This is a piece about Eldo Kanikkeberg, The Singing Motorman. It’s pretty self-explanatory. The Seattle Waterfront Streetcar is no longer in operation.
Ye Olde 99
The streetcar run is a lot of fun
To the Waterfront Special you’re welcome to come,
Let’s all take a ride today,
The Metro fare is regular pay,
Oh the one-eyed car on the railroad track
Will certainly bring old memories back,
The smooth electric train,
You can ride without any pain,
Old 99 is on its way,
And we’re all sure it’s here to stay.
* * * *
Down to land’s end on the shores of Elliott Bay in Seattle there runs an old-time streetcar clickety-clackin’ down the track, giving tours of waterfront destinations from Pier 70 in the North on down to Pioneer Square, then up the hill to Chinatown. For the most part, those that ride ride for the fun of it, out on the town on a day off or on vacation.
Hey Jack! This aint no sit and stare inside yourself commuter ride… this is The Waterfront Streetcar. And the man up front stepping on the bell and pulling on the air horn is Eldo Kanikkeberg, The Singing Motorman; six-foot two and two hundred thirty-five pounds of maximum out there personality, and Norway’s gift to the popular culture of the Pacific Northwest.
Get the picture: The Streetcar is a two person operation. The motorman is up front in the driving compartment while the conductor hangs out inside the car, opening and closing the door, taking money and tickets and acting as tour guide and congenial host to the multitudes. And come summertime, we pack ‘em in good. I was conductor to Eldo’s motorman for seven years and that’s a lot of up and a lot of back.
Eldo sang and laughed and told jokes and acted silly for everybody on the Waterfront Streetcar. He loved his work. His job description: singing and laughing and acting silly for everybody. Driving the streetcar was the work’s vehicle, what moved it along. So he loved that too. (Are you listening?)
I can hear him now with that Norvegian twang:
“Now just the other day my friends Ole and Sven were fishing in the bay out there and boy were those fish yumping! Well after a good day fishing Ole says to Sven he says, “Sven, this is a heck of a good place to fish, we better mark the spot and put an ‘X’ on the side of the boat.” Well Sven shook his head. He didn’t like that idea too much. “Why you dumb son-of-a-gun,” he says, “how do you know we’re gonna get the same boat tomorrow!?”
Eldo sat up in the front of Ye Olde 99 just driving along: pulling handles, blowing the air whistle in rhythm, banging on the bell and all the while singing Streetcar songs that he would make up set to traditional popular melodies. Or else he would be thumbing through his book of Norwegian jokes (yokes!), preparing for the next golden moment.
Stuck at the passing track or at the end of the line or just stopped at a light, Eldo would throw on the brake, walk back through the car to where I stood, grab the mic and it was showtime. We had an old beater guitar from 1940 painted with a picture of Roy Rogers and his horse Trigger that Eldo would bring for me to play and we would do it: sing together strumming madly faces pressed to the one hand-held microphone and jam ram those tunes.
“Ooh ooh, it’s the Streetcar run,
The Waterfront Streetcar line,
Ooh ooh, it’s old 99,
The Waterfront Streetcar is right on time.”
Or one I wrote for Eldo to the tune of Chuck Berry’s “No Particular Place to Go:”
“And now we come to the end of the line,
I change my poles and I check the time,
I light up a smoke and it’s time to split,
With a clackety-clack and a clickety-click,
Wavin’ hello and drivin’ slow,
With no particular place to go,”
Eldo had been a bus driver with Seattle’s Metro Transit for thirty years, and he had always shown up singing and kidding and putting a distinctly light touch to his work. But when he landed down on the Waterfront he broke new creative ground. The Singing Motorman did the work his way, and an otherwise rigidly ruled Metro Transit had to expand its universe to accommodate him!
Eldo was a great teacher for me. As I said, he was way out there. He would sing his songs and tell his jokes and in these ways speak himself so clearly; and he would do it for anyone… anytime. No worries here about what other people were thinking. Not a whisper of holding back. Absolutely no retreat and no surrender… and he would drag me with him. He taught me about self-expression and about finding a way out by finding a way through to being and doing what fills my heart. And he taught me by simply being and doing who he was in a bold, powerful way. Eldo so was so damn insistent; bald-faced, arrogant, self-consumed. God he could be obnoxious and a bitch to work with! But he had a message of joy and fun and good will that you couldn’t smother. That the world couldn’t smother.
When he wasn’t “on the job,” The Singing Motorman was still working at it, playing accordion in a German strudel band or entertaining with his one man Norvegian lounge act. In fact, when Eldo died suddenly one Thursday afternoon, he was caught in the middle of a song he was performing at the Norski nursing home on Phinney Ridge in Seattle.
* * * *
A beautiful summer afternoon on the Seattle Waterfront. At every station another mob scene waiting to happen. Eldo’s got his shirt wide open and his collar up and he’s moving and shaking it like he’s Elvis or something as he grabs the mic and lets loose with another yoke from the Ole and Sven collection. And then the music, the hokey lyrics, the bottoms-up open-faced balls of it all. A lot of people love it, smile, clap, hoot. You can see some others disdain the silliness, wonder why we’re making asses of ourselves instead of driving the damn streetcar down the track. But those folks, they’re in the minority. And anyway, Eldo’s never ever going to acknowledge them, or even think about them. You see that’s just not part of this big man’s job description.
