Word: firemanning
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...Cover) Lumbering along a street in Washington, an old railroad fireman named H. E. Gilbert recalled his private meeting with the President of the U.S. earlier that day. Gilbert turned to his companion. "You know," he said, "today's events make me prouder than ever that I'm an American. Where else in the world could an old country boy like me say no to the President and then walk out of his office...
...Fireman Gilbert's character and personal style are marvelously well suited to his role as a rearguard battler, a staver-off of the future. He is, says an official of Gilbert's union, "oldfashioned, unsophisticated and basic." He does not smoke or drink, and rarely swears. He once joined a country club but soon quit because he disapproved of the drinking the other members did. His recreations center on his home in a suburb of Cleveland: broiling steaks in the yard, playing pingpong, showing home movies. He and his wife sometimes have guests for square dancing...
...married his longtime sweetheart. Bent on settling in Chicago, he went on to the big city alone because he did not have enough money for her fare. As soon as he could get a railroad pass, he brought his bride to Chicago. For nine years Gilbert worked as a fireman on the Alton Railroad. In those days railroad firemen worked hard. In heat so intense that it once made his nose bleed, Gilbert sometimes shoveled as much as 20 tons of coal in the course of a 16-hour day. He signed up as a member of Chicago Lodge...
While Gilbert was shoveling coal in the mid-1920s, U.S. railroads began introducing the first diesel locomotives. Powered by an internal combustion engine, the diesels needed no firebox, no pile of coal-and no fireman. The diesels came onto U.S. railway tracks very gradually, and as late as 1937 fewer than 1% of the nation's locomotives were diesels. In that year the Brotherhood of Firemen foresightedly negotiated a contract with major railroads calling for two-man train crews. Fire or no fire, there was to be a fireman aboard...
That was the year the Brotherhood was founded. An Erie Railroad fireman was killed in a train wreck, and a railroading friend named Joshua Leach set about taking up a collection for the widow and the children. Leach was so distressed about the plight of the widow, left without funds, that he decided to form a firemen's life insurance association. The eleven original members called themselves Deer Park Lodge No. 1, took oaths and made up secret passwords. From that small beginning grew the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen (engineman is an old-fashioned word for fireman...