When musician and folklorist Beth Lomax Hawes died at 88 on the day after Thanksgiving, obituaries celebrated her as co-writer of “Charlie on the MTA,’’ the famous 1948 ditty about a hapless Boston commuter who got stuck in the subway system because he lacked the 5-cent exit fare. Yet the song wasn’t just a flight of fancy. It cleverly captured the indifference that the Metropolitan Transit Authority, the precursor to today’s MBTA, regularly showed to the needs and desires of its customers.
A devotion to capturing reality through music ran in Hawes’s family; her father and brother traveled an impoverished South recording the work of traditional blues singers. The back story behind the mythical Charlie’s plight was that the authority had hiked its fares but not seen fit to adjust all its turnstiles, so the hike came in the form of an exit charge that Charlie lacked the nickel to pay. For Hawes and her coauthor, the basic issue was money: “Fight the fare increase!’’ they urged.
Of course, modern audiences might have quibbled more with the old Metropolitan Transit Authority’s obliviousness to customer service than with the actual cost of the fare hike. Any transit agency that raises its prices should be prepared to collect the extra money efficiently. Today’s transit agency has learned at least that lesson, as the MBTA’s three-year-old CharlieCard system shows. Fares are bound to rise over time, but there’s no longer an excuse for stranding innocent customers in some underground transit purgatory. T riders can thank Hawes for that.
