With Stay’s holiday pop-up, our connection to one of Hershey’s last trolley conductors comes full circle
David Sattazahn is the conductor on the right in this photo taken on the last night of the Hershey trolleys in December 1946. (From the Hershey History Center Collection)
At midnight on Dec. 21, 1946, the life that David H. Sattazahn had known for 27 years came to a screeching halt.
The Hershey Transit Co. completed its final runs. Sattazahn, a conductor, was on one of the three cars.
“The trolley picked up people in Palmyra … and took them to Hershey,” the Lebanon Daily News wrote in a 1970 remembrance. “It then continued into Hummelstown. Sattazahn said the crew was reluctant to return to Hershey for they knew it was to be the last trip. Finally the trolley returned to its car barn on Chocolate Avenue and the days of the Hershey trolley were over.”
At 6 the next morning, the buses of the new Hershey Coach Co. replaced the trolleys. Sattazahn was given a job as a bank custodian.
I’ve thought about Sattazahn as we’ve planned our Holly Jolly Trolley-Stop Pop-Up Shop, which will occupy a vintage trolley building at the Hershey History Center in December.
I imagine he walked home on that final night, three days before Christmas, heading east on Chocolate Avenue, crossing at Valley Road or a block farther at Ridge Road to get to West Caracas Avenue.
From the street, it was a dozen concrete stairs to the front porch of the bungalow where he and his wife, Bessie, raised two sons.
I’ve climbed those steps many times. I live in Sattazahn’s old house.
World War I veteran
He was born in 1893 in Lickdale, Lebanon County. He served in the Army during World War I, enlisting in September 1917 and discharged in June 1919. Presumably he joined Hershey Transit right after his discharge, commencing a 27-year career.
Our house was built in 1931. Sattazahn lived there at least as early as 1942; it’s the address on his World War II draft registration, available on ancestry.com.
Our home is one of the few on our block without a garage. I have a theory that if Sattazahn was the home’s original owner, maybe he didn’t want a garage. He was a trolley man, after all.
If Sattazahn was heartbroken on that final run, he betrayed no hint of it as he posed, smiling, for a photo with fellow conductor Dwight Waybright, in the middle of the crowded car with its barrel-shaped roof.
Our Holly Jolly Trolley-Stop Pop-Up Shop will operate in this 1930s-era trolley building at the Hershey History Center.
With his round wire glasses, Sattazahn resembled Harry S Truman. Sattazahn stood 5-10; Truman, 5-9.
Advertising cards were visible above the windows. The Lebanon Daily News story noted that riders took the cards as souvenirs. A state trooper was along for the ride to prevent damage.
The overnight transition from trolleys to buses was only page 3 news (out of four pages) in the Dec. 28, 1946 issue of Hotel Hershey High-Lights, which published weekly and served as the community’s de facto newspaper.
The first half of the story focused on the new bus schedule; the second half delved into the trolley history, which started in 1903 — the year Milton S. Hershey founded the town— with service between Hummelstown and Palmyra. Campbelltown was added in 1907, Lebanon five years later.
“Starting out with only three cars and six miles of railway in 1904, trolleys were added in proportion to the increased mileage until in 1940 the Hershey Transit Company boasted over 33 cars carrying freight and passengers over 35 miles of track.”
By 1940, however, Hershey Transit already was in retreat.
“Lines between Hershey and Elizabethtown were discontinued on June 23, 1940, and the run between Hershey and Lebanon was shorted on January 9, 1942, so that trolleys only traveled as far as Campbelltown,” according to Hotel Hershey High-Lights.
A place in our pop-up shop
It’s now 77 years since the last trolleys rode through Hershey. Sattazahn died in 1976 at the age of 82.
A nonprofit called Friends of the Hershey Trolley is in the midst of a years-long restoration of car No. 7 in the historic car barn off West Chocolate Avenue, where Sattazahn completed his final run. Most of the other cars (some that are said to have ended up in South America) and tracks are gone.
With so much of that history lost, it’s extra-special for us to occupy the circa 1930 trolley-stop building with our Holly Jolly Trolley-Stop Pop-Up Shop in December. It’s an intimate space that we’ll fill with shirts and sweatshirts, stickers and coin pouches, knit hats and felt pennants.
We’ll find room for that photo of Sattazahn standing in the middle of the car on that final run all those Christmases ago. Given our connection with him through our home and now the trolley building, it seems only fitting that he should be along for this ride.