UP ON MICHIGAN AVENUE, N.E., where Washington’s battered buses once rumbled into huge garages for a night of rest and rehabilitation, the machines, materiel, and manpower are quietly being readied. Inside these cavernous quarters, an impressive array of sleek state-of-the-art equipment — some of it said to be one of a kind — has been assembled, tested, and retested.
At 45 minutes past midnight on July 1, 1955, a haggard Walter J. Bierwagen, president of the D.C. Transit Workers Union, left the negotiation room that recently had become his home away from home. For months, the 2,400 or so members of his union had been seeking a quarter-an-hour raise and a few other contract sweeteners from the Capital Transit Company, which operated most of the buses and all of the streetcars within the metropolitan Washington area.
Wired to Washington
“The first essence of journalism is to know what you want to know.” John Gunther once wrote. “The second is to find out who will tell you.” Gunther, who died in 1970, was one of the 20th century’s most ambitious and prolific journalists: He knew what he wanted to know, found out who would tell him, and told the rest of us in Inside Europe, Inside U.S.A.,
Continue reading