Transportation History (or Leave the Driving To Us) There is simply no denying the effect Greyhound Bus Lines has had on the United States for the past century. Greyhound is a staple of the American landscape, and it’s safe to call it an American institution; in fact, few transportation companies have been as directly connected with American history (and the American public) over the past 100 years. Greyhound bused people from rural areas to the cities in the 1920s, shuttled soldiers across the country during both World Wars, carried migrant workers during the Great Depression, and brought the Freedom Riders across the Mason-Dixon line in 1961; it has moved, and in the process helped to shape, America. Greyhound started 100 years ago in Hibbing, Minnesota, a mining town of about 9,000 people, on the foundation of a failed car dealership and the broken dreams of Swedish immigrant Carl Eric Wickman. Born Martis Jerk on August 7, 1887, in Våmhus, Sweden, Wickman immigrated to the United States in 1905. After briefly living in Arizona, he moved to Hibbing, where he worked as a drill operator in a Mesabi Range mine until layoffs cost him his job in 1914. Having invested $3,000 to start a Goodyear Tire and Hupmobile dealership, Wickman had bright visions for his future, overlooking the fact that low-wage miners would probably not be ideal candidates for new automobiles. Predictably, Wickman’s fall-back career as a car salesman was a quick failure, and he was unable to sell a single Hupmobile. Strapped for cash, Wickman realized that while the miners were unable to purchase a car, they did need transport. A good portion of the miners either lived or drank in the saloon town of Alice, Minnesota, two miles away from Hibbing. Wickman decided to start providing transport to his former coworkers. Benefiting greatly from his most recent failure, Wickman used the only car in his inventory, a blue 1914 Hupmobile seven-seat tourer, as a shuttle, charging miners 15 cents for the two-mile trip from Hibbing to Alice or 25 cents for a round-trip. In 1926 Wickmans bus operations became known as Greyhound Lines. An important moment in Greyhounds history came when Ed Stone set up a route from Superior, Wisconsin to Wausau, Wisconsin. The Greyhound moniker can be found in a story that during his inaugural run, passing through a small northern Wisconsin town, Stone saw the reflection of the 1920s era bus in a store window, which reminded him of a greyhound dog and he adopted that name for that segment of the Blue Goose Lines, as the Wickman lines were then known; later the entire system became Greyhound.
Posted on: Fri, 15 Aug 2014 04:27:12 +0000