My name is Robert Poellnitz.
When I was at CTA, I was a streetcar driver.
I was born in Pennsylvania in 1927.
My father was a coal miner, and when the coal ran out in Pennsylvania he brought us here.
I went to school at Phillips, and then I left Phillips and went into the army and stayed
in Korea a year, and came back to Chicago and looked for a job at CTA.
I started on the streetcar, and that streetcar was at 39th & Cottage Grove.
That was a streetcar bond.
So I left the streetcar bond after they phased it out and went to Archer Avenue and they
trained us on the buses.
There was only a few Afro-Americans there at that time and I stayed there 13 years in
order to get to 77th Street, so I could have the weekends off.
So I drove trolley bus.
I drove Green Hornet.
In the shops it's like most things in those years.
The whites stood here and the blacks stood there.
We both drove the same buses, you know, but that part there when we got there.
And the neighborhoods was different then.
When you went to certain neighborhoods they'threw eggs in the door and call you names and all
that stuff.
It's a lot of stuff we went through.
You learned how to roll with it, you know?
I stayed there -- it was nice -- it was a good living -- you know -- and I liked the
uniform.
Everything was blue then.
The fire department, police department, and CTA, we had uniforms, you know.
It was nice, it was just nice.
I felt good driving the car with the blue uniform on.
There was good stuff.
I enjoyed it.
As time changed, people change.
The bosses were good, the bosses understood what was going on.
And so, the accolades that I received, I was getting some during that means things began
to change a little bit.
It was a good living, and we had good people working with you.
And the bosses was good.
But, it was a job.
You took the good with the bad.
And I kept thinking I want to get off these buses because these buses was hurting my back.
And so I got utility and got off the buses.
It was real good then because things got better.
I knew where I came from, and I bought a home.
I took care of my family.
And I just kept moving on.
I went on to trucks in '69.
That's utility and tractor trailers and everything.
You learned how to drive trucks.
When the train got derailed at first somebody would call was utility.
And we had equipment to put it on.
And so, we would go out and do this and we had the big truck -- you got the big truck
and you got a partner -- and we'd go out.
So this right here is putting a train on the track because fire department does a lot of
stuff now that we did then.
Then I made supervisor.
So that means I was the head of that department plus four other supervisors.
I wasn't driving the trucks no more, I was in charge of utility.
And we had dispatchers, and they dispatched out like they do 9-1-1, 3-1-1, and they called
me.
My na -- mine was 202.
And that was the bosses, 202.
Anything happened over the city, don't care where it was, 202 got it.
Then on the big snows we was out there trying to pull buses, tow buses, that was bad.
Because they had to move the bus.
Sometimes it would take 4 or 5 hours to move a bus 10 feet.
And I think at the time when Martin Luther King came through, they burned up that bus
at 71st Street.
I got a call to go there.
I had the bad, but I had the good.
You learn how to roll with it.
Well, my wife worked and I worked.
So I would bring my daughter out and let her sit behind me.
And so I would keep her until such and such a time and then take her home.
So it was like babysitting.
Someone had to babysit, so I took her on the bus with me.
My best memory was when I was getting the diplomas and all that stuff knowing I was
doing a good job.
CTA is like the fire department, the police department.
It was a family, and you helped each other out.
And I think about it sometimes what I went through, and I might shed a tear or something,
because it was good.
I can't complain.
I enjoyed it.