Preachers of all sorts generally contend that confession is good for the soul. I have never paid much attention to those preachers on confessions or on any other subject. On the other hand, the Commander-in-Chief and the Chief Decider of the United States seems to pay considerable attention to what preachers have to say.
The Chief Decider and the preachers contend that men have souls much as they have tonsils and appendices. When the Chief Decider took office, he met with Vladimir Putin, the head man of Russia. Bush, who has no training as an ophthalmologist, looked into Putin’s eyes and pronounced his soul to be in heavenly shape. No other mortal human being can understand how this determination was made. Since Bush looked into Putin’s soul, the chief executive of Russia has taken it upon himself to undo the democratization of Russia. Bush must have seen Putin’s soul dressed in its Sunday best.
Recently the Chief Decider of the United States went to Iraq and stared into the eyes of the new Prime Minister there, Mr. Maliki. He announced that by looking into Maliki’s eyes, he could determine that he was a fine and brave fellow. At the moment that this essay is being written, the Bush administration is trying to figure out how to chase Maliki out of office because he has not quelled the insurrection in Baghdad. So much for Bush as an ophthalmologist. And so much for Bush as a reader of men’s souls.
I think it is fair to conclude that the Chief Decider of the United States has not had a base hit in six years in office. If he keeps staring into people’s eyes as he has done so far, he may complete his term without ever getting a scratch infield single.
No one has ever looked into my eyes and seen my soul because I haven’t the faintest idea where it might reside. Nonetheless, if confession is good for the soul, I intend to unload a mea culpa that I have carried for the better part of 80 years. The fact that I am happily married to a lovely women really makes no difference. I confess that for all of my life, I have had a separate love affair. This love affair involves another party, specifically with trains. If Bush had looked into my eyes and soul, perhaps he could have divined my errant behavior because on occasion, my eyes and soul sing the Wabash Cannonball, a powerful train song.
Perhaps it dates back to my birth on the Lilac Roost Farm in Clayton, Missouri. Lilac Roost was situated on a small hill overlooking a valley where the railroad tracks crossed North and South Road. You see, in Missouri, we are not given to fancy names. The full name of that highway was North and South Road. It simply ran in those two directions. But here lately, some enterprising politicians have attempted to call it Brentwood Boulevard. As long as I live, the road will be called North and South Road, which includes an aptly named passage known as “dead man’s curve.”
The tracks that ran in the valley below the Lilac Roost Farm served freight trains. For reasons unknown to me, the engineers always blew the train whistle as they approached the trestle over North and South Road. I suppose they did that while Lillie Carr was delivering her seventh child into the hands of Dr. Leon, the family obstetrician. So the lonesome sound of the train whistle has been in my ears from the first instant of my life. If life begins at conception, as some people believe, my life may have been affected by that sound before my birth.
At about the age of four or five, I could walk to a place on the hill and watch the trains pass. Mainly, the tracks were used by the Missouri Pacific Railroad. In common parlance, that road was known as the MOPAC.
I can remember being thrilled when the engineers, leaning out of their cabs, would wave at me or pretend to shoot me with their fingers. Sometimes the fireman or other trainmen would wave to me as well. So you see, my love affair started early, and it was strong. It remains today with great strength.
As I grew older, my father occasionally told me of his life as a fireman on the Illinois Central Railroad. Basically, the Illinois Central runs from Chicago to New Orleans, some 900 miles away. In those days, as the last of the 1800’s disappeared and were replaced by the 1900’s, the trains ordinarily were powered by steam engines. In back of the engine was a coal tender. The fireman’s job was to scoop up a shovel full of coal from the tender and throw into the firebox under the boiler. If this sounds like back breaking work, it was.
My father stayed only a little more than a year with the Illinois Central, because he determined that he would be shoveling coal or doing some other kind of train work for more than 15 years before he had an opportunity to become an engineer. He only had a second grade education, but he concluded that was a bad deal.
My father worked out of a division point on the Illinois Central called Kankakee, Illinois. For those of you interested in trivia, there is a song of recent vintage called, “The City of New Orleans” made popular by Arlo Guthrie and later Willie Nelson. The Illinois Central named its trains after the towns it served between Chicago and New Orleans. In the song, “The City of New Orleans,” Steve Goodman, who wrote the music and the lyrics, rhymed “Kankakee” with “odyssey.” I am no song writer, but that is a remarkable achievement. I could never have figured out a rhyme for Kankakee.
It was not my father spinning tales of life on the railroad that involved my love of trains. He considered that life a dreary one of shoveling one shovel of coal after another into the firebox of the steam engine and, from time to time, peering out the other window opposite the engineer, to read signals. If anything, my father tended to put a damper on my enthusiasm for trains.
While my love of trains was not encouraged by my father, he was a collector of phonograph recordings having mainly to do with well-known train wrecks. In the era of steam engines, many of those wrecks seemed to end with the engineer being scalded to death by the steam. That is what happened to the most famous engineer of the time, Casey Jones. He is remembered in the song of the same name:

“Casey Jones, mounted to the cabin,
Casey Jones, with his orders in his hand,
Casey Jones, mounted to the cabin,
And he was going to take a trip to the promised land.”

Pretty macabre lyrics.
In our living room was a windup Victrola. Between 1915 and 1925, my father bought about a dozen phonograph records having to do with trains. Unfortunately, all of them had to do with train wrecks with titles like “Wreck of the Old ΄97,” and “The Wreck of the Shenandoah Express.” One of the verses sticks in my mind even today. It says:

“There is just one more message
From the engineer, I guess.
Tell my wife I’ll meet her in heaven,
Don’t wait for the Fast Express.”

In this case, the engineer was hurrying home to tend to his dying wife. He rounded a curve and the train left the tracks, and killed him. Sad news all around.
Those records must have been popular at the time, because they propelled the singer, Vernon Dalhart, into national prominence. My father was not a macabre sort of person; I believe that in buying those records he was attempting to pay tribute to the train crews that were lost. Those records are still in my possession today.
As I grew older, I got a job as a draftsman with AT&T in its St. Louis Division headquarters. One of the bosses sat where I could hear his voice because he was largely deaf. Donald Wass would summon his secretary and tell her to get him a room on the Pennsylvania Railroad train that would depart from St. Louis at 5:00PM and would arrive in New York City around 9:00AM the following morning. For better or worse, I thought that was a romantic way to live. Mr. Wass would show up at Union Station in St. Louis, he would board the train and order a drink. After a time, he would sit at a table with a starched white table cloth and be served by attentive waiters. After dinner, he could retire to his room, undress, put on his pajamas, and sleep until he approached New York City. For a young 19-year-old like myself, that seemed like a wonderful way to live.
It is my memory that the dining cars and sleeping cars were staffed by the Brotherhood of Pullman Car Porters. In the middle of the last century, A. Phillip Randolph, the president of that union, became a very important figure in the American Federation of Labor. Mr. Randolph’s union was the only complete Afro-American union in the AFofL.
In 1941, the United States went to war with Japan and Germany. Like so many others that age, I was drawn into that war through an enlistment in the United States Army. The Army shared my love of trains.
First there was a trip from St. Louis to Las Vegas, New Mexico for basic training, followed by a long rail journey to Coral Gables, Florida. The Embry Riddle School of Aeronautics was entrusted to make 100 of us aerial engineers. Upon completion of that training, the Army sent us back to Las Vegas, New Mexico, where we wasted two weeks before being sent to Charleston, South Carolina, to board ships to take us to the North African theatre of war.
The Army dictated that much of this cross-country train travel should be accomplished with drawn window shades. It was also marked by two stops at Hutchinson, Kansas, late at night, where we found women volunteers boarding the trains to offer us apples and cookies. Because of the hour of the night and the fact that soldiers in those days had no pajamas, the refreshments were received by the soldiers in their skivvies. No one seemed offended.
Railroads were an important means of transportation of passengers and freight in Europe. It is for this reason that the air forces of the United States spent much of their time in bombing railroad marshalling points behind enemy lines. My airplane was shot down on December 8, 1943, in such a raid on the marshalling point south of Ancona, Italy. After my rescue by the Italian Partisans, I returned to duty.
In December 1944, I was picked to be the aerial engineer on the crew that brought the oldest plane in the European theatre from Italy back to the place where it was manufactured in San Bernardino, California. The plane was a C-47, known in civilian life as the DC-3. It was manufactured in 1935 by the Douglas Corporation.
Getting from San Bernardino to my home in St. Louis, where I was permitted to take a five-day furlough seemed to take forever, but in the end, the railroads got me there. So, as you can see, trains played an important part in my military enlistment.
Many years passed between my discharge from the Army, my return to AT&T, and the arrival of the AT&T job that took me to many countries around world. The rest of the civilized world depends heavily on rail transportation even today. In Europe, if a train is scheduled to arrive at 5:42, the engineer is expected to pull that train into that station at 5:42. If he is a minute late, or a minute early, there will be comments. In Europe and in Japan and even now in China, trains run on time and are thoroughly dependable and their train technology is far ahead of our own. They are clean and they are a decent place to eat.
Contrast that situation with what we find in the United States. The people in Congress seem not to understand the importance of railroads. This administration, for example, had set out to gut the rails. There are few resources for development of new railroad technology. For the years since World War II, the railroads have been largely on there own. To survive, they have had to merge, and the names we have known over the years such as MOPAC, Pennsylvania Railroad, and Illinois Central have long since disappeared. This is a tragedy of immense proportions. In a war time situation such as World War II, there is no way that we could have moved people and freight from one place to another without the railroads. Gutting the railroad budgets is a totally short-sighted and disastrous policy.
Given a choice on trips of 500 miles or less, I would always prefer to take that trip on a railroad. The pressures of time and the pressure to meet schedules dictated that air travel was the way to go. Unfortunately, I have never had the opportunity to board the New York express train at 5:00PM in St. Louis as Don Wass did, order a drink, have a delicious meal, and then retire to my bedroom to be rocked to sleep by the gentle swaying of the train, all attended to by the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.
My commuting around here for many years was on the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad. The trains were old but they generally ran on time. In bygone days, the DL&W had a poem produced about it:

“Said Phoebe Snow, about to go,
Upon a trip to Buffalo,
My gown of white will be alright,
Upon the road of anthracite.”

From that poem, the Lackawanna railroad was know as the “Route of the Phoebe Snow.” For many years, I sat on those trains and pretended that I was on the way to San Francisco or New Orleans or some other exotic location. I rode the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad (C&NW) in Chicago and after moving to New York, it was my fate to ride the Lackawanna and the Lackawanna Ferry. Unfortunately, commuter trains don’t take you to exotic places. They take you to Hoboken, New Jersey. But riding the commuter trains failed to dampen by love for railroads. In fact, it made it stronger. And so you see, the Confessions of a Married Man has to do with his love of railroad travel. If there is a more melodic sound in this world than the strains of a train whistle going through a valley late at night, I am at a loss as to what it might be.
Where we live now in New Jersey, we don’t hear the lonesome sound of the train whistle much anymore. We have to settle for the engineer ringing the bell as he pulls into and out of every commuter station on what is now known as the New Jersey Transit System. That title certainly does not carry the cache of its predecessor, the Lackawanna. I would prefer the train whistle but ringing the train bell is an acceptable substitute.
And so you see, now that I have made my confession, my soul actually feels 64% better. I wish I had done it earlier.
We told you about the engineers, the firemen, the trainmen and the Pullman porters. Now it is time to meet a most important personage on train travel, the conductor. And the conductor says…..
All Aboard!
A-l-l-l-l A-b-o-r-a-rd !
E. E. CARR
October 23, 2006
Essay 212
~~~
Kevin’s commentary: Turns out The City of New Orleans is a nice song! Definitely worth listening to.
Now I’m pretty sure that Judy is not too bothered but Pop’s confessions but perhaps she’ll weigh in. Maybe she likes trains too, forming some sort of love triangle. Who knows.
I’m riding plenty of trains these days a subway every work day, and a bina-fide, choo-choo style train every time I go visit my girlfriend in the south bay area. That train is of course called the Caltrain and departs on time reliably from San Francisco. If only it were as reliable at arriving to and departing from every other stop on its line.
Finally, I’d say that Putin’s recent actions toward the Ukraine put Bush’s eye-to-soul reading prowess at a solid 0%.