Word: freighting
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Freight trains going through Arkansas must perform an odd ritual. At the border, the train stops and picks up one or two additional crewmen. The men remain aboard, working with the regular crew while the train traverses the state; they are dropped off as it crosses the border...
Arkansas law requires a minimum of six crewmen in both the operation and the switching of a freight train. It and similar laws in other states are the result of persuasive union lobbying, and have generally been upheld in the courts. But now, a three-judge U.S. District Court has struck down the Arkansas law in such a way as to put the others in jeopardy...
...supposed justification for Arkansas' legislated featherbedding was safety, but the court was not impressed. "We find," said the judges unanimously, "that freight trains have been operated and switched throughout the country for the past number of years with crews of five men or less and that the operations have been conducted with safety. It follows automatically that such operations can be conducted safely with fewer than six men." The court then granted the request of six railroads and threw out the law as being "unreasonable and oppressive," in violation of due process and an "unconstitutional burden" on interstate commerce...
...Hentoff blessed him as one of "the precipitously emergent singers of folk songs in the continuing renascence of that self-assertive tradition." Self-deceptive would be more accurate. Dylan was just another work shirt and guitar buried under hyperbolic interpretation of stock songs ("House of the Rising Sun," "Freight Train Blues"). The words had him then, ballooned his voice with folksy groans and rips, all upbeat enthusiasm and innocence. The Folksinger...
What is happening is a dream of sorts, a very important, very fierce and tender, dream. Let the others hop back door, blue San Francisco Bay freight trains. For Dylan, "The Knigdoms of experience in the precious winds they rot." The winds push him underground into dreams "no words but these to tell what's true"--into artistic anarchy where can make new sounds, new words, new effects out of old materials...