History
Gurdon Wattles bought the Omaha and Council Bluffs Railway and Bridge Company, or O&CB along with several competing local lines and merged them into one unit called the Omaha Traction Company in the early 1900s. Wattles continued using the O&CB brand. In 1943 the company began training women as streetcar operators after many of its male drivers were called into military service during WW II. The women learned quickly and were paid the same wages as their male counterparts. The company disbanded with the creation of Metro Area Transit in the early 1970s.
Read more about this topic: Omaha Traction Company
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“The reverence for the Scriptures is an element of civilization, for thus has the history of the world been preserved, and is preserved.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)