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From Chapter 8, titled
“Let the Seller Beware”
My mother believed that being required to pay full fare for her children on any conveyance was a capitalist plot to impoverish her and further enrich the transportation moguls. So she didn’t. She never bothered to explain how she reconciled this theory with her aversion to paying any fare at all for her children on buses and streetcars owned and operated by the city.
For the most part, getting away without paying her children’s fare presented little challenge. Every Department of Street Railways streetcar or bus had a raised marker on the pole next to the fare box. It measured forty-four inches from the floor. People who were taller than forty-four inches paid, people shorter than forty-four inches did not.
She always ushered us quickly past the fare box, each of us in our Hunchback of Notre Dame posture, as she dropped in fare only for herself. Sometimes the streetcar conductor or bus driver would look at the three junior Quasimodos scuttling quickly down the aisle and then look at my mother as if he might say at any minute, “You gonna pay for those kids?” But she’d stare right back, and the driver/conductor would let it go, probably deciding that he’d already had a bad enough day without antagonizing a woman who looked as if she was spoiling for a fight.
I think she believed this might go on forever. But one Sunday she was confronted by the driver of a bus who seemed to be made of sterner stuff than most of his wishy-washy colleagues.
We had been downtown, and when we got on the Jefferson bus to go home, my brothers and I hurried, as usual, past the fare box and crab-walked down the aisle, staying as close to the floor of the bus as possible. When it became clear to the driver that my mother was counting out six cents to pay for her fare, while we hurried toward the back of the bus, he told her: “You gotta pay for those kids too, lady.”
In a voice that made it clear that she was highly offended, maybe even insulted, she replied: “I certainly do not have to pay for them. They’re only children.”
The driver told her she had to pay for her children if they were taller than the marker. He told her to bring us back to the front of the bus and have us stand next to the marker. If we were shorter than the forty-four inches, she would not have to pay for us—and they both knew that we were all taller than the marker.
“I absolutely will not bring them up here and subject them to your humiliating little test,” she said. When she saw us squirming nervously, she glared at us, one of her patented looks that pinned us to the seat.
“Then put eighteen cents in the fare box for them,” the driver said. She told him she was not going to do that, either. She then launched what has to have been the most brilliant and effective filibuster ever conducted on public transportation in America.
She talked about fairness and equity, about commonsense enforcement of rules, about government’s responsibilities to its citizens, and about the God-given right of all Americans to travel freely without being bullied by tyrannical agents of a transit system whose executives would be appalled to witness this sad spectacle, of a rider and her family being publicly abused and humiliated in the city’s name, and all for eighteen cents, for God’s sake.
By this time the other riders on the bus had stopped reading their newspapers or talking with their friends and turned their attention to the urban drama unfolding at the front of the bus. Jim, Bill, and I were properly impressed with, and maybe even proud of, Mae Shine’s performance. The bus stopped and started. People got on and off, although I think some passengers may have ridden past their stops, curious to see how all this was going to play out. My mother kept talking.
Whenever she paused, the driver said: “Eighteen cents, lady.”
She talked about there being no price tag on principle, and, if there was, it certainly wasn’t eighteen cents. She said she was the wife of a city employee and that all tax-paying Detroiters, not just families of city workers, deserved better treatment than this at the hands of the people being paid to serve them.
The driver, unmoved, repeated his demand for eighteen cents.
Finally, my mother said to him: “I am tired of arguing with you. Why don’t you just stop and let us off?”
He wheeled the bus to the curb at the next corner, happy at the prospect of finally being rid of his troublesome passenger and her freeloading children.
The bus stopped, the doors rattled open, and we scrambled off behind our mother. She smiled gloriously as she watched the bus drive off.
It was our stop.
What made her triumph even sweeter was that the driver, intent on collecting fares for her children, had failed to notice that she had neglected to drop in her own fare.
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Life with Mae:
$24.95
Also order from WSU
On September 14, 2007 – on what would have been Neal’s 77th birthday – Wayne State University Press posthumously published “Life with Mae,” his last and most enduring gift to us. The memoir of his mother, Mary Ellen Conlon Shine, her life in Ireland and how that shaped her life in Detroit is filled with entertaining vignettes, touching remembrances and humorous anecdotes.
Upon his mother’s death at age 78 in 1987, Neal wrote that Mae Shine “was absolutely full of life. She had an enthusiasm for living that was unequaled.” He worked for a few years on the book of his mother’s life, turned the manuscript into WSU Press in the fall of 2006 and received the edited manuscript shortly before his death. His children and grandchildren picked up where he left off, shepherding the project from the editing process through publication.
This is how Neal described his book, “Life with Mae,” in a WSU Press author questionnaire:
“Mae” is essentially the story of three brothers, including the author, growing up in Detroit in the 1930s and 1940s with a remarkable woman – their mother. Calling her “remarkable” really misses the point by a wide margin. Better words to describe her probably should include outrageous and outspoken to the point of bluntness.
She was born in 1909 in the small town of Carrick-on-Shannon, Ireland, where her father ran the depot that distributed Guinness Stout to the pubs in the region. When she was 14 she was put into service as the housekeeper for a prominent doctor in her town. As hard as she tried to imagine it differently, the only future she culd see for herself in Ireland was as a servant. She saved her money and when she had enough for a one-way ticket to the United States, she left. She was 18.
She was a woman of enormous certainties and one of the dominant principles in her life was that nothing was on the level. She believed that we lived in a society that essentially consisted of the “haves” and the “have-nots,” and that the odds were heavily weighted in favor of the “haves.” She considered herself the unofficial representative of the “have-nots” and took the role seriously.
She was the fierce protector of the clan and presided over our childhood, half guardian angel, half police officer. She worried constantly about being “taken” and did not have a high trust level. She believed, for example, that neighborhood merchants could not always be counted on to deal honestly with their customers. As a result, her sons spent much of their childhood returning groceries that did not meet her standards, which were always significantly higher than those set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration or the State Department of Health.
They were sent back with cans that were dented, fruit that was bruised, slightly wilted lettuce, soft tomatoes, bananas mottled with brown spots, flaccid celery, mushy green peppers, meat, especially hamburger, that was sticky to the touch, eggs that were too small or carried the remnants of henhouse residue, lunch meat sliced too thick or too thin and hot dogs with traces of color not indigenous to the original product.
She was also a woman with a vibrant spirit, the gift of laughter and an abundance of love, all of which she generously lavished on her children.
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