![]() ![]() Public transportation was the self-evident bedrock of working-class life. What’s striking is that no one watching in the fifties needed to think about any of this. When Ed and Ralph go to Minneapolis for a Raccoons convention, they take a sleeper car on a train. ![]() Neither the Kramdens nor the Nortons seem to own an automobile. ![]() He and his best friend, Ed Norton (Art Carney), who works in the sewers, make daily use of the subway and bus system, which was designed to whisk the outer-borough working classes into light-industrial Manhattan. His employer is the Gotham Bus Company, which seems to be the sort of private-public enterprise that, like the I.R.T., built the subways. ![]() Ralph Kramden (Jackie Gleason) is a New York City bus driver, deeply proud to be so and drawing a salary sufficient to support a nonworking wife in a Brooklyn apartment, not to mention a place in a thriving bowling league and membership in the Loyal Order of Raccoon Lodge. “The Honeymooners” (1955-56), the greatest American television comedy, is-to a degree more evident now than then-essentially a series about public transportation in New York. ![]()
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