Milwaukee Electric Railway & Transport Company Weekly Pass

I found these scrounging around Milwaukee one weekend . . . . Every week you could carry a bit of colorful paper in your purse or pocket. Brightening your commute? A souvenir of the adventure of public transport in the city? In the 1930's and 1940's, one dollar would buy what now requires $23.00 in Chicago in 2009. There's some information about the Milwaukee Electric Railway & Transport Co here, with a photo of a pass at the very bottom of the page. They had their own print shop (I would imagine they'd have to!). It also looks like other big cities had something similar -- a one dollar weekly rail/bus pass -- that started during the Depression and extended into the 50's.

Who designed these? Who decided what that week's reminder was to be -- whether helpful (Before crossing-Look both ways Stay Alive; Mail Early), civic-minded (Have you given-Community Fund Campaign; Red Cross Roll Call-Join Now!), historical (Abe Lincoln's Birthday; Independence Day; Balboa Discovered the Pacific), advertising (18th National Flower and Garden Show; Visit the Zoo; 18 More Shopping Days) -- or to leave off any additional tidbits of information entirely and focus entirely on the utility of it? And the variety of fonts and colors that were used? I wish we had the time or money or wherewithal to do this these days . . . I will always enjoy a tool/utilitarian item that has some artistic touch to it, to lift it above mundanity.

This is a scan of the back sides of a few of the passes -- you can see some ink transferred from the printing process (stacking/layering printed sheets of tickets) and there are a few where the blocks (of type, ornament) left an impression in the paper.

The Milwaukee railway passes from the 1950's that I have seen are much less vital -- they seem to come from an established design template that may have been installed to produce them more quickly and efficiently, and there are no extra messages or factoids. Very sad. I wonder if they did that because they did not have the time (because there were so many more people purchasing the weekly passes, and they had to print more, faster), or it was necessary to streamline the process, to be more efficient.