The Big Board

Half a century ago, when I was a young and callow fellow, I worked on Wall Street. Well, really in an office on Broad Street, but it was work for a Wall Street firm, Burnham and Company. It was clerical work, and the boss was a total prick.

In those days "The Street" was still very much awash in paper, Actual stock certificates were delivered between firms with "runners," retired guys, who were making extra money. The New York Stock Exchange was sometimes referred to as The Big Board. The American Stock Exchange was still referred to as The Curb, because in their early days they had no building and were flashing buy/sell orders from the street, the curb.

Until recently, The Big Board could be meant to mean the arrival and departures board in Penn Station on the Amtrak level, pictured above. The Big Board was electronic, but not an LED display. Letters and numbers rotated within their spaces to update travelers of the status of their train. You would heard the ratcheting driving the movement of the characters as they spun somewhat like a slot machine. If you were lucky, the next spin might tell you what track to descend to. Bad luck meant you were delayed, or cancelled.

The Big Board was visible from either side, and hung over the staircase to the lower level. I remember the old Penn station when a green chalk board was used as the arrival/departure board and someone would come out from behind it and write in chalk what the status was. I also remember the sliding metal destination signs that were hoisted at the gates to the tracks below, to tell you where the train was going. I remember as a kid watching the signs change, and seeing what I thought were faraway places be posted: like Cincinnati.

In those days my mother and I took the Broadway Limited to Chicago to reunite with her Illinois relatives., The train left at 4:00 or 4:30 in the afternoon, and was due in Union Station, Chicago by
9 o'clock the next morning. My mother went off the idea of flying ever since the United Airlines plane we once took couldn't make it past Toledo in a terrific rainstorm on night, and we had to land and spend the night in Toledo, put up in a hotel by the airline. Imagine that. We weren't made to flop in the Toledo terminal. Planes then couldn't fly above the weather, so you could be in for some real knuckle rides. Too much for my mother's nerves. Trains, thereafter.

Like meeting under the clock at the old Biltmore Hotel, The Big Board was an easy mark to tell someone where to meet you. It was under The Big Board that I told my Australian Twitter buddy @justjenking where to meet me before she and her husband got on the train headed to Washington, when Jen got to tour the White House with her press credentials, and even have her picture taken at the podium used for the daily news briefings, briefings that in the Trump Administration have become so popular that Maureen Dowd in her column today describes the press secretary, Sean Spicer, as a star of daytime "must-see TV." Every time I see the podium I think of Jen as the press secretary. She's better dressed.

But The Big Board is no more. Jen sent me a link to a story that reports on its replacement, and wonders where we would meet now if the situation came up again. She was here perhaps once, and already became nostalgic.

What actually happened the day we met, I had instructed Jen and her husband to be under The Big Board. It turned out, they weren't, but not really their fault. Replacing The Big Board was already underway, and they had installed one of the new "video screens" at the south end of the station, the 31st Street side. The Big Board was still there, but now there were two arrival/departure boards.

I cursed when I realized there were now two boards, but luckily Jen saw me first with the agreed upon red cap I would wear. (I have an Australian cricket cap, but I opted for a more domestic marker.) They were under that south side board.

There is now a matching north side, or 33rd Street side "video Screen" hung near the bathrooms, which even after a fairly recent prolonged renovation are a sorry use of porcelain. The new video screens of course do not make noise when things change. No one comes out from behind it with a piece of chalk and writes in beautiful handwriting the status of the trains, and they are not visible from either side. They are TV screens, after all.

Will a rendezvous meeting place be harder to describe these days? Sure. I think now it will have to be "near the Hudson News place."

I sat near the owner of Hudson News once in the Trustees Room at Belmont race track once, Robert Cohen. His horse won that day.

The racetrack was another place the green chalk board and attendant with the beautiful handwriting was replaced by blinking lights. He posted the winners and their payouts.

Nostalgia is the residue of progress.

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