Word: brakeman
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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...
...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...
...bestseller, which Miss Skinner tailored to fit herselves, is a girl who marries the wrong man. In 1900 Edna was a small-town blonde, a frontporch girl. In 1937 she is white-haired and miserable in the luxury of a New York penthouse. Reason: she jilted the simple-hearted brakeman who loved her for an ambitious young lawyer who loved success...
...Spievak lost both legs at 17 as a brakeman on the Erie Railroad, is so agile at 50 he can kick a football. Light-haired, bespectacled, he is president of Youngstown (Pa.) Artificial Limb Co., which turns out 150 limbs a year. To succeed him the delegates last week chose 50-year-old Clyde Aunger, who at 16 lost a leg in a trolley car accident. In business for himself in San Francisco since 1911, he was taken to Australia during the War to teach his trade. President Aunger's pride is a music box in the calf...
...Governor Earle consists of Senator Guffey and of David L. Lawrence, who is the Governor's Secretary of the Commonwealth and patronage dispenser. Although Mr. Guffey bosses the machine, Governor Earle does not always obey him. This year, for example, he backed a bill for adding an extra brakeman to freight and passenger train crews. Labor wanted it but Senator Guffey, who is campaigning for lower freight rates on coal, opposed it. With the aid of David Lawrence, the Governor got the Legislature to pass...