James A. Genthner, whose lifelong love for the clanging bells and electric hum of streetcars, the hiss of gaslights and the distant melodic whistles of trains as they rolled through the night, died of a heart attack July 23 at his Timonium home. He was 80.
“Jim was a true Baltimorean and true Marylander all his life,” his boyhood friend, Fred Stiner, wrote in his eulogy. “He was born in Baltimore, went to school in Baltimore, married in Baltimore and lived in the Baltimore area his entire life.”
James Anthony Genthner, son of Elmore Genthner, a steamship captain, and Virginia Genthner, a homemaker, was born in Baltimore and raised on Kelway Road in Old Original Northwood.
Mr. Genthner was a 1962 graduate of Baltimore City College and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1966 from what is now Loyola University Maryland.
After college, he took an office job with the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. When the railroad company merged with the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway — the forerunner of today’s CSX — Mr. Genthner declined to transfer to another city, and took a job with what is now the State Highway Administration as a relocation and right-of-way agent.
“The job sent him from the mountains of Garrett County to the ocean beaches in Worcester County,” Mr. Stiner said. “He was an expert on Maryland geography.”
After retiring from the state in the early 2000s, he worked in temporary jobs with real estate firms for several years.
But it was Mr. Genthner’s fascination with Baltimore and Maryland history, Baltimore Transit Co. streetcars, gaslights and trains of the B&O, Pennsylvania Railroad, Maryland & Pennsylvania and the Western Maryland Railway, that came to define his life.
Because his father was often away at sea, his mother indulged and supported her son’s interests.
As streetcar lines were being converted to buses in the city in the post-World War II years, Mr. Genthner was 15 years old when he wrote a letter to the editor of The Baltimore Sun in 1959, complaining about how “buses spread their bulk around several lanes” and “have a hard time turning and pulling into stops,” he wrote. “Why doesn’t somebody give the transit rider a break and keep the street cars?”
“One of his characteristics was that Jim was a preservationist and concerned about local history and had a deep involvement with the Baltimore Streetcar Museum,” Mr. Stiner said.
Mr. Genthner was a founding member of the Baltimore Streetcar Museum in 1966 and his badge number was 150.
“I’ve known Jimmy and ‘Buster’ Hughes since the ninth grade when we were students at Woodbourne Junior High School and began riding streetcars together,” said John V. Engleman, who along with Mr. Genthner and Mr. Hughes, who died earlier this year, were original members of the streetcar museum.
“We rode all the lines in Baltimore including the last night of service on the 7407, Nov. 3, 1963, which was a chartered car,” Mr. Engleman said.
After the Falls Road museum opened in 1970, Mr. Genthner completed training to become a motorman and conductor.
“In the early years, Jimmy did some restoration work, but enjoyed operating our cars,” Mr. Engleman said. “He was very capable and knew what he was doing.”
Related Articles
News Obituaries | Gene Oishi, former Sun reporter who was interned in Japanese camp, dies
News Obituaries | Susan C. Wendel, former Baltimore County advocate for seniors, dies
News Obituaries | Konstantina ‘Connie’ Ambridge, family matriarch and Hopkins fundraiser, dies at 103
News Obituaries | Jim West, former WBAL radio host of ‘Jones & West,’ dies
News Obituaries | Francine Pascal, creator of beloved ‘Sweet Valley High’ books, dies at 92
A gas light enthusiast who was enthralled by the yellowish-green glow that the lamps cast at night, Mr. Genthner was on hand to witness the last lamp being extinguished on Aug. 14, 1957, in Little Italy, by Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., bringing the city’s 141-year gaslight history to a close.
“It was sad and there was nothing that you could do about it. In those days people didn’t really have a sense of the past. The Zeitgeist then was out with the old and in with the new,” Mr. Genthner told The Sun in 2011.
“Jim didn’t like change,” Mr. Stiner said.
Mr. Genthner possessed the ability to remember the most arcane facts when it came to Baltimore history.
In 1984, he won the Evening Sun’s trivia contest. Mr. Genthner turned in an “absolutely perfect answer sheet, and was among the earliest postmarks,” the newspaper reported.
He explained his success in the article.
“I went to school 51 at 34th and Frisby and teachers there kept filling us with Baltimoreana,” he told the newspaper. “They set up bus tours and walking tours around the city and kept talking about what we were looking at. I got to know Baltimore at a much slower pace.”
Mr. Genthner was known for typing his correspondence on an Olivetti typewriter and only slightly embracing the computer era and email. He collected and enjoyed vintage Maryland rye whiskey.
He also had an extensive collection of vintage model trains and streetcar and railroad memorabilia.
He had traveled to Japan, Europe and through much of the nation riding streetcar lines. He preferred traveling by Amtrak or ship, and eschewed air travel.
“He boasted about not being on an airplane in 30 years, and I said, ‘Jim you wouldn’t recognize them now,'” Mr. Stiner said.
“Jimmy was always a little different and in many ways, a private person,” Mr. Engleman said.
“But he had a wonderful wry sense of humor,” Mr. Stiner said.
In 2005, Mr. Genthner and his wife, the former Cecilia Catherine Locsin Castro, moved to Timonium.
His wife of 34 years, an institutional dietician, died in April.
Mr. Genthner was an active communicant of the Roman Catholic Church of the Nativity in Timonium, where a Mass of Christian burial was offered last week.
He is survived by two brothers-in-law, Juan M. “Nanny” Castro of Nottingham; and Carlos Castro of Framingham, Massachusetts; four sisters-in-law, Lorna McGinty and Cristina Palmisano, both of Baltimore, Marijo Fadrigalan, of East Taunton, Massachusetts, and Ana Dempsey, of Weymouth, Massachusetts.
