The New York subway is a famous and foul-smelling landmark. It has also
been a source of rumors and urban legends.
One tells of a female subway conductor who quit on the spot after she witnessed
the aftermath of a shooting on her very first day of work.
Like so many tall tales, this story has some truth to it. Marian Swerdlow
did indeed witness a shooting on her very first day of work as a subway conductor.
"I heard a ruckus going on in the car, so I took a little peek outside
my cab," she recalls. "And I saw two men in the middle of the car grappling
with each other."
She heard two pinging sounds soon after, and after the train had pulled
into the station, she noticed three kids getting off and disappearing quickly
into the crowd. But she had no time to worry about them because the two men
who had been fighting had been injured, one badly.
The incident left her shaken and upset. "But I went back to work the next
day because I had no other choice," she says. She needed the paycheck, period.
But that was not the only reason why she applied for the job in 1982. It
gave her a union platform from where she could join the fight against the
city government of the time and its social spending cuts.
The job also became more accessible for women around the same time. "They
had just opened up these operator jobs to women," she says. "I thought it
would be exciting and interesting to be one of the first women."
It certainly was as she met the whole spectrum of people that give New
York its unique character and reputation.
"It takes all kinds to make a world, and they all ride the [subway]," says
Swerdlow. She included many stories about them in her book, Underground Woman:
My Four Years as a New York City Subway Conductor.
Wilson Hart operated subways in Chicago for 10 years before he became an
instructor with the Chicago Transit Authority. He says the best part of his
job was the people he met. "You gotta like people," he says. "If you don't
like people, then it's rough."
You also have to like working underground, for obvious reasons. Bonnie
Rasmussen has been a subway operator since 1989. She says working underground
has not really bothered her. "For the most part, it doesn't bother me.
I quite enjoy it," she says. "It's boring at times, but a lot of jobs
are boring at times as well. But I don't have a problem with it."
But the job can get boring, especially late at night. The cars are often
empty and eerily quiet during those hours as they slip through the darkness
outside.
It was not uncommon for Hart to enter a world where sleep and consciousness
would blend into an undefined swirl that played tricks on his mind. "You would
be wondering if you had stopped at a certain station," he says.
But people like Hart cannot afford to be complacent for any length of time
because circumstances can change quickly.
He had to make emergency stops on more than one occasion when people jumped
in front of his train. "I had some people who had been two or three feet in
front of my train," he says. "I didn't hit them, but I came close. That
was my worst experience as an operator."
Operators must also be able deal with impatient and rude passengers. Just
ask Swerdlow.
"We felt like the riders were mean, unreasonable, vindictive and that they
wanted to hurt us. The riders were very hard on us," she says. "I was hit
by pennies, cans [and] people would spit on me. I think I got worse than some
people because I was a woman."
This begs an obvious question. Why would anybody work as a subway conductor?
Swerdlow laughs. "This is not a job that has any intrinsic reward," she says.
"This is a job where you are going to need that paycheck."
But Swerdlow does not have regrets, and she says it was a fantastic experience.
She met her now-late husband on the job, and she gained an appreciation for
people who do not work in an office behind a desk.
"I learned a lot about people who do manual work, who do unskilled work,"
she says. "I learned to have a lot of respect for the humanity of people who
may not be educated in a formal conventional way, but who have a lot of knowledge
about the world, and about people. I was a white woman coming on to a job
[where] mainly people of color [and] men work and they were wonderful to me."
Swerdlow still spends time with many of her former colleagues. And yes,
she still rides the subway on her way to work as a high school teacher.