Seattle to Winslow for Seventy Cents

Washington State Ferries had been a state agency for thirteen years by this schedule's printing. The system was born in 1951 when Washington bought out the Puget Sound Navigation Company — the Black Ball Line — for roughly $4.9 million, ending decades of private ferry monopoly on the Sound. This brochure reflects the settled, bureaucratic confidence of a mature state utility: toll tables are tidy, routes are numbered, the map is competent if small.

The domestic fares give a clear sense of scale. A passenger crossing from Seattle to Winslow (the ferry slip on Bainbridge Island — the town was later absorbed into the broader Bainbridge Island municipality) cost 70 cents one way, or about $7 in today's dollars — nearly identical to the real cost of the crossing now. A car with driver ran $1.80 (roughly $18 today). The San Juan Islands routes out of Anacortes were longer and priced accordingly: Friday Harbor on San Juan Island ran $1.30 per passenger and $3.50 for an automobile.

The international route — Anacortes to Sidney, B.C. — charged $2.20 per person and $6.00 for the vehicle (driver's toll not included in the auto rate). Sidney sits about 17 road miles north of Victoria; the brochure flags this parenthetically. A round-trip day excursion was available for a flat $4.00 per person. That crossing still operates today as the Anacortes–Sidney route, one of the longest runs in the network.

The departure point — Pier 52, Foot of Marion Street, Alaskan Way — is Colman Dock, still the main Seattle ferry terminal. "MAin 4-4752" follows the Bell System's named-exchange convention, in which the first two letters of a neighborhood exchange name mapped to dial digits: MA = 6 and 2, making this number 624-4752 in modern notation. The named-exchange system was phased out across the U.S. through the 1960s and early 1970s as all-digit dialing expanded.