Passing It On

Life lessons learned while working on the railroad

I learned a lot from the variety of railroad jobs I held while attending college, namely:

1. I wasn’t cut out for a career involving manual labor outdoors.
2. There’s a lot of wisdom to be absorbed while working with blue-collar mentors.
3. You cover a six-team parlay with one sure thing.
4. It’s a lot more fun to ride a train than work on one.
5. We lost a lot when the passenger trains died.

The Union Pacific Railroad has been very good to me, and my family. My paternal grandfather, a great uncle, my father and several uncles made livings working for the railroad, most of them for the U.P. Both of my brothers worked there and my railroad jobs pretty much paid my way through college.

I took my first job as a mail handler at Union Station in Omaha right after my high school graduation. As an on-call member of a group of students dubbed “the school board,” that meant mostly overnight work on weekends when a regular called in sick (or otherwise impaired). The next summer, I took a more-steady gig at a massive rail mail center in Council Bluffs, tossing bags of bulk mail headed to all corners of the United States. I also managed a couple of weeks during the Christmas rush.

For the last three years of college, though, I returned to Union Station where I worked as a coach cleaner. We didn’t actually clean coaches as much as we provided passengers with water. Since most streamliners passed through Omaha in the dead of night, that was when we lugged heavy hoses to each coach, filling them with water to last until their next stop.

One summer, though, I was lucky enough to have several weeks duty of driving an ice wagon throughout the station, icing down drinking fountains and servicing dining cars. For another summer, I was “set up” as a carman’s helper, oiling wheel boxes and bleeding brake lines.

None of my railroad jobs exist today, at least not in the fashion they functioned at that time. The work could be brutal, working in all types of weather and occasionally getting trapped between trains with no escape until one of them left.

The weather alone was enough to make me determined to never do this kind of work for a living, although most of my co-workers did exactly that. The life lessons learned from these hard-working, mostly uneducated, men was a welcome complement to my formal college training.

I joined my first unions on the railroad, placed my first bets on college football games there, became adept at an obscure version of mumbledy-peg and learned the value of punching in and out on time.

Working as I did in a once-ornate train station, complete with one of the area’s fine dining establishments, I witnessed first-hand the decline of passenger rail service. The restaurant had slipped badly before I started working there and the trains disappeared, one by one. Besides eventually losing my full-time job, it was a sad thing to go through.

Amtrak still serves the area with limited passenger service, but it’s nothing like the heyday. Fortunately, Union Station is still around, but as a museum.

Next time, I’ll write about my four-year stint in the U.S. Air Force.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of  Rodzina.

Life lessons learned in a bowling establishment

I learned a lot from my second job, at Twin City Bowl in Council Bluffs, Iowa, namely:

1. Beer plays an important role in the fiscal vitality of a bowling center.
2. I have serious limitations in mechanical matters.
3. When a business is foundering, cash your paycheck ASAP.
4. Hard-working, otherwise sensible Americans often jump at an opportunity to gamble.
5. Nice guys don’t necessarily make the best businessmen.

My first experience in the world of steady paychecks came when I was just starting my junior year in high school when I was recruited to work at one of my town’s four bowling centers. Just a few years before, there was just one bowling alley in town and the sport was enjoying a huge growth spurt, cleaning up its image of being dark, smoky men-only retreats with sleek, modern centers catering to women and kids.

As something of a hotshot junior bowler, the proprietor at Twin City Bowl approached me about working there before I reached the mandatory age of 16. So, for a month or so, he paid me off the books while I learned the ins and outs of picking up empty plates and bottles, emptying ashtrays, sweeping floors and myriad other duties.

The hours weren’t so hot, working late nights several times a week, but the perks were great: bowling at a reduced (sometimes free) rate, free food when working, even a trip to the premiere of the professional Omaha Packers entry in the short-lived National Bowling League. I mostly loved it, at least for the first year.

I quickly learned that you don’t pick up a bottle of beer with a half-inch of suds left in it and that you didn’t allow any beer to be sold (or even be seen) during the Saturday night Baptist Mixed League. There were typically two of us teens working each night, one in the back to fix broken pin-setting machines and one to work the front where the people were. My brief stints in the back were disastrous as I had a tendency to replace broken belts incorrectly, sending pins flying in directions the Brunswick engineers never intended.

Our snack bar-dining area was a draw in itself since we employed a head cook who made pies from scratch and homemade pasta every weekday. The wait staff was bolstered each spring by the arrival of a wisp of a Southern Belle who accompanied her husband, an oddsmaker at the nearby Ak-Sar-Ben horse racing track, to spend a few months while the horses were in town, dishing up chocolate malts and cheeseburgers while dispensing her own brand of racing advice. It may be just my overactive, teenage imagination of the time, but it seemed like the flow of customers to the tiny snack bar was much greater when she was in town.

As good as business seemed to be to me, apparently things weren’t quite as rosy in the cash flow department. The front-back working situation was consolidated into one job more nights than I liked, forcing some of us into work we were unsuited for or uninterested in. Paydays became unreliable and reached a point where we had to cash checks on the spot rather than risk nonpayment at a bank teller’s window.

The easy-going, mild-mannered proprietor who had recruited me turned sour and surly and the pie-baking, pasta-making cook jumped to a rival bowling center. By the time I reached the home stretch of my senior year, I’d had enough, too. It would be more than a year before I worked steadily again but I spent that year occasionally filling in on my first railroad job, as a mail handler.

Next time, I’ll fill you in on the railroad jobs that carried me through my college years.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Photo of Twin City Bowl by lwlehmer.

Life lessons learned from a paper route

I learned a lot from my first job, as a newspaper carrier, namely:

1. Aluminum storm doors make an ungodly racket when struck by a well-folded brick of newsprint.
2. A person can eat just so many chocolate covered cherries.
3. Some adults “earn” their beer money by stiffing the paper kid.
4. Some minister’s wives would feel right at home on a burlesque stage.
5. That postman’s creed about delivering in rain, snow, darkness, etc., goes double for paper boys.

Oh sure, there were grand lessons of responsibility and financial independence, but the real nitty gritty came from the wildly unpredictable personal interactions and financial dealings with adults outside my family.

I was 13 when I assumed control of Route 60a of the Council Bluffs Nonpareil, about 75 subscribers over an eight-block area on the blue collar west side of town for which I would earn 11 cents per customer for delivering their paper seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, except for Christmas Day.

The Nonpareil was an afternoon paper six days a week, but shifted to mornings on Sundays. Those were the days I had to trudge nearly a mile in the predawn darkness, stuff preprinted sections and ads into the main paper and trudge back to start my deliveries. Obviously, this could be a brutal winter experience in Iowa.

Good service was the key to tips, which usually came a nickel at a time with the paper priced at 45 cents a week – except for Christmas, when roughly every other customer added a box of chocolate covered cherries to your booty. Good service meant not banging those aluminum doors. It was much wiser to slip the paper between the front doors, especially on days when lousy weather was expected.

Whatever the weather, customers expected timely, dry delivery of their paper. That made it doubly frustrating when customers just scratched their heads come collection day, usually on Friday night. It didn’t take long to realize who the deadbeats were, but the paper had a policy of not cancelling anyone less than four weeks in arrears and the carrier usually ended up eating the loss.

That sting was assuaged a bit by the kindly grandmotherly types who were generous with their praise and pocketbooks and the occasional floor show by a particular minister’s wife, whose collection-night attire (as filtered through the eyes of a 13-year-old) could best be described as “flimsy negligee.”

Being a paper carrier was hard, but rewarding, work. Having control of a few dollars a week at that time of my life was good training for the years ahead. I was able to start a savings plan for college, had a steady resource stream for my new hobby of coin collecting and learned plenty about dealing with adults I only knew on a business basis.

But, after a few years, it was time to move on. Next time, I’ll tell you about my working days at Twin City Bowl.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of ratigger76.

Time to dig out those high school yearbooks

Do you like class reunions? I thoroughly enjoy mine, although it took me over two decades before I went to one.

The first reunion I attended wasn’t even mine. It was my wife’s, 20 years after she graduated from Omaha’s Bishop Ryan High School. I had such a good time, I couldn’t wait for the next one, the 25th anniversary of Council Bluffs Thomas Jefferson’s class of 1963. We’ve been regulars ever since.

My class gets together again this month and I’ve been given the honor of speaking to the group about my work as a personal historian. My classmates and I are at that age of self-reflection where we look back on our lives, consider what we’ve accomplished and how it will matter to future generations.

High school reunions give us a chance to reconnect with an important part of our past, those who were at our sides during those formative years before we struck out into the unknown of the real world, to take our places among honest-to-goodness adults where our thoughts and actions truly meant something.

Stories are at the heart of every reunion. Stories of dreams fulfilled and promise unrealized, joy and heartbreak, life and death. Every story we hear or tell at a reunion matters to us. They are threads woven deeply in our life’s tapestry.

One point I hope to make to my classmates is that our family stories matter, too. Even if our kids and grandkids don’t care about them today, they will someday. It’s our job to make them available when they’re ready, even if that’s after we’re gone.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Thomas Jefferson High School logo courtesy of neoarcana1.

If walls could speak: Leaving your mark, literally

Recording your family history is a way of leaving your mark for future generations. But what about those other ways that you literally leave your mark for others?

Just about every place that you have lived bears some sort of reminder that you once were there, whether it be a crack in the plaster from some familial rough-housing, a coffee can of treasure buried in the backyard or hash marks on a pantry wall that mark the growth milestones of your youth.

In my case, here are a few of the things I’ve left behind in my home town of Council Bluffs, Iowa:

• In my parents’ house on North 28th Street: My brothers and I enjoyed bowling in our basement, with plastic pins and a softball. I named the place “Regal Lanes,” a term misunderstood by my brother as he indelibly inscribed “Ringo Lanes” on the basement wall. (Note: if they ever rip up the paving on Avenue E north of the house, that strip of buffalo hide is mine!)
• In our former house on Lincoln Avenue: If the shed near the alley is still standing, take three steps west and start digging. You’ll find the rusted hulk of a former kitchen appliance, a gift from a former owner too cheap to pay to haul it away. Hopefully, you’ll find no evidence of the brick that shattered the lower reaches of the laundry chute, though I’m certain you’d enjoy the story. And, while I’d like to take credit for the safe encased in concrete in the basement, that’s the legacy of a previous owner.
• In our former house on 10th Avenue: I hope you’re enjoying the oak plank floor in the northwest bedroom. That was a serendipitous discovery after removing some otherworldly carpet and spending many hours on hands and knees with a finish sander. You’re welcome.

I know those are quite tame, nothing compared to my grandfather and father, who actually built a whole house for their families. In the case of my grandfather, he built the same house twice and dug the foundation by hand. I feel like such a slacker sometimes.

What are the ways you’ve left your mark in the places you’ve lived?

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of TrEjAcK..

Black, white, yellow or brown: Does it really matter?

How has race impacted your family history?

Although this sensitive issue is often overlooked as we delve into our roots, it often plays a larger role than you might imagine. My blogging friend Miriam Midkiff of AnceStories has an excellent post this week on the topic, with Martin Luther King Day less than a week away.

Even in these relatively enlightened times, the race issue is never far away. This morning’s paper carried a story about Louisiana’s new governor, Bobby Jindal, calling him “the nation’s first elected Indian-American chief executive and the state’s first nonwhite governor since Reconstruction.” Democratic presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have been sparring over the issue for the past week.

I grew up in the overwhelmingly white community of Council Bluffs, Iowa. Council Bluffs was also a very blue collar railroad town in those days. I worked my way through college mostly by working a variety of railroad jobs. On those jobs I worked side-by-side mostly with white men of limited education who were outspoken about their deep-seated racist views. I also worked with American Indians, blacks and Latinos at a time when the civil rights movement was just gaining a solid foothold in American culture. It was a rich, yet often tense, environment.

My father-in-law was mostly Irish and faced prejudice in his formative years in Omaha. Italians and Czechs also had their own enclaves in the first half of the 20th century in Omaha, doing much of their business and most of their socializing with “their own kind.”

It’s hard for me to get a good read on how we all get along these days. In times of crisis, a true democracy built on the backs and minds of a diverse populace whose civil rights are genuinely equal should be able to pull together for the common good rather than splintering off into separate groups dedicated to preserving their own mutual self interests.

Regardless of how you see the state of the races today, it’s worth reflecting on where your family has been with regard to race relations, evaluating where it is today and, most importantly, projecting where you’d like for it to be in future generations.

Larry Lehmer, founder and president of When Words Matter, is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of benchilada.