Bob's Corner
In honor of Labor Day 2007, I am not laboring, but reprinting an item written by Jerry Goodrum, a retired public relations executive from San Diego. It has elements of newspapering and trains, so how could I pass it up? Here’s the column by Goodrum:
It was 1935, and my first paper route turned my world into a magical place where anything was possible. I mean anything.
Mayfield, Kansas, where I grew up, had no crime rate. There was nothing in the town worth stealing. It was the heart of the Great Plains Bible Belt, and some of God's best people lived there. You could figure it wasn't their fault if the Great Depression hit Mayfield just as hard as anywhere else on Earth. The Depression had no geographic boundaries. But why would the Lord also inflict the Great Plains Drouth on such God-fearing people? Both plagues at the same time? It was a double whammy.
It was only for adults to wonder about. We kids didn't know we were poor. In fact, when I look back I think that maybe we were blessed. Kids nowadays are totally supervised. They will never know freedom. But in our day there were no bad people in Mayfield for parents to fear, so we largely ran free, except for school and the odd jobs that all kids were required to do.
But there, in the middle of the Depression and the Drouth, I struck it rich. I mean really rich. What happened was that some other kid grew up to bigger things and handed off his paper route to me. I was 10 years old and suddenly making $10 a month. I walked tall. But I had a lot to learn about money.
The first thing that happened was that another older kid, Francis Porter, convinced me I needed a bicycle. It wasn't a hard sell on his part. What kid wouldn't want a shiny new red bicycle when he'd never before had any hope of ever owning one? Except it wasn't exactly new. Francis was handy with his hands, and he made my "new" bike out of parts salvaged from several old worn-out bikes. And painted it red. Wow! I readily took on the monthly payments of $1 for 10 months, only to be told by numerous people the bike wasn't worth more than $5. But I didn't care. I was rich.
Being rich had a downside. For example, there were competing newspapers from Wichita that served our town, and the kid who threw the other paper was four years older than I. He took competition seriously and regularly beat me up.
But there was an upside, too. Like when I discovered that there was a law requiring railroads to stop their passenger trains for anyone wanting to get on. This was the heyday of the glamorous trains that crisscrossed America -- the Zephyr, the Empire Builder. Important people like politicians and movie stars all rode them. The Santa Fe's crack train that ran through Mayfield on its daily journey between Los Angeles and Chicago was, I think, the Chief, or maybe the Super Chief, I don't remember. It thundered through Mayfield so fast it nearly swept the tiny depot off its foundation.
Its engine was a living, breathing animal that belched black smoke into the sky and hissed pure white steam out its nostrils. The shrill of its whistle told you, don't even think of trying to beat me to the crossing. This great black monster was king of the universe, and it didn't stop ‘til it got to Wellington, a Santa Fe division point, 9 miles away. Actually, it was only 7 miles, but for revenue purposes the Santa Fe called it 9 miles. At a penny a mile the trip cost 9-cents. It was affordable for those of us with money.
So, I had a plan, now that I was rich. And I was smart enough at age 10 not to tell anyone about it except my mom, of course, who had no way of knowing the extremes of the Santa Fe’s emotions. I would go every Saturday to the station agent, Mr. Oscar McClellan, and demand that he flag down the Chief for me so that I could ride it to Wellington where there were two movie theaters. One was the Regent -- expensive at 15-cents -- and the other was the Lyric, which only cost a nickel for the Saturday afternoon double feature. There was a serial, Flash Gordon, a heroic swashbuckler in the strange world of science fiction. He could wow you right out of your seat. The other feature was always a Western with blazing pistols, galloping horses, and the good guys bringing the bad guys to final justice.
So the total cost was 14-cents; why be rich if you couldn't enjoy it? I didn't worry about how to get home again. I could go to the Ford Garage on the main street where many farmers often stopped before driving back to Mayfield. They'd always give me a ride.
I still remember how Mr. McClellan's jaw muscles would twitch and his teeth would grind when he had to flag down that train. But my anticipation of seeing Ken Maynard or Hopalong Cassidy or Tom Mix made me do it anyway. I wasn't exactly innocent in what I was about. In fact, the engineer would be screaming from the engine cab. The conductor, watch in hand and counting the seconds, would leap off the train to the station platform and demand to know what in blazes was going on. The brakeman would be yelling "Is this an emergency?"
Passengers would be staring out the windows. They'd see this dumb 10-year-old kid scrunch down and climb aboard while the embarrassed station agent slunk back to his desk. Then the exasperated conductor would bellow, "Highball!" to the engineer and the great train would thunder into action again.
The plan worked for a while until Mr. Mac told my dad what I was doing.
It was the end of an era. I've never been that rich since.
