By Patrick Crowley
Enquirer staff writer

Leo Meyers with his streetcar mailbox. The support is made from part of an old streetcar track. The Enquirer/PATRICK REDDY

FORT WRIGHT - On a comfortable suburban cul-de-sac, a distinctive mailbox holds as many memories as letters.

The mailbox at 511 Knob Hill Court doesn't look like a mailbox. It looks like a green streetcar. That's the way Leo Meyers wants it. Because that's the way he remembers it.

"When I was a kid growing up in Covington, there was nothing more fun and exciting than riding the Green Line," says 69-year-old Meyers, a retired power company worker,

The "Green Line" was the streetcar company that served Northern Kentucky. Several times a day on the route between downtown Cincinnati's Dixie Terminal and the end-of-the-line in Fort Mitchell - site of the present day Greyhound Tavern - street cars rambled past 548 W. 12th in Covington, the house where Meyers was born and raised with his five siblings.

"Hardly anybody in the neighborhood had an automobile," he says. "The Green Line was the way we got around. And we loved it."

The Green Line ride was loud and bumpy, but to a young boy it was an exotic journey through a major city or a lush forest.

"You would go through Covington and see all the people going to work or shopping at the department stores that used to be downtown," he says. "Or you would head out toward Fort Mitchell, go up Montague Road and go over trestles over Sleepy Hollow Road and St. John Cemetery. It was a very beautiful ride through a wooded area.

"I'll never forget it."

Then there were Sunday afternoons in the late 1930s and '40s. His father would herd the family onto the Green Line for a trip that wound through Covington, Cincinnati, Newport and into Fort Thomas.

The family would spend a few hours watching the soldiers drill and put on parades at the military base that once covered much of south Fort Thomas. Each child would get an ice cream cone before the ride back to 12th Street.

Children today have more exciting leisure time pursuits - youth sports leagues, video games, trips to the mall, amusement and water parks.

"But back then, we looked forward to that trip all week," Meyers says.

"Those were simple times. We were all poor in the neighborhood, but nobody really knew it because everybody was in the same situation. So for fun, we took a trip on the Green Line.

"I know it doesn't sound like much today," he says, his eyes growing misty as his thoughts race back to a different place and time, "but those are some of my happiest childhood memories."

Because he spoke so much about the Green Line, Meyers' wife and daughters had the mailbox made for him after the family moved to Fort Wright in the mid-1960s.

He used to keep it in the house for fear of something happening to it.

"But I finally figured, what the heck," Meyers says. "I want to get some use out of it."

The pole used to keep it in place is actually part of the old Green Line track. It ran past his grandparents' house at Dixie Highway and Pleasant Ridge Avenue near Blessed Sacrament Church in Fort Mitchell.

The mailbox is a replica of the last street car that ran on the Green Line, which made its final journey in the summer of 1950.

The number of the last car in service was 511, the same number as Meyers' house.

"I think it's more than a coincidence," he says with a grin.

E-mail pcrowley@enquirer.com