Cody Pfanstiehl, 90; Enthusiastic Spokesman of D.C. Transit Authority dies
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Cody Pfanstiehl, 90, the longtime spokesman for Metro whose
consistently upbeat view of the capital's subways and buses eased many
a commuter's ire, died of pneumonia Feb. 1 at Holy Cross Hospital. He
lived in Silver Spring.
Mr. Pfanstiehl (pronounced FAN-steel) cheerily steered the Washington
area through strikes, fires, derailments, snow delays, jammed
Farecards and the time Metrorail's tunnel-boring "mole" machine got
stuck in a hole beneath Yuma Street NW.
"Who else has an $8 billion set of trains to play with?" he once
asked.
He led countless hard-hat tours of the subway-in-the-making, stoutly
defended the non-intuitive station names and touted the gee-whiz
engineering marvels of what he called "the world's deepest subway."
Ever genial, often exuberant and affectionately dubbed the "resident
Pollyanna" of public transit, Mr. Pfanstiehl, in his 21 years as the
public face of Metro, did his best to accentuate the positive, even in
the face of challenges such as the nearly total breakdown of the bus
system after the 1976 fireworks on the Mall.
"Rush hour is going to be lousy and whammed-up," he warned commuters
in 1982, a few days after a jetliner crashed into the 14th Street
Bridge, a Metro train derailed underground and a record-breaking cold
spell set in. "We still have the weather whammy and the 14th Street
Bridge whammy and now this rail whammy. . . . We are triple-whammied."
It wasn't always easy to be the public face of the transit system,
especially after Congress ordered Metro to take over four failing bus
systems in 1973. The spaghetti snarl of 750 routes, striking drivers
and buses with broken lifts challenged his optimism. But most often,
he was a glass-half-full kind of guy.
"The flood," he said of a 1977 underground leak, "had a Noah and
Johnstown popular appeal to the press. The water was 18 inches."
In 1979, when a Red Line train took off from the Rhode Island Avenue
Metro station without its driver, but with a full load of passengers,
Mr. Pfanstiehl said it was under "complete automatic control" at all
times, stopping at several stations, although its doors did not open.
A passenger eventually jimmied the operator's cab door with a
barrette, stopped the train and released its passengers.
"At every second, the train was doing what it was supposed to do," Mr.
Pfanstiehl explained. "The only problem was that there was no human
being at the controls to open the doors."
Mr. Pfanstiehl even managed to justify taking balloons away from
children who attended the ceremony celebrating the opening of the
Orange Line.
"For starters," he told a Washington Post columnist, "Metro didn't
supply the balloons. They were supplied by a citizens' association.
"Second, there is no rule that says balloons can't be taken aboard
trains. However," he went on, "it is our responsibility to discourage
anything that might distract people from giving their full attention
to the arrival of a train at 50 miles an hour. Can you picture the
danger that would be inherent in a balloon getting loose near the edge
of a crowded platform as a train came whizzing in?"
But when a 7-year-old sneezed and lost his $1,800 braces through a
street grate in July 1981, Mr. Pfanstiehl and a maintenance supervisor
descended into the Farragut North station at 1 a.m. They climbed a
ladder, squeezed past giant ventilation fans and searched through the
muck below the grate until they found the boy's braces.
Cody Pfanstiehl was born in Highland Park, Ill. He attended the
University of Chicago without ever registering. After he was
discovered, he was hired to work in the university's public relations
office.
He joined the Army Air Forces during World War II and was assigned to
be an instructor in intelligence, based in South Carolina. He was
discharged in 1944 and became a radio announcer, then worked in public
relations in Chicago before taking a job in Washington writing for Air
Affairs magazine and joining the press department of Warner Brothers
theaters.
He became publicity manager of WTOP radio, then public relations
manager of the old Washington Evening Star newspaper. He led publicity
for the Community Chest charity before it became the United Way. In
1961, when President John F. Kennedy created the National Capital
Transportation Agency, Mr. Pfanstiehl was appointed community service
director. The agency soon became the Washington Metropolitan Area
Transit Authority. Mr. Pfanstiehl retired in 1982, a year after the
Downtown Jaycees named him one of its Washingtonians of the Year.
His first wife, Margaret Vogel Pfanstiehl, died in 1981.
In 1983, he married Margaret Rockwell, who founded Metropolitan
Washington Ear, the reading service for the blind, which prompted his
children to say Washington's mouth married Washington's ear.
The second Mrs. Pfanstiehl invented Audio Description Services, which
allow blind and low-vision people who wear radio-equipped headphones
to hear descriptions of live performances they are attending. She
called Mr. Pfanstiehl the co-founder of the effort, and the pair
trained hundreds of people in the art, which is used by television
stations, museums and the National Park Service.
In addition to his wife of Silver Spring, survivors include three
children from his first marriage, Julie Hamre of Bethesda, Eliot
Pfanstiehl of Silver Spring and Carla Knepper of Baltimore; a stepson,
Justin Robert Rockwell of Silver Spring; nine grandchildren; and a
great-grandson.