Rae Ann Fugate - From Chicago Bus Driver to the God Man: Charles M. Christensen Life Stories

From Chicago
Bus Driver to
The God Man

Charles M. Christensen Life Stories

RAE ANN FUGATE

Copyright 2014 Rae-Ann Fugate.

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Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

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ISBN: 978-1-4908-3981-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-3982-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-3983-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014910271

WestBow Press rev. date: 06/20/2014

CONTENTS

This book is dedicated to Clem and Marie Bilhorn and to Charles R. Bartels and to everyone who was involved with the ministries of the Mayfair Bible Church in Chicago in the early 1950s. Without their dedication to the Lord and their faithfulness in prayer for our family the following story may not have been possible. They have our familys profound gratitude and we praise the Lord for them and for His faithfulness to all o f us.

My Dad, Charlie (Bus) Christensen, gave me cassette tapes that he recorded periodically over the years. They contain stories of his life as a husband, father, Chicago Surface Lines streetcar conductor and Chicago Transit Authority bus driver. They are not necessarily in chronological order but are told as they came to his mind over the years of dictating. I have rewritten them for clarity and readability. You will read about how God changed him in mid-life from an ordinary man into a man of God.

In some instances I changed the name of someone for privacy rea sons.

Photographs are from the files of The Chicago Transit Authority and are used with permis sion.

Rae Ann Fugate

There was an old Austrian named John Kruk, a guttural speaking man who was physically strong and a giant. We worked together on the streetcars in Chicago. He was much older than I was. He had been a sergeant in the Austrian army and stories were told about him around the streetcar barn. When he first came over to the United States he drove a beer wagon drawn by four horses, delivering barrels of beer. A barrel of beer weighs four hundred pounds. One time he went into a saloon where he was delivering a keg of beer and said to the bartender, Where you want? John was limited in his English speech. Where you want? He meant the four hundred pound barrel of beer.

The bartender contemptuously said, Oh, put it up on the bar. John Kruk took the four hundred pound barrel of beer and set it up on the bar. Oh, no! the bartender said, I didnt really mean that. Dont put it up there. He came around the end of the bar excitedly gesturing for John to take the barrel down.

John said, You said put on bar. I put on bar. You take it down, and he left. That incident shows Johns strength but there was another incident I actually witnessed. We had a late run on the streetcar one night. We were working one of those split runs where we operated the streetcar for a few hours in the morning and then we came back in the late afternoon to work the rush hours until about nine oclock at night. This was on Western Avenue. John and I had left Howard Street and were coming down Western Avenue to Division Street to pull into the barn. When we got down to Division Street, I was supposed to run off the back end of the streetcar, run up to the front of the car, and lift the switch which allowed John to drive the streetcar around off of Western Avenue onto Division St reet.

There was a man, probably in his twenties, sitting in the front seat of the streetcar and he was drunk. I had gotten everybody off, but this man did not pay any attention when I said, Far as we go. I went in and shook him but I could not wake him up. He was perfectly sound asleep. There was no way I could get him up and off the car. I shook him and hollered, You have to get off here. There was no resp onse.

John opened the sliding door between his driving platform and the passenger cabin and said, What you wait for?

Oh, I said, John, this man is sleeping, hes drunk, and I cant wake hi m up.

He said, I wake. He walked up to the man, grabbed him just below the lapels of his suit coat, and lifted him out of the seat. The man must have weighed 170 or 180 pounds. John literally shook him awake. He said, You wake up now. You get off and go home. Come and he half dragged the man off the streetcar. I made sure the guy got over onto the sidewalk before I lifted that switch. But that was John Kruk. I became quite fond of him and remember him o ften.

I think I am getting ahead of myself here. Maybe I should start with my growing up years and how I became a bus driver in Chi cago.

At the beginning of my life on February 29, 1912 my mother and dad owned a rooming house at 2100 West Warren Boulevard. My sister, who was two-and-a-half years older than me, was born in this home. I was born in the hosp ital.

In later years I always reminded people that many great men, such as President Abraham Lincoln, President George Washington and many others, were born in February including myself, Charles Martin Christensen. Not that I was bragging or anything like that. It was not until many years later that I realized for me to be born in February it had to be a leap year when there was an extra day. Otherwise I would have been born in March. Also, I was born after 11:00 p.m. so I barely got in under the February dead line.

My sisters name was Ellen Margaret Christensen. Margaret was the name of a lady who roomed with my mother and dad and became a life-long friend of the family. Margaret called my sister Girly. That was her nickname. Margaret, bless her heart, named me Buster because I had a Buster Brown hair cut in my first two y ears.

I was two years old when Ellen died. I do not have any personal remembrance of her but we have a lovely picture of her, at the age of four-and-a-half, in a gold frame that hangs in my home, and every once in a while I have a little word with the picture, knowing Girly is with God and I will see her in the near future. Girly died of diphtheria. I guess they did not have shots in those days. She got sick and died within four days and I can assume that was an extremely difficult time for my par ents.

I do not know how long my parents kept that house but it must have been six or seven years, at least, because one of the few things I remember in that early childhood is when my mother took one of those childs wagons and pulled it down to the coal yard, with Raymond in her arms, to beg or buy, two bags of coal to heat the house. I think that must have been around 1918 during the war when coal was hard to get. I do not know for sure about those facts. I do not know how old I was when we later moved to Belden Avenue and Springfield Avenue in Chi cago.