Geez, Cece! Lighten up! http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_325.html It’s not like there wasn’t a pop singer named Phoebe Snow.
I must confess the small vice of being a railroad buff. I’m intelligently sheepish about this. I’m not hardcore or anything but the affliction does possess more than a faint whiff of arrested development and other rail buffs often scare me to the point where I ache to become a transvestite performer — with all the improved social status that implies — instead.
But it just so happens I grew up alongside the tracks of the Erie-Lackawanna Railroad and remember both it and its famous express train with great, embarrassing gobs of nostalgia. Amtrak and most modern-day commuter service are drab, sterile, utterly uninspiring substitutes for what once was and Phoebe herself used to shake the house while coming down on the neighborhood with the roar of a tornado — a delightful sensation to just about any young boy.
So, anyway, I thought some of you might like to see some photos. The first one is a shot of the back of the Phoebe Snow’s famous tavern car preparing to leave Hoboken.
http://www.modelrailwaypo.com/images/gallery/PhoebeSnow.jpg
The second, I confess, is taken off of a mug some outfit it selling. But it gives you an idea of how sharply designed the outside of the train was.
And finally, here are a bunch of the ads Cecil mentioned with also some links to Scranton’s Houdini museum.
My grandfather was a conductor on the Phoebe Snow in the early part of this century. I have his conductor’s watch and chain, with one of his uniform buttons (from the Eire Lackawana line) as a fob.
A piece of history.
Advertising Jingles for Phoebe Snow.
Note the schedule in the corner
The Lady in the ads.
http://www.members.tripod.com/njrails/20th_Century/DelawareLackawannaWestern/Phoebe/ps10.jpg
http://www.members.tripod.com/njrails/20th_Century/DelawareLackawannaWestern/Phoebe/ps1.jpg
http://www.members.tripod.com/njrails/20th_Century/DelawareLackawannaWestern/Phoebe/ps2.jpg
http://www.members.tripod.com/njrails/20th_Century/DelawareLackawannaWestern/Phoebe/ps3.jpg
http://www.members.tripod.com/njrails/20th_Century/DelawareLackawannaWestern/Phoebe/ps5.jpg
Phoebe perpetuates a stereotype.
http://www.members.tripod.com/njrails/20th_Century/DelawareLackawannaWestern/Phoebe/ps8.jpg
http://www.members.tripod.com/njrails/20th_Century/DelawareLackawannaWestern/Phoebe/ps11.jpg
http://www.members.tripod.com/njrails/20th_Century/DelawareLackawannaWestern/Phoebe/ps12.jpg
It would have been nice had Unca Cece gone on to explain what relationship, if any, the singer’s name had to the train. I looked her up on the net, and according to the Bio on her official site, she was born Phoebe Ann Laub, so Phoebe Snow is obviously a stage name, and quite likely derived from the train. But can anyone confirm or deny, and if confirming, indicate why she would have chosen to name herself after a train?
Oh, and Faldage? I agree! The question was a reasonable one, and the questioner didn’t deserve to have his or her throat jumped down. Sorry if that’s blasphemy, folks.
When I first read today’s column, I, too, wondered “Who peed in his cocoa?”.
I consider myself reasonably well-informed and I had no idea that Phoebe Snow referred to anyone other than the singer. Then I noticed the date of the original column. At the time it was first published, there were considerably more people around for whom the original Phoebe Snow was a pop-culture referent. Nearly thirty years later, I suspect there are a lot fewer. Seen in this context, Cecil’s sarcasm seems somewhat less arbitrary.
Still, I question the validity of including the knowledge of 75-year-old advertising gimmicks, dreamed up to promote now-defunct modes of transportation, as an essential component of historical awareness.
But, then again, what do I know?
Please pass the nuts.
Lampare
At the time this column was originally published, Cecil insulted almost everybody who posed a question. It was part of his schtick, and the people who wrote in expected it. Ceci has…hmmm…changed… a bit over the years.
I, for one, am glad I stirred up some of these links to the original Ms. Snow. I do remember having heard of her but she’s not the first thing that would jump to mind upon hearing the name.
Jeez, everyone’s so sensitive nowadays. If you can’t handle a little sarcasm, what good are you? There should always be a place in this world for biting wit and gratuitous barbs. And if a world-class smart ass like Unca Cecil can’t get one off every now and again, then I just don’t want to live any more. Where’s my laundry marker? I’m going to draw a dotted line accross my wrist. Dweebs.
Long-distance passenger service ended on the Erie-Lackawanna in January of 1971. As Cecil noted, the Phoebe Snow vanished in the wake of Thanksgiving 1966. It was, therefore, a memory of reasonably recent vintage at the time of Cecil’s column — especially in Chicago its western end-point.
The DL&W ain’t all gone, though, or all Conrail. The current Morristown line of New Jersey Transit was doing business as “Erie-Lackawanna” 40 years ago.
Cecil’s sarcasm was completely justified. Phoebe Snow (the pop singer) was born in 1952; her first album came out in 1974. It would take an EXCEEDINGLY dim squirrel to believe that a dance was created “sometime in the 60s” in honor of an anonymous teenager who had not yet changed her name.
– Beruang
And yet children are still told they have to repeat the Pledge of Allegiance.
But indeed, some advertising gimmicks do, willy-nilly, become part of a culture. To take a far older example, any speaker of English who does not know that the slogan of
Pickfords in the 1880’s was “We carry everything” is, to that extent, culturally deprived.
I didn’t feel culturally deprived until now, but as an English speaker in an English speaking country, I’m mystified as to why I would be expected to have heard of Pickfords, or that “we carry everything” is a slogan rather than a simple statement of fact. Even by the 1880’s English had gotten a lot further than that small pond called the Atlantic. 
In Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe; or, The Peer and the Peri, the Fairy Queen has put the young, half-fairy Arcadian shepherd Strephon into Parliament. Thus:
Thanks for that JWK, I now feel much less culturally deprived. I have to confess my exposure to G&S had thus far been limited to the fine work of Sideshow Bob. 