![]() ![]() In Jack Kerouac’s “ On the Road,” the car was the vehicle of liberty for the bohemian kids of those working-class Brooklynites. Yet it was also in the mid-fifties that the hipsters and beatniks and rebels feverishly celebrated the car and the burst of autonomy, even anarchy, it offered to postwar life. Public transportation was the self-evident bedrock of working-class life. What’s striking is that no one watching in the fifties needed to think about any of this. When Ed and Ralph go to Minneapolis for a Raccoons convention, they take a sleeper car on a train. ![]() Neither the Kramdens nor the Nortons seem to own an automobile. He and his best friend, Ed Norton (Art Carney), who works in the sewers, make daily use of the subway and bus system, which was designed to whisk the outer-borough working classes into light-industrial Manhattan. His employer is the Gotham Bus Company, which seems to be the sort of private-public enterprise that, like the I.R.T., built the subways. Ralph Kramden (Jackie Gleason) is a New York City bus driver, deeply proud to be so and drawing a salary sufficient to support a nonworking wife in a Brooklyn apartment, not to mention a place in a thriving bowling league and membership in the Loyal Order of Raccoon Lodge. ![]() “The Honeymooners” (1955-56), the greatest American television comedy, is-to a degree more evident now than then-essentially a series about public transportation in New York. ![]()
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