All aboard for streetcar rides and memories

"Memories," 5 x 7 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press paper

It's ironic that downtown Oklahoma City is all abuzz with the coming of new streetcars, and the end to months of torn up streets, as with many cities today.
Those thoughts helped spur today's #watercolor, in response to #worldwatercolormonth daily challenge prompt No. 29: "Childhood Memories."
I can remember being excited to travel to Dallas from Fort Worth to see Aunt Sissie and ride the Dallas streetcars. The fascination of watching the intersecting wires, and the fun waiting to pull the cord and ring a bell to signal a stop came to mind as I considered  this painting. And the "ding-ding-ding of the bells that served as horns for people and cars. It helps that at the end of the ride, we'd manage to find an ice cream shop where I could get lime sherbet.

I had to look up photos of street cars, and I couldn't find a color scheme, though this is from an actual Dallas street car. Service stopped in about 1956.
Since then I've ridden older street cars in New Orleans and cable cars in San Francisco; and new ones in Seattle and Portland.  Yes, I'll ride the new ones here too, just for the fun of it.
But the local lines pale in comparison to what was "The Interurban" about 100 years ago which stretched from Norman to Edmond.  The streetcar played a significant role in the expansion of this city and elsewhere. 
The automobile killed street car service here and elsewhere after WWII, and today the insanity of traffic jams and commuting shows how short-sighted that was. Consider the race track of Broadway Extension. How so advanced it would be if we had rail going down the median, saving gas, time, the environment and more. 
Not going to happen in a state addicted economically, politically and culturally to petroleum.
But at least we'll have  downtown street cars, more as a tourist attraction than anything else, bypassing some of the old street car rails you can see in a few places downtown if you look. Somehow though, it won't measure up to the excitement of this kid, many years ago, getting on a trolly in Dallas.
What street cars have you ridden?

"Coming in on a wing and a prayer..." long ago

In the depths of World War II, the Army Air Force bombers returning from raids over Nazi Europe sustained terrible losses.  Many with heavy damage would barely get their crews home. 
When they made it home to a safe landing, the crews knew they were "coming in on a wing and a prayer."
My Dad was a technical artist for Consolidated Aircraft in Fort Worth, working on those bombers, the B-24 Liberators.
Thus my birth announcement, drawn by Dad--that is a B-24 Liberator engine on the stork.
My fascination with aircraft began early.
 

D-Day's blood

Some of the American dead, killed on D-Day at Normandy, June 6-1944

I think it is probably impossible to write anything original any more about D-Day, but I hope we never forget the blood and bravery of June 6, 1944. I've written about it many times, here on the blog and elsewhere, reminded that I was five months old, snug in my safe crib in Dallas, Texas, when so many died so I would grow up as a free American.

White crosses and flags at half staff march across the American cemetery at Normandy now, and bring tears, but it is good to be reminded of the real carnage, the real human cost. 

Almost 5,000 men died that day, 2,499 of them Americans, many on horrible Omaha Beach. Our allies lost 1,914. While it doesn't match the carnage of our Civil War, nor the horrible losses of  WWI, or of Russia losing nine million people in the entire war, these men are the symbol of war's terrible cost.

Here's an excerpt from War Correspondent Ernie Pyle's visit to the beach that puts that tragedy better than any writing has:

    "The strong, swirling tides of the Normandy coastline shift the contours of the sandy beach as they move in and out. They carry soldiers’ bodies out to sea, and later they return them. They cover the corpses of heroes with sand, and then in their whims they uncover them.
    "As I plowed out over the wet sand of the beach on that first day ashore, I walked around what seemed to be a couple of pieces of driftwood sticking out of the sand. But they weren’t driftwood.
    "They were a soldier’s two feet. He was completely covered by the shifting sands except for his feet. The toes of his GI shoes pointed toward the land he had come so far to see, and which he saw so briefly."

 

On a wing and a prayer

Six months before D-Day, this 9" by 12" birth announcement was sent out by my parents. My dad, a technical illustrator at Consolidated Aircraft between Dallas and Fort Worth where the B-24 Liberator bomber was built, drew this stork flying in, with a B-24  radial engine. 
"Coming in on a wing and prayer," was the war-time phrase of many bomber crews flying home with planes shot up in combat and perhaps with wounded on board. So here it is, glued to a  brittle and yellowing page out of a family album.
Dad drew the announcement, had some printed off, and then did the color paints individually. He didn't go to the war, like three of his four brothers, because he had a wooden leg, having lost it under a freight train in Tucumcari 11 years before. That's probably why I'm here at all. If he hadn't lost his leg, he'd never have met my mom. His example led me to do individual birth announcements for each of my children, but they were never works of art.
Seventy years later, I'm still trying to wing it, and praying.