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.

Work: It’s more than just what we do

Studs Terkel’s book about work in America is simply titled “Working.”

But the subtitle of the 1974 classic is more revealing: "People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do."

Our work is as important to us as it was to our ancestors. You may find occupational threads in your own family histories – lawyers begetting lawyers, farmers producing farmers – or you may find crazy quilt non-patterns, reflective of changing times, upward mobility or, perhaps, streaks of rebellion. Regardless of your own personal history, our jobs help define us.

With Labor Day 2008 on the horizon, I’ve been thinking about the jobs I’ve held in my lifetime and what I’ve learned from each. Over the next several days, I’ll write a bit about my work history and the life lessons taken from each job. I’ll start with my days as a newspaper carrier and proceed through my jobs at a bowling alley, with the railroad, for the Omaha public schools, as an Air Force officer and through my lengthy career as newspaper reporter and editor before my current position as a personal historian.

As you sort through your own working years, what jobs have given you the most satisfaction? What have you learned from each stop on your career path? While I hope you’ll include that information in your own personal history, it would be great if you shared it here, too, with your comments.

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 mjkmjk.