Union Pacific

 

The first day on the job I was vaccinated for smallpox.  It was the first vaccination of my life and it almost killed me.  For a solid week my left arm was swollen as large as my leg.  The fever and pain was tremendous.  Added to my misery was the fact that this was my first time to be entirely away from every member of my family.  The lonesomeness and despair were overwhelming.  I was ready to give it all up and go home before things started getting a little better.

On Thanksgiving Day I went to see a wrestling match at the auditorium in Omaha.  It was between Strangler Lewis and Frank Gotch.  They wrestled for six hours to a draw, and Strangler Lewis went to a dance later that night and danced to 2 am.

Insert:  In January 1921, Ad Santel started a minor controversy by claiming Ed “Strangler” Lewis was a better wrestler than the late Frank Gotch.  Santel trained with both Gotch and Lewis, so he did have an insider’s knowledge.  Was he right though?

Gotch was the last Undisputed World Heavyweight Wrestling Champion.  Gotch won the title by defeating the great Georg Hackenschmidt.  Besides defeating Tom Jenkins, Stanislaus Zbyszko and Georg Lurich, Gotch defeated Hackenschmidt in the 1911 rematch.

Retiring in 1913 to spend time with his wife Gladys, who he married in 1911, Gotch died in 1917 at only 40 years of age from uremic poisoning.  Up until his death, wrestlers were still trying to lure Gotch from retirement for one more match.

I thought that if Strangler Lewis could suffer as much as he had that afternoon and still dance till the wee hours, I certainly could get over a case of homesickness combined with a smallpox vaccination.  I quit feeling sorry for myself and things really started looking up for me.

My first assignment was in a little town in Nebraska just west of Ogallala by the name of Brule.  My hours were from 6 pm to 7 am and the pay was $35 per month.  My duties were to keep the depot open during those hours and load express items on the trains (which consisted mostly of 100# cans filed with milk).  The milk went to a creamery and the cans came back empty the next day.  Every evening there would be two to four big trucks filled with these cans because this was a rich dairy community.  After loading all that express, I had no problem relaxing the remainder of the night.  The muscles I had built up over the years on the farm came in mighty handy.  Even though I was strong, I was fatigued before the night was anywhere near over with.

After I got off work at 7 am, the agent had me help him milk his eleven cows.  I was used to milking and that didn't bother me to any great extent.  I enjoyed helping him because it made me feel more at home.  There were no trains due at 5 am and he covered up for my being absent from the depot at that time.  I never did learn to sleep days, however, and it was permissible to sleep a little on the job - provided I woke up when the trains came through so I could report them.

The trains made so much noise when they came through with their whistles and clatter that they would make it almost impossible for anyone to sleep through their passing, but I did it once.  For years after I left there, I found it difficult to sleep at night.

The trucks the milk was loaded on were big and heavy and were parked each night close to the station building.  No one ever told me they were to be secured in any way.  One night a big storm came up and blew one of the trucks out on the track.  A fast mail train came through and hit it.  There were truck parts scattered all over the country and the train master happened to be on that train.

The train master said many things to me that I had never learned in Sunday School.  He threatened to fire me, but I finally convinced him that I was new on the job, and no one had taken the trouble to tell me about securing the trucks.  After that episode, the trucks were always chained or staked when left out.  The trainmaster forgave me because of my ignorance of safety rules.  

The job as helper was an arduous one, but I enjoyed it for a while.  Soon, however, I started yearning to become a full-fledged operator.  After being held back for a year because of my age, I applied for an operator's job on my eighteenth birthday.

The job was that of a relief operator.  The district I was to cover was from Cheyenne to Rawlins, Wyoming.  I would relieve the regular operator for any time from one week to thirty days or more, for any and all reasons.  The job was awarded me and I started in Medicine Bow, Wyoming.

Arriving in Medicine Bow about 5 am, there was nothing open in the town.  To the west of the depot was the most gorgeous mountain I had ever seen.  It occurred to me that I could walk out to it and be back when the stores and other businesses opened up.  I started walking toward it.  At 8 am I was no closer than when I started.  Disgusted with my ignorance of distances, I turned around and retraced my steps, arriving long after all businesses were open - tired and disgusted.

Most of the agencies on the Wyoming Division were in towns without hotels or eating places.  Therefore, it was necessary for the relief operator to carry his own cooking outfit and bedroll.  Most of the stations used boxcars for their depot and they either doubled as a boarding house, or another car was set there for the usage of the operators and agent if there was one.

One of the most interesting of these stations was at Borie, Wyoming.  It was a signal tower job.  The operator's office was on the second floor so he could see the oncoming trains from east or west.

Coming from Sherman Hill, about twenty miles west of Borie, there was a 2,000 ft. drop in altitude.  There was a derail switch at Borie so that if a train from Sherman Hill had a brake failure it would be derailed and destroyed at Borie to prevent it from running into the train yards in Cheyenne.  That would destroy property and killing many people.  The tower was glass on all sides.  The telegraph keys were on one side of the room and the pot-bellied heating stove on the other.  On cold nights, it was difficult to keep the fingers warm enough to work the keys.

A green fruit train from Okanokan Valley, Canada got loose one day before I came there.  They estimate the train's speed at 150 mph when it hit the derail.  All of the crew had jumped off except the engineer.  The engineer jumped when the train hit the derail.  Nearly every bone in his body was broken, but after many months of hospitalization he recovered.

The temperatures in Borie fell to 30 below zero.  There was only four inches of snow on the ground, but that wind piled it in drifts twenty to thirty feet high.  

To get warm, I would sometimes go behind the stove and lie on a caboose cushion.  One cold January night while lying on the cushion, I fell asleep.  About that time, the Overland Limited, a crack mail train, was coming up the hill from Cheyenne.  As they approached, they whistled four times for a clear board.  The board remained red.  They were nearly a quarter of a mile from the station and the board still remained red.  The first I knew about the Overland Limited wanting a green board was when the conductor and engineer started shaking me!  By the time I had written them a clearance card and turned the red signal to green, twenty minutes had elapsed.  The track was slick from the snow and ice, and they couldn't get started.  The total delay was forty-five minutes.

The repercussions from that incident were many.  It was only three days until another relief man arrived to relieve me - for the last time - from duty with the Union Pacific.

I was certainly glad to get away from that barren, ungodly cold and hostile weather.  I returned to Missouri where the weather was at least more friendly.  After a few uneventful months with the Missouri Pacific I moved on to the Santa Fe in Colorado.  My first job was at Holly, and from there I went to Las Animas and stayed until April.