ep14 Two Days on a Streetcar

A Russian immigrant rides continuously for two days on streetcars. Two kings bet on a wrestling match. A ballad retracted from intended obscurity makes an operator internationally famous. Can you imagine that? These completely true facts and others, ladies and gentlemen, are going to be paraded before you in just a few minutes by your narrator, Lindsey McCarry and his co-workers on this session

of this broadcast series. We'll return in just a minute and a half with the first one. Number one on our parade of amazing facts and news stories.

In these days the bewildered traveler of the world over receives every possible assistance in his journeys from many kinds of agencies, not so with Rosie Kameninski, however. It was on the last day of November in the year 1999 that Rosie, a recent arrival from Russia just three weeks previously, left the home of friends on Third Avenue in Brooklyn to return

to the home of Mrs. Mary Eulman on 59th Street where she was employed, but Rosie didn't return. Mrs. Eulman waited patiently and then anxiously, but Rosie was apparently swallowed in the maw of metropolitan civilization. Rosie failed to return to the Uleman home for two days. Then a fellow countrywoman, Mrs. Mary Lopitska, discovered Rosie Kameninski on a

streetcar, and the thoroughly frightened young Russian girl was able, at last, to make herself understood. Up to that time, knowing virtually no English, unable to convince anyone of her plight, poor Rosie had been riding around Brooklyn on streetcars for forty-six hours. Can you imagine that? You know, some of our customs of the day have their origins so far back in

time and antiquity, that it's pretty hard to trace them. But I think that here's one you'll enjoy hearing about, because so many of you might have experienced it. It's the origin of the bridal shower.