cover image Transit Talk: New Yorks Bus and Subway Workers Tell Their Stories

Transit Talk: New Yorks Bus and Subway Workers Tell Their Stories

Robert W. Snyder. Rutgers University Press, $35 (192pp) ISBN 978-0-8135-2576-1

Snyder, managing editor of Media Studies Journal, dedicates this book to his grandfather, who was a transit worker for 48 years--and this paean would make any grandfather proud. Snyder gets right to the point: there are 44,310 transit workers in the system and they somehow manage to transport five million people daily. Adopting an approach reminscent of Stud Terkel's, he lets the workers tell their own ""war stories."" Some are sweet, like when a baby is born in the last car of a train and is named after the nervous worker who helped in the delivery. Others are more grim, as when a jumper lands under a train and miraculously lives. ""Why did you do this?"" the worker asks the woman. ""No one loves me,"" she replies. He says, ""I love you. Why would I crawl under all these cars?"" The transit authority, we learn, has traditionally been a haven for immigrants, from the Irish of the 1920s to the Jamaicans of today. It provides jobs, as one worker points out, of ""secure poverty""--you'll never get rich, but you'll pay the rent. The author goes on to tell of scam artists in the subways, such as the ""token suckers"" who actually suck tokens out of turnstile slots; and of how quickly death can come to a track worker when he or she steps on the third rail. There are tales of ghosts of dead track workers (the ""ghost"" turns out to be the smoke of a track fire) and a heart-warming story of a bus driver who used to wait for the ""scrubbies""--the cleaning ladies from the Empire State Building--every night so they wouldn't have to wait another hour for a bus home. This is a terrific book for railroad buffs and Big Apple aficionados. (Dec.)