Word: switchman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...train barreled over Joseph Hewins' body on a wintry evening in 1845 in the Massachusetts Berkshires. Hewins had spent the workday shoveling snow off the tracks, only to be killed on his trip back to town when a switchman got distracted. Hewins left behind a wife and three children, who were poor even before his death. His widow sued but lost at every level. Had the train merely chopped off Hewins' leg, the railroad would have paid. But in the perverse logic of that time, when a man died, he took his legal claims with him. And so the thinking...
...train barreled over Joseph Hewins' body on a wintry evening in 1845 in the Massachusetts Berkshires. Hewins had spent the workday shoveling snow off the tracks, only to be killed on his trip back to town when a switchman got distracted. Hewins left behind a wife and three children, who were poor even before his death. His widow sued but lost at every level. Had the train merely chopped off Hewins' leg, the railroad would have paid. But in the perverse logic of that time, when a man died, he took his legal claims with him. And so the thinking...
...work of three people," says Joseph Kelterborn, 44, who works for the NYNEX telephone company in New York City. His department, which installs and maintains fiber-optic networks, has been reduced from 27 people to 20 in recent years, in part by combining what were once three separate positions -- switchman, powerman and tester -- into his job of carrier switchman. As a result, says Kelterborn, he often works up to four extra hours a day and one weekend in three. "By the time I get home," he complains, "all I have time for is a shower, dinner and a little sleep...
Bill once had hopes of becoming a broadcaster, but he found security as a switchman with Southern Bell. In 1960, when the Bettses moved from their first $5,500 house to a larger $ 19,000 house, Bill got a second job as an auditor for the state racing commission. The Bettses had four daughters, but Roxie worked as a night desk manager at a bowling alley, and credit cards smoothed the financial bumps. Weekend fishing trips to Key West could always be charged, and when the minimum payments got to be a problem, Betts refinanced the house...
...with two Cs, one D and four Fs in his seven courses. "It just seemed like the 13th year in high school," Calley says now. He had an ulcer at 19. After he left college, he worked as a hotel bellhop, then a restaurant dishwasher. He became a strikebreaking switchman on the Florida East Coast railroad; soon he was promoted to freight-train conductor and earning as much as $300 a week with overtime. He once got demerits for letting several cars get loose from a locomotive and smash into a loading ramp. Still, a Florida East Coast terminal superintendent...