Forty years ago, Memorial Day moviegoers at the Ambassador Theater, 18th Street and Columbia Road, N.W., saw Ann Sheridan and Ronald Reagan in “King’s Row.” In probably his best motion-picture performance, Reagan’s leg is amputated, and he utters a classic line — “Where’s the rest of me?” — which later would become the title of his autobiography.
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.