The 200-plus miles of streetcar tracks that once reached into nearly every neighborhood in Atlanta are long gone, replaced decades ago by buses, trains and private automobiles.
But one remnant of the old system is still very much alive and thriving: 92-year-old Earline Seale. And the first woman to steer a Georgia Power streetcar through Atlanta more than 70 years ago can’t wait to see the city’s new streetcar system unveiled in a few months.
When a 2.7-mile streetcar loop from Centennial Olympic Park to King Center opens sometime this fall, Seale hopes to be among its first patrons.
Hers was a job that almost didn’t happen — and probably couldn’t have happened if American men hadn’t gone off to fight in WWII, leaving a labor shortage that women like Seale boldly stepped in to fill. But it soon became the best job she ever had.
Seale still keeps mementos from her days at the helm. They include a color portrait of her wearing a navy blue operators’ cap cocked jauntily to the side, and about half a dozen newspaper clippings.
“I loved this job, I did,” Seale said, as she leafed through the articles and photographs on her kitchen table one day last week. “It just seemed like we were so free.”
‘I wasn’t one to sit around’
The city of Atlanta is currently screening and hiring operators for the new streetcar’s opening sometime in the fall. Sharon Gavin, spokeswoman for the Atlanta Streetcar, has heard about Seale and says she would be an ideal recruit even today.
“You can teach people to operate a vehicle, but you can’t really teach that sort of intangible charisma and way of working with people and customer service focus,” Gavin said. “She seems to be so what we’re looking for even now.”
With her wavy black hair, blue eyes and red-lipped grin, Seale was a natural choice to become the face of the first female streetcar operators. Her cheerful image graced posters that promoted Georgia Power and its new hires.
Seale had only been married for a month when her husband, Army 1st Sgt. Franklin Seale, shipped out to Europe in 1942. When they wed, Seale had quit a job as supervisor at the Colonial Bakery to become a homemaker. But she found herself growing restless at home alone.
“I wasn’t one to sit around on my butt and do nothing,” Seale said.
She hadn’t planned on piloting a streetcar. But in 1942, she drove a friend to fill out an application at the Georgia Power trolley office and wound up snagging a job for herself after deciding to apply on a whim. She started out working in the trolley office “hot seat,” taking inquiries from streetcar passengers.
When a division supervisor stopped by the office one afternoon, she took a chance: she’d prefer to be in the driver’s seat, she told him.
He readily agreed. But then Seale worried aloud that the other ladies in the office might accuse her of receiving preferential treatment. She’ll never forget his reply.
“He said, ‘You don’t give a damn what the others say, you think about Earline,’” Seale recalled. “All my jobs I’ve had since, I’ve remembered that I need to think about me. I’m the one that’s got to do the work.”
87 cents an hour, plus extra training
Seale’s salary was on par with those of men, 87 cents an hour, which was top pay back then, she said. (A pair of one-way trip tokens cost just 15 cents, whereas a single ride on the new system will cost $1).
It wasn’t an easy gig. Shifts often started at 2 or 3 a.m. Driving required constant clock-watching to stay on schedule and vigilance to avoid children and vehicles that darted in front of the streetcar. Company officials took pains to reassure the public that the female streetcar operators were just as competent as their male peers.
One ad featuring Seale’s picture said, “The training program for women operators is even more thorough and painstaking than for men, requiring about three months longer” than the typical four months it took to become a full-fledged operator.
Atlanta was racially segregated until the 1960s, and that separation of the races carried over to the streetcars as well. Black passengers had to sit in the back while white riders sat up front. Seale said she cannot recall having any problems on her streetcar arising from racial tensions.
“It was just the custom, and they went along with it,” Seale said. “People didn’t talk about black and white (issues) then. Blacks went where they went, and we went where we went. There wasn’t a whole lot said about it.”
Her routes changed from day to day, but she often piloted a streetcar to Decatur.
A beer delivery truck parked outside of a bar blocked her path on several days, causing delays. When Seale tried to talk to the driver about it, the man laughed and sneered, she said. So Seale warned that if he didn’t quit leaving his truck there, she would knock his rearview mirrors off with her streetcar.
“Sure enough I come by there the next day and he was parked in the same spot at the same time,” Seale said. “I just put that thing in go. And honey, I went by there like a bullet. I broke every window in that streetcar.”
Looking back, “it’s a wonder I didn’t get fired for that,” Seale said.
She didn’t, though. And the beer truck driver never parked in her way again.
She quit, her husband hired on
Seale quit her job shortly before her husband returned home from the war in 1945.
But after he was discharged from the Army, her husband began working as a streetcar operator for Georgia Power. Seale decided to go back, too.
Those plans were dashed when a routine pre-employment medical exam revealed she was pregnant. Back then, you couldn’t work on the line if you were pregnant, she said.
Georgia Power’s last streetcar went out of service in 1949, due largely to the postwar popularity of the automobile. Trackless trolleys and buses replaced the streetcar system, and over time the lines that once served as crucial arteries through town were either torn up or paved over.
The company still prides itself on its role of powering and operating the city of Atlanta’s first electric streetcars, and it issued a statement Thursday thanking Seale “for her service to our company, the city of Atlanta and for sharing her story.”
Seale went on to have two sons, now 67 and 57, and later a 34-year career working in Kroger grocery stores in various customer service roles. Today she is enjoying retirement, living independently with Franklin Seale, her husband of 73 years, in a tidy white house in Covington.
Gavin, the Atlanta Streetcar spokeswoman, said Seale is welcome aboard the new streetcar as soon as it’s ready to launch.
“I would love to have her out for one of the first rides,” Gavin said.
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