Riding the Rails with Dad (No, We Weren't Hobos)
by Nick Gier, Professor Emeritus, University of Idaho (nickgier@roadrunner.com)
Read his column about high speed rail at www.home.roadrunner.com/~nickgier/BulletTrain.htm
When Public Television's Jim Leher "called" the Santa Fe's Superchief on the Diane Rehm show last month, tears came to my eyes as I remembered my now deceased father, a conductor on the Union Pacific Railroad until 1947. My dad's first grade teacher offered to pay his way through college. He was too proud to take the offer, and he went to telegraphy school instead. His first job was on the Chicago & Northwestern, serving his native Wisconsin, and then on to the mighty Union Pacific. My brother was born in Omaha--UP headquarters--and I came into the world near the mainline in North Platte, Nebraska. We rarely ever saw our father when we were little, and he finally made dramatic decision about that problem.
My dad's stories were not as exotic as those told about the Hollywood stars and dignitaries who rode the Santa Fe's most famous streamliner from Chicago to Los Angeles. His stories were certainly not as intriguing as the tales Leher tells in his new novel--The Super—a Southwest U.S. version of Murder on the Orient Express.
Still, I never tired of my dad's stories about ordinary freight and passenger trains. I always asked him to repeat the one about the freight train that had to pull onto a side track so his Portland Rose could pass. The problem was that the freight was too long, so it had to pull ahead on the main track while the Rose cleared the entry of the side track. Then the freight had to back out onto the mainline so that it the Rose could steam ahead to Portland.
I was also enthralled when I heard him describe the "Big Boys," some of the largest steam locomotives ever built. They were 4-8-8-4 behemoths with two articulated sets of four driving wheels on each side. They were especially built for executing, without helper engines, steep grades such as those in Western Wyoming and Utah's Wasatch Mountains. His descriptions of these behemoths swirling in smoke and steam on Wyoming's cold winter mornings are seared in my memory. I chuckle to myself every time I remember him telling me how he knew whether his engineers had been drinking. He would come up right in their faces and ask to check their watches. If he smelled alcohol, he would send them home to sober up.
My parents met in Evanston, Wyoming, where my maternal grandmother had a boarding house. Late one night my dad came to the house, and Grandma Sadie told him that she had no rooms. My mother was standing right behind her, and, looking straight at the handsome man on her doorstep, she said: "Yes, we do have room!" My dad slept on the sofa, and even though my parents were engaged to other people at the time, they were married two weeks later on a very cold January day in 1942. They were together for 54 years until my dad died in 1996.
For their honeymoon my parents took the train to San Francisco and then up the West Coast. One morning as they topped the Siskiyou Mts. on the border of California and Oregon, the conductor walked the sleeping cars aisles calling out "Happy Valley, Happy Valley." They were descending into the Rogue River Valley, and for my parents it was love at first sight.
Back home in Omaha my brother and I would run away every time my dad would come home from his long assignments. We didn't know this strange man. The experience broke his heart, and he decided to give up a well-paying job with the best pension anywhere. My parents sold everything that they could not pack into a 1947 Mercury Coupe, made a bed for us boys in the back, and they headed for "Happy Valley." Along the way we stopped to see Grandma Sadie in Evanston and promised that we would send for her has soon as we were settled. She was a loving presence in our Medford home until her passing in 1968.
My father grew up on a farm in Mazomanie, Wisconsin, so farming was in his blood. He invested all of his savings in a dairy farm in Eagle Point, Oregon. Milk prices soon tanked, so he was forced to take a mill job to make ends meet. My mother did not like life on the farm, and the turkeys harassed and terrified me. One day after putting on a new red coat, I was run into the irrigation ditch by a big tom. We moved to Medford where my father taught himself bookkeeping and eventually moved into the car business. My brother and I received excellent educations in the Medford School District.
One of my earliest memories of Medford was a South Pacific steam locomotive sitting at a crossing to the west side of town. My dad's first workplace was just on the other side. Passenger service in Western Oregon was already being discontinued in the early 1950s, and I have a vivid memory of my dad putting my brother and me on the last passenger train from Medford to Grants Pass. It was pure excitement all the way.
In the summer of 1958 we decided to visit relatives in Wisconsin. We drove to Portland where we boarded the North Coast Limited to Chicago, operated by the Northern Pacific Railway. My father and his two sons loved every minute of the trip. Dad's nostalgia really kicked in when we took the Chicago & Northwestern, on which he was a telegrapher, to Madison.
In March of this year I was helping my Indian graduate student move from Houston to Dillon, Montana. The shortest route took us along Interstate 80 in Wyoming. For the first time I saw the country through which my dad traveled on the Union Pacific. As I looked at the long coal trains, I recalled that Grandma Sadie's no-good husband and son worked in the coal mines in this area.
Oh, I forgot to tell you that the toilets smelled really bad on that train to Madison in 1958. Later my dad learned that the Chicago & Northwestern had stopped cleaning them so as to discourage passengers. The freight business was much more lucrative than hauling people. America's "bottom line" mentality has not always been conducive to the public good, and our neglect of public transportation and basic infrastructure will be part of our undoing in the 21st Century.
Nick Gier taught philosophy for 31 years at the University of Idaho.
Josh and Reed