[Vision2020] Riding the Rails with Dad (No, We Weren't Hobos!)

[nickgier at roadrunner.com]

Greetings:

This is my column for the week.  I went light this week so I could study up on the Greek crisis, which, as I will argue, one cannot blame on those evil "Social Democrats" in Europe, and surprise, surprise, right in our own White House!

Another light column you've already seen in rough form when I responded to a picture of darling young South Korean accordionists on the Viz.  "Pear Blossoms, Marching Accordions, and Side Zippers" is attached.

Nick Gier

Riding the Rails with Dad (No, We Weren’t Hobos)

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 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 was enthralled when I heard him describe the "Big Boys," some of the largest steam locomotives ever built.  His descriptions of these behemoths swirling in smoke and steam on Wyoming's cold winter mornings are seared in my memory. 

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 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.  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."
 
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. Dad’s nostalgia really kicked in when we took the Chicago & Northwestern, on which he was a telegrapher, to Madison.

The toilets smelled really bad on that train to Madison. 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.  Read his column about high speed rail at www.home.roadrunner.com/~nickgier/BulletTrain.htm.


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