Old-Timer

RAILROADMAN--Chauncey Del French -- Macmillan ($2.50).

Henry Clay French was an orphan who got a job as callboy on the Hannibal & St. Joe Railroad in Kansas City back in 1873. Learning telegraphy in his spare time, he was a full-fledged operator at 14, a combined telegrapher and brakeman on the Santa Fe three years later. For the next 50 years he was shunted from line to line like a boxcar in a busy season. He saw hard living in Kansas cow towns, hard drinking at Northwest division points, hard work everywhere. Last week his son, a brakeman himself, offered Harry French's biography as a typical story of a last-generation American workman.

Railroadman recalls the flavor of Casey Jones or The Wreck of the Old 97. It tells of railroading in the days before air brakes and automatic couplers--when there was no standard-gauge track; when engines were thrown into reverse to bring them to a sudden stop; when railroadmen were the true aristocrats of labor, with something of the prestige transport pilots have nowadays.

Harry French was in wrecks on the Lawrence, Leavenworth & Galveston (known as the Lazy, Lousy and Greasy), on the Union Pacific, the Northern Pacific, the Tacoma Eastern, the Oregon Railroad & Navigation, missed wrecks by a hair on half-a-dozen other lines. In those days grades were so steep over the Cascade Mountains that when a dispatcher wired a telegraph operator in the mountains, asked if a runaway stock train had passed through, the reply became a classic: "Roar of wheels. Smell of manure. Yes." Harry French's biggest railroad wreck came when a bridge gave way as the locomotive passed over it, dropped the caboose in which he was riding 40 feet into a flooded river, killing nine men and injuring 26.

But his worst wreck was the smashup of his first marriage which came when he had three children. A hard drinker, suspicious, temperamental, French became jealous of a young boarder, accused his wife of infidelity, made the boarder dance at the point of a gun. After the divorce Harry French went through a kind of proletarian purgatory: jobs slipped through his fingers, money went for liquor, strikes got him in trouble, his daughters by his second wife died. Moroseness drove him to unforgivable railroad sins: abandoning his train in the middle of a run; deliberately tying up traffic until three freights and two passenger trains were stalled at one station. His growing sons cured him of that; he worked his way back to respectability as a brakeman on the Union Pacific, retired on his pension of one dollar a day. Humorless in its domestic episodes, woodenly written except for pages of authentic railroad talk, Railroadman is nevertheless a first-rate U. S. document, the best picture going of an old-time rank & file member of the powerful Railroad Brotherhoods.

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