Tickets Reference Beantown Legend

Why Charlie?

They might not match the exotic connotations of the Octopus Card, used in Hong Kong, or the Oyster Card, used in London.

But Boston’s new CharlieCards and CharlieTickets offer a mysterious allure all their own, especially to legions of college students who frequently come to the Hub from afar.

The stylized businessman who appears on the fares, holding one of his now-eponymous tickets aloft, is a reincarnation of Charlie, the hapless commuter popularized by the Kingston Trio, a folk group, in a 1959 recording.

Charlie was unlucky enough to venture on the T during the 1940s, the dark days of exit fares. By collecting ten cents as travelers entered the trains and five cents as they departed, the Massachusetts Transit Authority (MTA) could raise funds without changing its fare-collection equipment.

But that ploy also made it theoretically possible for cash-strapped riders to become entrapped on board.

Such was Charlie’s tragic fate.

According to the song’s rhyming lyrics, he innocently boarded the T at Kendall Square, changed trains downtown, and headed for a Jamaica Plain stop. But when he realized that he couldn’t pay the requisite nickel to exit, Charlie became a permanent tenant of the MBTA, journeying every afternoon to Scollay Square—better known today as the grim Government Center—to pick up a sandwich prepared by his wife.

“He may ride forever / ’neath the streets of Boston / He’s the man who never returned,” the chorus ends.

The song itself dates back to 1948, when Boston mayoral candidate Walter A. O’Brien, who advocated streamlining the T’s fare system, commissioned the song and had it played from a truck that drove in circles around the city.

Despite his epic campaign, O’Brien lost. Incidentally, the victor, John B. Hynes, later had a T station dedicated in his honor on the very Green Line that brought Charlie his food.

—BRENDAN R. LINN