In Retrospect

Since I recently retired I thought I'd put together a retrospective on my past experiences. 

I was born May 17th, 1959 and lived in the same small house on the South Side of St. Louis, Missouri with my family of five for 18 years. I attended and walked to Oak Hill .5 miles (same small neighborhood school with the same core 15 kids for 9 years) and Cleveland High 2 miles away. (And yes it was uphill both ways!) When I was 18, my Uncle Bob secured a union job for me working for the Missouri Pacific Railroad as a Brakeman (on the road) and Switchman (in town). Working for the railroad meant being on call 24/7/365, reporting for work 2 hours after being paged and working outside no matter the weather. I worked with crusty old men in dirty, sometimes filthy, conditions. 

The first time I worked, after a 2 week theoretical training in Texas, I showed up at midnight in the most industrial part of town, in a place that would shame most other heavy industrial sites in its creepiness, filth and grit. I found parking in a totally unlit lot and then found the "shanty" where my fellow coworkers were hanging out before shift. There were 6 or seven men hanging out talking and grunting and they were huddled around an old timer who was one of the most unique personalities I'd ever encountered and I don't mean that in a good way. He was sitting on an overturned bucket smoking a cigarette and had the biggest reddest looking WC Fields nose I'd ever seen and the most facinating thing about him is that he never ever took his cigarette out of his mouth. Once it was lit it stayed in the corner of his mouth and he just kept talking and smoking at the same time. When the ash got long enough he would simply just use the side of his mouth not holding the cigarette to blow off the ash a "skill" that must have taken years to perfect. Perfect may be an overstatement because it didn't seem to matter to him where the ashes landed.  Through the rumor mill he found out I was the boss's nephew and said something silly about that, it seemed that most people respected my uncle but nobody actually liked him.  He then said I was a good looking kid ant that I probable was getting a lot of "cock".  Everyone in the hut was shaking their head yes and starring at me and I'm like WTF?  I finally got the inference but had never heard the term used that way so I just kept saying no and thinking what in the everlasting hell did I sign up for and was this to be my life from now on? 

Working in the cab of the locomotives was very dirty because nobody cleaned them and they often "spit" oil from their exhaust stacks.  As a result I had to have separate clothing for work. Work clothes were easily identifiable by the tiny speckled droplets of oil.  One of the dirtiest experiences I encountered was working on coal trains and emptying them at the power plant.  Once again this happened 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year rain or shine, winter, spring, summer and fall, during blistering heat of the summer and the worst snowstorms of the winter.  After navigating our way 30 miles or so to the enormous other worldly looking power plant I would bound down the locomotive's ladder onto the apron of the powerplant. On my signal the engineer would pull the train slowly over the open pits and at the right time I would stick a "key" into the side of the coal car (hopper) and then turn it. The hopper doors would swing open from the bottom and coal would explode downward spilling into the monstrously huge gaping holes called the "pits." I'd walk along with the railcar until it was empty and then turn the key in the opposite direction and close the doors. This was done repeatedly over and over: insert key, wait until the train was over the pits, turn key, witness the eruption of coal disappearing downward into the pits and then a tsunami of coal dust rushing up and out, like the clouds of smoke the mosquito trucks dispensed from the tanks in the back of their trucks in the 60s, coal dust went everywhere and everything got covered, including me from head to lungs to my entire being.  (I would cough up black coal detritus for hours after my shift was over.) This was repeated over and over until every car was emptied. usually between eighty and one hundred and twenty cars and would take anywhere from 6 to 8 hours. Once during the summer when I was wearing bib overalls and combat boots and nothing else because is was nearly 100 degrees, while I was walking beside the cars on the pit I felt something crawling up my leg and I started dancing around like a wild man. I then stripped off my bibs, two quick snaps, down to my skivvies and knocked off a huge water bug that had made it's way up my leg to my crotch. And yes it freaked me out totally but luckily there wasn't a sole around to watch my wild almost naked dance. After that episode I always kept a roll of tape in my "grip" (term used for a personal bag) and  wrapped it around the bottom of my pant legs before I started the dumping of the coal. 

I worked in 3 or 4 different railyards in St. Louis as a Switchman. Switchmen/Swithchperson usually worked an 8 hour shift and went home.  Working as a Brakeman was different because you took a train from one city to another so timing and duration were always changing and unpredictable.  When there weren't any Switch jobs available in St. Louis I changed over and started work as a Brakeman working the from St. Louis to Jefferson City. As it happened on the day my two good friends started college, one in Columbia and one in KC, I got laid off.  Such was life on the railroad. After working 2 moths as a switchman and brakeman and not really having a clue what I was doing at either  I got offered a chance to work in Jefferson City. 

So off I moved to Jeff City at 18 with two months of work experience. I worked from Jeff City to Kansas City and literally never knew what the heck I was doing. My job was mainly to get out and "throw" the track switches and inspect the train for "Hotboxes" and do what the engineer told me to do.  This was in 1977 and there were only radios on the engines and cabooses there were no walkie talkies all communication was done between the crew was done with a lantern, hand signals or yelling. The first two weeks I was in Jeff City I stayed in the same hotel the crews from St. Louis stayed in before their return trip home and I thought I was a baller, except when I was working. 1. I didn't have a clue, two half the people I worked with sucked, and 3 the trip between Jeff City and KC could take anywhere between 8 and 16 hours. I was living in a hotel so I didn't have anyway to make food and if you didn't bring it with you you starved and starve is what I did. Even after getting an apartment I rarely packed a lunch, mistakenly thinking that if I ate a big meal before I left I'd be ok. Unfortunately for me sharing wasn't a thing. The accommodations in KC weren't nearly as nice as the old hotel in Jeff City. As a matter of fact it wasn't a hotel it was a dormitory and the dormitory was right in the middle of the railroad yard. There was no escaping for me, the only place to go other than my room was the cafeteria which stayed open 24/7. 

We'd board the train in Jeff City, the engineer and the front brakeman on the lead locomotive and the conductor and rear brakeman would grab the caboose as we slowly pulled by. About halfway between our run the Engineer would slow the train and I would hop off, this was always out in the middle of nowhere, and then pull the train by me and stop somewhere around halfway while I was "inspecting" each car as it went by. I would then crawl between the cars to the other side where I would walk back to the enginge, inspecting as I went.  Once again this was 24/7/365 walking on "ballast" the rocks they put down under the tracks. And yes walking on rocks in the rain or snow in the middle of the night wasn't as much fun as one might think. I spent Christmas Eve that year working and Christmas day in the dormitory/restaurant combo in the middle of the railyard in KC with a rather robust older waitress/cook who was as thrilled to be there as I was. In case you don't know Kansas City has the second biggest rail yards (Chicago #1) in the U.S. and one of the reasons the KC yard is so big is to accommodate all of the grain cars from the surrounding states. Wheat, corn, soybeans are all huge crops and get shipped to market by rail. Unfortunately grain cars are not sealed as effectively as they should be and massive leakage is a constant problem.  Thousands or tens of thousands of leaking grain cars leads to piles or trails of grain almost everywhere in the massive rail yard and there's always an extremely foul stench of fermenting and rotting grain. Spilled grain also means rats, thousands and thousands of huge grain fed rats. There were so many rats that when we pulled into the yards the extremely bright locomotive headlight would slice through the darkness ahead and the rats would part left and right like Moses parting the Red Sea.  Yeah it was kinda funny the first time it happened then it was alarming because I was the one who had to crawl down the ladder and throw the switches. Guys who worked on the ground regularly had pistols strapped to their legs, old west style.  Once while throwing a switch, a rat's tail got squeezed between the track "points," resulting in the rat jumping and thrashing until it broke its tail and scurried free. At the point the rat broke his tail, got free and ran away I was already halfway back up the engine ladder only to find the engineer laughing uncontrollably when I reached the cab.  Needless to say that got my attention and  helped me decide that maybe I wasn't cut out for this line of work. 

Fortunately for me one of my best friends was attending Mizzou (Missouri State University), which was exactly 22 miles from Jeff City so I got to see the juxtaposition of the two career paths/lifestyles and let me tell you they could not have been more different. I was working with all men all middle aged to old, all with only a high school education and all dedicated to the railroad lifestyle. The money was good for someone my age but I never thought it was commensurate with the danger or inconvenience.

I went to Southeast Missouri State University the next semester. I knew I didn't want to work for the railroad for the rest of my life and that I was going to use it as a stepping stone to pay for college.  In the mid 80s I ended up working the Popular Bluff to Little Rock Arkansans route, Popular Bluff was 1.5 hours away from Cape Girardeau/school. In 1985 I made the decision to move to Cape Girardeau and finish my degree and at that point I had 1.5 years left. I played the railroad game so I would work once every 30 days unless I was "laid off". I would take unemployment when I could, but sometimes I both worked and went to school. On more than one occasion I drove to Popular Bluff and slept on a cot in my van in the Walmart paring lot waiting for my pager to go off and get my work assignment.  Back then getting a page meant you then had to find a payphone to call the assignment desk for your instructions. It turned out to be the same way I'd be communicating working in TV production for the next 20 years.

After I graduated from SEMO I looked for a job in Missouri including St. Louis and Springfield to no avail. The icing on the cake was the St. Louis production faciality that broadcast Cardinal baseball told me that if my dad wasn't the president of the company I wasn't getting a job.  Union jobs are like that ... and I got mine already, almost like a cast system. The guy teaching Mass Comm at Cape for most of my 9.5 year tenure was finally told he had to get a masters degree to continue to teach at the university. Up until then he was teaching all the TV production classes with only an undergrad degree in geography. He was originally from New England so he went back home and got his MA from Emerson College in Boston. When I told him about my difficulty finding a job he encouraged me to go to grad school. Made perfect sense, it only took me 9.5 years to get a BS in Mass Comm, what could possibly go wrong?