Word: brakeman
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...From brakeman to low section-hand...
...Skor bowling alley in Washington; a printer from Worcester; a lawyer; a section hand; a real-estate dealer; a professional roller skater; the 25 -year-old assistant office manager of a wholesale grocery firm in Allentown; an employe of the Arkansas Power and Light Co.; a brakeman on the New York Central; a 22 -year-old butcher from Fresno...
...made almost no use of electronics. "Every ship and every plane," says Caldwell, "is in constant touch with the rest of the world by radio - but every railroad train crew is utterly isolated while in motion." To stop another train, trainmen still follow the "archaic practice" of sending a brakeman up the track with a lantern or flag...
...Brakeman Rodgers. For years hillbilly music remained a branch of folklore to most urban Americans - if they knew of it at all. But in 1921 a Kansas City-born folklore fan named Ralph Peer (then sales manager for Okeh Records) took a recording apparatus into the backwoods of Georgia and made some 300 disks. As an experiment, Okeh issued Peer's recordings, listing them in a special catalogue similar to those used for foreign language and "race" records. Within a few years Okeh's hillbilly list sold over a million disks-mostly below the Mason-Dixon line...
...attracted by Okeh's success, Victor decided to enter the field, unearthed in Bristol, Va. a former Southern Railway brakeman named Jimmie Rodgers. His quaintly drawling voice soon became the biggest thing in hillbilly minstrelsy...