Massachusetts dean of transit history dies
If the nation's first subway system had a wise old uncle, it was George M. Sanborn.
Mr. Sanborn, who died Saturday, spent hours holed away in the state's quirky transportation library - where he worked nearly four decades - rummaging through tattered public documents to figure out the history of a manhole cover, the origin of a train station, or the portion of Massachusetts law that required conductors to wear hats. He was 77.
He would spend his own time and money rescuing a rotting streetcar from a farm in Canada, or some other unlikely location, and donate it to the Seashore Trolley Museum, where he was a trustee.
He would take researchers on late-night tours of abandoned subway tunnels under Boston's Theater District, relishing the opportunity to point out where the trains once ran.
In a city that loves to talk about transportation, Mr. Sanborn was the dean, a little-known man in a little-known library who maintained the legacy of Boston's pioneering transit system. To students, government officials, journalists, and others with an interest in trains, buses, and roads, he was the repository of the facts about the things that get us where we want to go today.
"George was a Boston institution because he really knew everything that happened in [transit] history," said James Schantz, board chairman of the Seashore Trolley Museum in Kennebunkport, Maine. "He was the resource that everybody would turn to."
Mr. Sanborn, who had fallen in 2005 after a stroke, died in a North Reading nursing home, according to close friends. Nine of those friends, fellow transit enthusiasts, including Schantz, were in New Orleans, scoping out old streetcars, when they heard the news. They raised a glass in his honor.
"I don't think there's anything more fascinating than transportation," Mr. Sanborn told the Globe in 2004. "You have to get from point A to point B, and that's called transportation."
It was a simple idea, but one that built a life's passion. Sanborn had no family, just a close network of friends and a community of people who shared his interest in transit, with a special appreciation of streetcars.
"He's like all rail fans. He's an odd stick. We all are," said Stevie Stephenson, a retired train master who knew Mr. Sanborn for 50 years. "Odd sticks tend to be together . . . we think a little bit differently."
Mr. Sanborn was born in Sanford, Maine, in an era when small towns, including his, were served by streetcars.
"That was really, kind of, the getaway to the outside world," said Conrad Misek, a Green Line repairman at the T.
At a young age, Mr. Sanborn moved with his parents, Frank M. and Margaret MacLaren (Nisbet) Sanborn, to Danville, Va., where he picked up a Southern drawl.
After Navy service and college, Mr. Sanborn returned to New England and worked at Harvard's Widener Library. But it was at the State Transportation Library where Mr. Sanborn found his true calling, as a transit reference librarian.
"He felt very lucky because there's not a lot of jobs where his particular knowledge of transit could relate so directly," said Schantz.
The one-room library at 10 Park Plaza is an idiosyncratic collection of old planning documents, budgets, and five-year plans going back decades, rail schedules, photographs, and just about anything else a transit enthusiast could want, short of a train.
"If it was obscure and extremely difficult to find, George was on it," said Bradley Clarke, president of the Boston Street Railway Association.
When Mr. Sanborn's illness forced him to retire in 2005 after 37 years at the T, there was no one to fill that encyclopedic niche, said Daniel A. Grabauskas, general manager of the MBTA, calling him a "gentleman of the first order."
Around the building, many knew him as Uncle George or the Cookie Child. Though thousands of people work at the T, many of them named George, his inner-office envelopes needed only a first-name to reach him, Misek said.
He kept an old-fashioned desk, with a typewriter and no computer, and sent hand-written letters, long after e-mail made that practice seem quaint. When schoolchildren or graduate students would come in, Mr. Sanborn was quick with a story, an unusual fact, and lots of enthusiasm.
"There was a glee in his eyes when he knew that a kid was interested in transportation," said Edith Mermell, a Chelmsford woman who would take her sons Zeke and William to meet with Mr. Sanborn.
William, now 15, said Mr. Sanborn had only one disappointment: that his mother drove.
"When we would go there, he would always tell us that we should have taken the train," he said.
Mr. Sanborn's funeral is scheduled for Saturday at 11 a.m. in Aldersgate United Methodist Church, in North Reading.
Noah Bierman can be reached at nbierman@globe.com. 