Editor’s note: This story is part of a collaboration between Flatwater Free Press and The Reader examining Omaha’s future streetcar.
Ernest Wintroub ushered his 7-year-old son Frank out the door of their Dundee home on a brisk spring evening in 1955. They stood on the street corner and listened for the familiar rumbling.
For 86 years, streetcars had crisscrossed Omaha. That night was the final public ride for the city’s last operating trolley, a relic of the transit system that was once one of the most robust in the country. As the father and son hopped aboard, an Omaha World-Herald photographer snapped their photo. It was published in the paper the following morning with the caption: “… remember this, it’s the last.”…