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.

Vitame vas: Listen to the sounds of your family

What comes to mind when you hear the phrase “wonderful wielders of the willow?”

Although the alliterative use of the letter “w” starting with “wonderful” has an almost poetic feel to it, it actually comes from an account of a baseball game a century ago by New York Times writer W.J. Lampton. Sounds better than “batters,” don’t you think?

Sportswriters of the past were colorful characters themselves and their sportswriting often reflected the flowery prose that was so popular in their times. Although that style of writing has largely disappeared, similarly colorful family phrases are often passed on to succeeding generations.

For example, English was the language of choice in my wife’s household as she grew up, but her mother used enough words from her own Czech heritage that my wife picked up on them and stored them in the deep recesses of her mind from where they emerge at the most unexpected times, amazing those of us around her who have never heard the phrases before.

Families of immigrants often carry the native tongue of their ancestors through successive generations, adding popular American sayings like “you’ll poke your eye out” or “if your friend jumped off a cliff, would you do it, too?”

Think about the language of the household of your youth. Where did those phrases come from? Do you talk like your mother or father?

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 Omaha's famous Bohemian Cafe courtesy of DBasci. (Vitame vas is Czech for "we welcome you")

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.