Eisenberg: The present: golden age or poorly thought-out detour?

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Updated: March 13, 2012 8:06AM

It’s nice to look back at the way things used to be. For many of us, there’s that ideal time when everything was right with the world, at least in our minds.

For example, I remember the 1970s as a time when I could ride my bike by myself to the White Hen to buy baseball cards and candy, even though I hadn’t turned 10 yet. It was a time when a trip to the Ben Franklin meant getting a Matchbox car for a buck, especially if there was a sidewalk sale going on. It was a time of afternoons at the park district pool and pickup softball games.

I was blissfully ignorant of the larger picture happening around me. A neighbor’s son had died in Vietnam, but I had never met him. The energy crisis only meant I became familiar with the cartoon characters and Captain America foes “Wattage Waster” and “Cold Air Crook.” Watergate went completely over my head and when Elvis died, I asked a friend who that parsley guy was. Inflation was something that happened to balloons.

Yet even knowing what I know now, my particular rose-colored glasses still point to those days of bouncing around a vehicle’s vast back seat unrestrained with a soundtrack provided by rock station WMET. Others may cling to their fond memories of the 1950s and ‘60s or ‘80s. Everybody has their own golden age.

My son may be experiencing his now. We’ve participated in sending items overseas for American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, have collected winter clothes for the poor and we donate all his extra candy after Halloween and Christmas to organizations that help the needy, but all of that seems to wash over him. He doesn’t care about the price of gasoline, or unemployment rates.

He’s also fascinated by public transportation and loves riding the Metra downtown. A couple of years ago, we took a “city bus” adventure, navigating the Pace routes between Steger and Homewood.

But he’d be surprised to know that the best days of public transportation don’t seem to be in the future, but rather the distant past. About a century ago, it was much easier to get places without an automobile than it is today. A hundred years ago, one could travel cheaply by electrified rail from Kankakee to Chicago, or west to Joliet and then up to Aurora.

Fun historical fact: The Joliet passenger station for the Joliet and Eastern Traction Company, which operated the electric trains between Chicago Heights and Joliet, is now Joliet’s downtown fire station.

Both routes have been proposed for reopening, in the form of the Metra SouthEast line, which would service Chicago Heights, South Chicago Heights, Steger and Crete, and the Metra STAR line, which would circle the outer suburbs from Chicago Heights to Joliet to Aurora. And while the SouthEast line has attracted enough support that it appears like it may happen at some point, the STAR line is more dream than reality right now, especially here in the south suburbs.

Those electric lines that once provided the service that some folks are trying so hard to replace now were phased out in favor of newfangled motor buses traveling over newly paved highways. In fact, the Chicago and Interurban Traction Company, which operated the line from Kankakee and Chicago, folded in the 1920s in part because of direct competition from South Suburban Motor Coach, which eventually became part of the Pace South Division.

But now, as local governments are trying to figure out how to pay for upkeep of our aging roadways and the federal government is trying to encourage ways to reduce our reliance on foreign oil imports, getting those electric mass transit lines back seems tougher than ever.

Future generations might look back to now as a golden age, when gasoline was still relatively cheap and everybody drove everywhere, but somewhere down the line, it’s going to seem like this past 100 years was a poorly thought-out detour.