had just graduated from high school. I was hired based on my civil service exam from Montana and I traveled across country by train to my first paying job. I was working in one of the first War Department offices that moved into the Pentagon after it was completed in 1943. I lived in NW Washington, D.C. and took the city bus to work every day via Pennsylvania Avenue to 14th Street across the Potomac on the 14th Street bridge. The road went under the Pentagon to the bus stop under the building where everyone got off.”
Guess I depended too muuch on rail and trolley experts.
Our featured image shows bus driver training
The company history does jive:
In 1933, all streetcars were brought under one company, Capital Transit. The streetcars began to scale back with the rising popularity of the automobile and pressure to switch to buses. After a strike in 1955, the company changed ownership and became DC Transit, with explicit instructions to switch to buses. The system was dismantled in the early 1960s and the last streetcar ran on January 28, 1962.