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Former WMATA Spokesman Cody Phanstiehl Dies

Posted by WMATAGMOAGH on Sun Feb 4 11:21:39 2007

Cody Pfanstiehl, 90; Enthusiastic Spokesman of D.C. Transit Authority

By Patricia Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 4, 2007; C07



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.

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