Word: brakeman
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...father was a circuit-riding preacher in Iowa. Al had little schooling. At 15 he invested $2 in a basket of fruit and candy, boarded an Illinois Central train at Cherokee, and told the conductor that he was the new candy butcher. At 17 he was a brakeman, at 26 a freight conductor and a union member who applied evangelistic fervor to his fellow workers' grievances. He got on the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen's national payroll 43 years ago. He has never been off it (present salary: $17,500). He has bitterly fought his brotherhood...
Driver Bill Linney, his two bobbers and his brakeman, could have run it with their eyes closed. His brakeman's carefully practiced pushoff (25% of a bobsled race) gave Linney's team a valuable one-tenth second. They rounded hairpin Shady Corner at approximately 57 m.p.h., zoomed around Zig Zag's treacherous S curve. (A General Electric eye timer clocked them doing 118 m.p.h. at the finish line.) Linney's final four-heat time-4:25.96-was 1.66 seconds short of the course record he set two weeks ago, but an impressive five seconds ahead...
...James Boyd's Marching On, a novel of the South in the 1860s, Big Bill the Brakeman, who rode the historic Wilmington-Weldon (N.C.) run, bragged that he worked on "the wreckingest road in the Union." The Carolinas were beginning to wonder if they were getting to be the wreckingest states...
...wheat, corn and oats, dreamed of changing it into one mammoth, highly profitable truck garden. But Hudson had no luck when he tried to get a loan under the G.I. bill to start farming. Finally defeated by red tape, he went to work for the Union Pacific as a brakeman at $450 a month. His wife Helen got a $25 a week job as a bookkeeper. Together they saved $5,000. His father-in-law, by mortgaging his home, lent him an additional...
...Tuthill tried about everything. He worked in a chair factory and as chief assistant can-washer in a dairy; peddled picture frames, baking powder and soap on the road; took a mail-order course in steam engineering; courted the belle of Springfield, Ill. ("Beautiful creature-she later married a brakeman.") He joined a street carnival as barker and sold the Perfesser's cure with a medicine show. In 1919 he became a comic-strip artist, began drawing The Bungles. By last week he was good & tired of that...