In 1958 a Texan won the Tchaikovsky piano competition in Russia. Given the political climate of the times and his youth and dramatic style, Van Cliburn became an instant American celebrity. When he gave his first concert in NYC (It was outdoors somewhere at a college in upper Manhattan or the Bronx) my mother and I went by bus from our home in Springfield. We had it pretty good since the Somerset Bus Co 148 stopped once an hour at the corner of Mountain and Hillside Avenues and took 50 minutes to the Port Authority.
I was fourteen and pretty heavily into my piano playing. The concert was phenomenal. He played a pretty romantic brew of classical. Well the crowd went wild and I believe he played more than 10 encores. We stayed to the end, discarding any concern for getting home. When the concert finally ended, we hussled back to Port Authority, but the last bus to Springfield had gone. What to do. My mother wheedled with the bus dispatcher and they put us on a bus to Plainfield, that waited (seemed like the middle of the night) on Rt 22 just to switch us to a 141 from Newark to Springfield so we could get home. That was a little scary but pretty cool.
Some winter break in during college I went with a friend in NYC to hear a Christmas eve midnight mass at one of the big churches in Manhattan. We also missed the last 148 to Springfield. This time there was no bus option. It was cold. We were stuck. It was really really cold.
Our solution.....we took a subway down to the Staten Island Ferry (I remembered it ran all night and was really warm) and slept all night as the Ferry went back and from Manhattan to Staten Island. The trip took about 20 minutes each way, so we had pretty frequent wakeups. If no one official was around we just stayed on our benches. But if there was a ferry person, we'd get up, get off, and quickly turn around and reboard the ferry. I can feel the heat of the ferries and the curve of the wooden benches. It wasn't a bad night at all.
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