Walter B. Lehmer was a Railroad Man. The capitalization is no mistake. Walter, better known as Jack to most, was my dad and a loyal employee of Union Pacific Railroad throughout his working career, which spanned the better part of four decades.
It's no exaggeration to say that railroads were the lifeblood of my hometown of Council Bluffs, Iowa. From the time President Abraham Lincoln stood on a bluff and pronounced Council Bluffs as the eastern terminus for the country's first transcontinental railroad, the iron horse was the town's economic engine. Growing up in the 1950s, the railroad culture was ubiquitous. You couldn't expect to cross town without being delayed by a train of some sort. The congestion on the city's main drag was alleviated some by a long-awaited viaduct that crossed dozens of tracks in the mid-1950s, but you were reminded of the industry's influence at every turn.
If you rode a bus (and many of us in the 1950s did), you probably knew that the Fifth Avenue line made a slight detour on 21st street, turning south towards the Golden Spike monument. The monument (which has remained standing well after its 1939 construction as part of the promotion for the film, Union Pacific), wasn't the destination, however. In my youth, it was delivery of workers to the blocks-long mail handling center that was a joint venture of the U.S. Post Office and Union Pacific. Prior to that, the area had been home to a magnificent 200-room hotel and restaurant catering to the U.P.'s many passengers. It was while working in the restaurant that my grandmother met my grandfather.
For decades, the Omaha & Council Bluffs Street Railway Company shuttled passengers around the city, to Lake Manawa and to the ferries that once delivered passengers to the Nebraska side of the Missouri River. Though it was long gone before our family moved to the southwest corner of 28th Street and Avenue E in 1948, we were told that a trolley line once ran north on 28th Street to the river, where, presumably, it connected with the historic double-swing Illinois Central bridge, a major rail connector between Iowa and Nebraska.
As you might expect, Council Bluffs was full of railroad men, especially, it seemed, on the west side of town where most of our friends and relatives lived. Dad came by his railroad roots honestly. His dad was a boilermaker and machinist who carried a sliver of metal in one of his eyes to his grave, the result of a work accident at the Union Pacific shops. Dad's paternal grandfather never worked for the railroad, but he came close. After closing up his blacksmith shop in North Bend, Nebraska, Cal Lehmer followed his son to Council Bluffs, taking a job with Griffin Wheel Company, one of the nation's biggest producers of iron railway wheels.
Nearly every branch of our family tree included a railroad employee or two, mostly with the Union Pacific. Both of my brothers and I worked for U.P. at one time or another. My work at Union Station as mail handler, coach cleaner and carman's helper made it possible for me to get through college. My youngest brother, Dave, stuck it out for an entire career, retiring from Union Pacific. Nepotism wasn't only practiced at U.P., it was practically mandatory.
Dad held a few other jobs after graduating from high school. The first was pushing wheat cereal for Tommy Tucker Cereal Company, an enterprise (and job) that didn't last long. Then came stints at Connolly and Wheeler drug stores where he dished up banana splits and cherry phosphates. His next job took him west, to 112th and Center streets in Omaha, with the Dutch Mill Oil Company, where his long work days and lack of a car, made him a temporary resident, taking over one of the cabins in the cabin camp (a forerunner of motels). He took his meals in the complex's restaurant and pocketed a neat $50 a month for his efforts. He made enough to buy his first car -- a 1931 Model A coupe -- and take a job closer to home at Omaha Standard, where he was building truck bodies when the U.P. called.
"In those days you didn’t just go to work for the railroad," Dad explained. "You put in an application. If you had a relative working there, you had to have a relative, then you could go to work. And they called me, so I went to work over there."
That was in April 1941. Dad was eight months into his four-year apprenticeship when the Japanese invaded Pearl Harbor.
"I was 21 years old and I knew I was bye-bye," Dad said. "I sold my car so I wouldn’t have to mess with it later. The railroad union came and told us that we were working for an essential industry and we weren’t going to get drafted. That’s when we went ahead and got married"
Mom and Dad eloped on Aug. 8, 1942. Then Uncle Sam threw a knuckleball.
"I got called to the Army," Dad said. "I had to take a physical. I came out of the doctor’s office and went over to the Navy recruiting office and said 'I just took a physical for the Army and I don’t want to go to the Army.' He said, 'You don’t have to. Go into Sea Bees.”
So, for the next three years the apprenticeship was put on hold and Dad served as a storekeeper in the U.S. Navy, half of that time in the South Pacific. As he and Mom waited out the late stages of pregnancy in Ventura, Calif., after his discharge in October 1945, Dad had to make a decision: go to work in the Southern California oilfields or return to Iowa and the railroad.
"I took a job out there," Dad said. "She [Mom] couldn’t travel for a month. The people that we rented a house from, he worked in the oil fields. He was a supervisor up there and he got me that job and I could have stayed. I had another offer, too. I could have gone to work for a wholesale auto parts company because of my storekeeper rating. I thought about it quite a bit whether I wanted to stay in California or come back to the railroad. You were the only grandchild on her side and kind of a little pressure on us to come back. I probably made the right move."
Dad resumed his career as a Railroad Man in late 1945. He was given one-year credit towards his apprenticeship due to his military service and by the time he was given journeyman status on April 7, 1948, he was already set up to be a foreman.
In May 1950, Dad was sent to Chicago to help inspect during construction of 50 new U.P. passenger cars. I spent part of that summer in Chicago before starting school in Council Bluffs.
"You learned a lot of things there," Dad said. "We had an apartment in the hotel. You learned that brown cows gave chocolate milk. Luke Appling lived in the same building. Wasn’t he the White Sox shortstop? You talked to him; he talked to you."
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, I remember Dad working odd shifts as he built on his career. For a brief time, our careers overlapped at Omaha's Union Station, which I wrote a bit about here. But, during my senior year in high school, his career threatened to derail my own plans.
The way I remember it, sometime during my junior year of high school, Dad had the chance to accept the General Car Foreman's job at Green River, Wyoming. The General Car Foreman job is a big one in the railroad business and it was definitely a promotion. When I got wind of it, I adamantly declared that I wasn't going. I'd stay with relatives until I finished high school, I said. Whether Dad turned down the job or whether it was just floated as a possibility, I'll never know, but Dad didn't go.
Instead, he joined the U.P. staff a few years later, a major promotion into the executive ranks. The job meant a lot of travel for Dad, sometimes out of the country, primarily to direct recovery efforts after derailments, but some other duties that he wasn't quite as comfortable with.
Dad was doubtless a solid member of the U.P. staff. As straight an arrow as there ever was, he was a strict by-the-book guy. I'm sure this was a factor in what I think was the biggest assignment of his career: Escorting the reclusive Howard Hughes to the West Coast.
Dad was the railroad's official representative on the rail journey, which left Omaha headed for Los Angeles in the dead of night. Hughes had his own rail car in those days and Dad followed in a U.P. private car. The Hughes contingent pulled a sleight of hand maneuver when it had the train stopped in the Nevada desert and someone thought to be Hughes was carried from the train and placed in a waiting ambulance, apparently headed to Las Vegas.
The train continued on to Los Angeles, where a cadre of inquisitive journalists sat in waiting. As the railroad's official representative, Dad was peppered with questions. Since he was as in the dark as anyone, he had nothing to say. I'm pretty sure there's film sitting in TV archives somewhere of my frustrated father repeating "no comment" to every question. The situation was unnerving and he was soon off the staff, promoted to his dream job: General Car Foreman in Council Bluffs.
He oversaw the Union Pacific rail yards in Council Bluffs for the last 13 years of his career. No one was more surprised than me when he opted to retire in 1981 at the age of 60. As a true Railroad Man I just expected him to go on forever.
He, obviously had other plans. For the next 27 years, he and Mom played golf, attended Sea Bee reunions, doted on grand-kids and great grand-kids and piled on the miles on a succession of motor homes, flitting from one country music jam session to another.
Retirement for my parents was pretty much a resumption of their five-month courtship in 1942, when they were both members of a roller skating club that hit all the hot rinks in Western Iowa.
As my Dad wrote to Mom in May 1942 when he was visiting an uncle in Long Beach, Calif.: “You are the only one to whom I have written every day. Gee whiz I wish you were here. I saw one roller rink last night in North Long Beach and from the bus it looked like a classy affair. I intend to skate and will I ever miss my waltzing and 2 step partner."
Photo: Walter B. Lehmer in his role as General Car Foreman of Council Bluffs, Iowa
Author Larry Lehmer's book about Dick Clark and American Bandstand -- Bandstandland: How Dancing Teenagers Took Over America and Dick Clark Took Over Rock & Roll --is available from Sunbury Press. His book about the last tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens -- The Day the Music Died: The Last Tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens -- is available at Amazon.
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