DATE: Monday, October 13, 1997              TAG: 9710120076

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B3   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: COLUMN 

SOURCE: GEORGE TUCKER

                                            LENGTH:   88 lines

THE LAST ``OWL EXPRESS'' RUN ENDS IN A HOOT OF DESTRUCTION

Oct. 16, 1894, was a milestone in Norfolk's public transportation history. On that day, the first electrically driven streetcars began clanging through the city, which had depended on mule and horse-drawn cars since Aug. 12, 1870. Like all good things, however, the trolleys had their day, and, on July 12, 1948, Norfolk's powered streetcar system, which had been taken for granted for 54 years, came to an ignominious end.

Fortunately for social historians like myself, Robert H. (``Bob'') Mason, then a reporter but later the editor of The Virginian-Pilot, was assigned to cover the last run of Car No. 407 (the ``Owl Express'') from City Hall Avenue to Ocean View. Unfortunately, Mason's superbly graphic account is too long to reprint in its entirety. Even so, what follows, with colorful quotes from his graphically written story, will indicate that the ride from downtown Norfolk to the southern strand of the Chesapeake Bay became a bedlam on wheels in short order.

Crammed to the doors with what appeared to be ``a normal Saturday night crowd - sailors, night workers, beach vacationers, late shoppers and a few drunks,'' the car headed northward at 12:40 a.m., at which time more of the passengers, in violation of the usual regulations, began smoking without restraint. This caused Mason to speculate later: ``Maybe that was the tipoff on what was to come, but nobody could have thought much about it at the time.''

Soon after the car reached Ninth Street, its trolley jumped the wire and the lights went off, causing a pincurl-sporting chippy to scream, ``These things ain't modern! The city oughta get rid of 'em!'' Her cry for action sparked the first violence, for before the Fairmount Park area was reached, the more aggressive male passengers had begun to tear down the advertisements that rimmed the top of the car's walls. But that was only a curtain-raiser to the vandalism that followed.

To quote Mason: ``The strap handles were next. Men stood on seats and tugged at the leather and wire that held them to the ceiling. They twisted and jerked until the straps yielded.'' Once this mayhem got under way, things really jazzed up. ``Back windows were being kicked out when a frantic mother hurried her little girl over the littered floor out the door in Norview. Fixtures on the buzzers along the wall were pried off, then the naked wires were crossed. The buzzers howled all the way to Ocean View.''

Still the wreckage already inflicted didn't satisfy the yahoos aboard. ``Women begged for strap handles until nearly all were taken,'' Mason continued. Then a woman asked for one of the drop-light globes, and the demolition accelerated to a new level. ``A man chewing a cigar stub and wearing a blue playsuit, with a pint in his belt, unfastened the nearest one and began to pull on the loosened end,'' Mason wrote. ``To increase his leverage, he braced one foot against the car top. That did it, the globe hinge gave. The man plunged backward and downward, across the heads and backs of other passengers into the aisle. Everything within 10 feet seemed to break - except the bottle.''

Egged on by this bravado, other rowdies got into the act and ``other covers were then opened and light bulbs were unscrewed and hurled to the floor amid great popping. Windows everywhere began to crash, sending splinters of glass through the car. A gang of youngsters in the back pulled the first cushions from their seats, and within a minute the rear door was blocked. One seat sailed through a window. Others followed.''

At that point ``a sailor wearing a third class motormac's cheveron,'' whose exit line later climaxed Mason's account, ``pushed himself up from the seat where he was sprawled, blinked into the semi-darkness, rubbed his reddened eyes, and went back to sleep.'' This brief interlude was quickly followed by a girl in a blue waitress' uniform who yelled, ``Tear it up! They're going to burn it when we get to Ocean View anyway!''

This battle cry gave a fresh impetus to the destruction, for according to Mason, ``So great was the bedlam that the stuck buzzers no longer could be heard,'' to which he added, ``There was a searing flash overhead, and the car went black.'' But W.A. Hoggart, the motorman who had driven the ``Owl Express'' on its last run, was still at the helm. His determination elicited Mason's admiration, for he wrote: ``Hoggart, the motorman, gripped the control lever as if he feared that too would be torn from its setting. His jaw was set, his eyes glassy, as the car neared the golf course.''

The determined Hoggart made it too, for according to the next-to-the-last paragraph in Mason's rip-roaring account, ``At the Ocean View station half the passengers rushed off, the other half stayed on to break what glass remained and to pull out the last cushions before the police came. The car was dead now and wouldn't start. It was 2 a.m. and a couple of busses would take her place. It was the end of an era.''

But that wasn't the end of the story. Just before the riot squad pulled up, the third-class sailor mentioned earlier in Mason's saga, who had slept through most of the ruckus, roused himself and staggered through the streetcar's jammed back door. His exit line was Norfolk's irrelevant statement of the year.

``Where in the hell,'' he muttered to nobody in particular, ``is the Portsmouth ferry?''

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