public figures

 

One thing about public transport here is that I haven’t seen public figures on it, unlike New York where Mayor Bloomberg rides the subway.  Years ago, I met Gary Locke canvassing for votes at the Federal Way bus transfer stop, but that has been the extent of my transport encounters with public figures.  Or rather “public figures” in the narrow sense.  In a broader sense, there are people who are not politicians or celebrities, but who have developed a public persona, a visibly noticeable image that sets themselves apart from the rest of us. Those are some of the sorts you will see on public transport.  Today’s blog will be about three of them, riders who enrich the texture of commuting.

 

To begin with, in order of proximity, there is “Three-fingered-Jack,” the grizzled-bearded street musician, often to be seen in Diversions with a newspaper and coffee. He invariably rides the afternoon bus to Seattle for Mariners and Seahawks games, carrying his fold-up chair and battered guitar case, and has dibs thanks to age and disability to the front bus seats.  If you don’t know, he’ll tell you.

 

Then there is another man of the hippy generation, but with more bizarre facial hair, who often rides the morning bus to Tacoma.  Details of his costume had indicated to me he was a clown (the hayseed denim overalls stopping above the ankles, with candy-colored striped socks and overlarge shoes below).  Yet his lumbering bulk seemed too intimidating and his features too hard-bitten for any parent to want to hire him to entertain a kiddy birthday party.  The sort of clown he was became clear in last November’s Seattle Weekly article on the “Pike Street All-stars.”  His public name is “Squeaky Tom,” who after a series of hard knocks is trying to make a living selling varied shaped balloons at the Market.

 

My last example is not a public entertainer in a professional sense, though he performs. He may not have a street name like Jack or Tom, but he has fashioned a public image with his fashionable dress of yesteryear. When he rides the buses in Seattle, he joshes with the drivers and fellow passengers, calling them “young whipper-snappers.” Old-fashioned expressions come naturally to describe him, since he is two years short of being a century old, as he proudly told us on the bus last week.  He’s a “nifty dresser,” something like George Raft, periodically seen on the Turner Classic Movie channel.  He wears his hats (including the kind of stiff straw boater hat that stopped being common street wear in the early 1930s) at a rakish angle, and sometimes has a “boutonnière” on his lapel.  He cuts a jaunty figure on the sidewalk, even or especially with his cane. He is in his public encounters, what in 19^th century France was called a “flâneur.”

 

If you’re into people watching, as a flâneur of today, public transport is a good way to go.

 

 

Wallace,

Staff