No. 175 - Interurban

I'm currently reading a book titled Hanging On: Or How to Get Through a Depression and Enjoy Life by Edmund G. Love. The author graduated from high school in June 1929, just before the stock market crashed in October 1929, which many consider to be the starting point of our country's First Great Depression.

If, as some believe, we are currently in the Second Great Depression and it just hasn't been announced yet, I thought this would be an interesting read to get some perspective on what it was like back then. Our collective memory of that era now consists of men with fedora hats standing in soup-kitchen lines, or perhaps of Franklin D. Roosevelt declaring: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” As the parents of the Baby Boomers pass on, firsthand knowledge of 1930s America is vanishing.

Edmund Love was quite a storyteller - he passed on in 1990. The book is quite interesting.

I enjoy when I come across a word that was used in the past but has disappeared from our current vocabulary. Recall that I learned the definition of "drawing room" back in Post No. 82. That word was also used around this same time period.

Last night I stumbled on another such word. On page 88 it was written:

In the spring of 1930 while I was still in Kemper, their car had been struck by an interurban during an evening drive. Mr. Berry was killed and Mrs. Berry was paralyzed from the waist down. The old lady had spent more than a year in the hospital and had finally been brought home in that summer of 1931. She was helpless and needed the services of a full-time nurse, but in the months since the accident the interurban company had gone bankrupt and there had been no financial settlement.

Did you find the unique word? Interurban? I made a mental note to look up the meaning of it today.

I learned that an interurban is a type of electric passenger railroad that enjoyed widespread popularity in the first three decades of the twentieth century in North America. It was basically a high-speed trolley between cities. At present, what once was called an interurban is now categorized as either commuter rail or light rail depending on operation and may include urban streetcar lines.