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>> Mr. Bliss: The job was a dirty job.
I mean you were black.
You know you had your dirty work clothes and then you had your
cleanest dirty clothes because you would have to wear them
practically all week.
You know you would take a couple of suits, because you wouldn't
get back home.
You would have to make, like I ran two rounds out of Chicago to
Omaha and then back but I didn't get home between, between trips.
Job was awful dirty but everybody liked it you know.
>> Mr. Moody: Once they got rid of
the steam engines and went to diesel why it
was a lot cleaner working in the mail car
because you run pretty close behind the engines and you got
away from all that smoke and cinders.
>> Mr. Liszewski: Some people got worried about on
the City of New Orleans train one mail car was right in
back of the engine so if you was ever going to have a
wreck you was going to be right behind it.
And you sailed down that 70 miles-per-hour
that was kind of a joke.
You was doing 90 to 120 a lot of times but that train run on time
about 99 percent of the time.
Pulled into Carbondale it was on time.
>> Mr. G. Waldman: Sometimes in the
winter time it would be zero
outside and snow two feet deep.
You would have to open the door and catch that pouch and snow
would be blowing back in your face and just kind of guess get
the right spot.
>> Mr. Kesterson: The heat was awful bad
in there because we were supposed to keep the doors
closed and there was two small fans above that turned real
slow that they didn't provide much air conditioning in
there was no air conditioning at all.
Winter time wasn't bad because we always had heat.
Our train that I ran on which was Illinois Central, always
made sure that you had heat because if you didn't have any
heat the clerk in charge would put out a no-pay slip and the
railroad didn't get paid for it, the round trip.
So the railroad was going to get paid for that trip and they made
sure you had heat in that car.
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>> Mr. Bliss: We were always
in the mail car.
We never saw anything that went up in the engine.
But you knew something happened every time because they pull the
train down into emergency and you would start
dancing across the floor.
And we had hit and killed three people one night and thank
goodness it was all different crews, different engine crews
and we killed three people between
Omaha and Chicago in one trip.
I'll tell you it just made you sick you know.
>> Mr. G. Waldman: I was afraid one
time when the train went off the
track because it, I don't remember if it
was Peotone or Manteno do you remember that?
>> Mr. Kesterson: I wasn't on that.
That's when the school kids was on there wasn't it.
>> Mr. G. Waldman: Yeah.
School kids were on and everything went off the track
except the engine and the mail car and baggage car.
All the passenger cars had like 250-300 kids on there and all
those coaches went off the track but they stayed connected
together and they didn't turn over they
were just leaning like that.
They made a big trench along there along side of the track
and I don't think anyone was hurt because you never did hear
anything about it.
But they had to bring buses out to load those kids on and bring
them into Chicago on buses because those cars had just
unhooked from them and let them set there for a couple of days
until they got them back on and fixed the track.
>> Mr. Kesterson: I think the only kids that
got hurt was the ones that busted windows
crawling out the broken glass.
>> Mr. W. Waldman: I was making a
trip from Chicago to St. Louis one
time as a sub and we were going along, usually they put the mail
car right behind the engines but on this for
some reason it was on the back.
And we were going through the country you know and it starts
slowing down and everybody's what's going on.
We went out and looked and here were in the middle of no where.
We came unhooked and the train went on.
We were sitting out there in the middle of no where you know,
they were at the next town before they realized we weren't
even on there so they had to come back and pick us up.
>> female speaker: Did you guys just
sit and wait for them?
>> Mr. W. Waldman: We worked, we had
work to do so it wasn't nothing bad,
it just kind of strange to be sitting out there in the middle
of nowhere you know, hoping another train didn't come along
and if they did they saw us you know.
>> Mr. Hight: I guess one of my
scariest moments is working from Carbondale
to Chicago and the train from Birmingham came
into Carbondale and they had the police out surrounding things
and they were transferring a very high
value registered mail to our car.
And I had the misfortune of being the register clerk.
So he says "when you get to Chicago, they will meet you at
the train and escort you to the post office".
Well, we got to Chicago there wasn't anyone there except the
guy who's going to take the mail off the train.
So I got in the mail truck and took this to the Chicago Post
Office and I told him, I said, "I thought I was supposed to get
an escort from the station to the depot or I
mean to the post office.
Oh he said, "we trust you".
In Carbondale I was surrounded by police
but in Chicago you're on your own.
>> Mr. Moody: A friend of mine was
making a catch, catching a pouch up
in Ohio I think, one night and caught a, back then
they had steam engines and had water towers where they stopped
and filled up steam engines water.
Went through the town that night and raised the catcher arm and
caught the cable on that water tower and it flipped right back
in the mail car and killed him.
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>> Mr. Bliss: Some of the crews always
had a deck of cards in the car and so
boy I tell you if they got their mail worked up
and they had five minutes they were setting down around a
table, around a round table there and pitching the cards.
>> Mr. Moody: Mail car started running on
the ties, it jumped the rails and flopped over.
They had to send crews down from Indianapolis Post Office to get
all the mail out of there so we had to ride in the baggage car
all the way to Cleveland and not work.
Like I say, everybody set down and played cards.
Well there was a wood box in there about six feet long and
probably two and a half feet wide and they all bail around
that box and played cards all the way to Cleveland some of
them, I piled up on a bag of mail and slept.
>> Mr. Bliss: Oh yes.
>> Mr. Moody: Anyway, got to Cleveland
we got to looking at that box and there
was a tag on it, it was a body being shipped
out in New York.
We played, they played penny ante on this corpse
all the way to Cleveland.
>> Mr. Mitchell: On the CHI and EVANS we
used to pull off on the side on a
passenger train and let the freight train go by.
We seemed to always pulled down there by a watermelon patch.
I don't know why, we did get watermelon.
>> Mr. W. Waldman: We had one time a
guy dumped a pouch and there was a
snake in it.
It had came from another train line.
So they think somebody was messing with
somebody but that got a little excitement.
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>> Mr. Kesterson: It was one of those deals
that if somebody needed some help
everybody would pitch in and help.
Everybody chipped in and helped because our main
goal was to get the mail out and that's what we did.
>> Mr. Glasco: If one person got caught
up with his job and you were done you went and helped him.
The sooner all of you got done, the sooner you could relax and
have a little bit of rest before you got to the next destination.
>> Mr. W. Waldman: Say that on the RPO
clerks everybody worked hard together and
it was really a good bunch of guys
I worked with.
You had a little bit of people from different areas and it was
really, really good time working.
I really enjoyed it.
>> Mr. Mitchell: Most of them took pride
in their jobs too they really did.
>> Mr. Glasco: There was a lot of pride
in the job too because you were really accomplishing something.
You could see something you had finished at the end of everyday,
something was completed.
>> Mr. Moody: We liked the job.
Never met nobody I didn't like on the train.
Everybody worked together.
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>> Mr. Collins: When we went into
post offices they had to eliminate a job.
Well, they called us lantern-swingers in the
post office.
That was a nickname we got that wasn't a road name.
>> Mr. Glasco: That was one of the
nicknames we got.
We weren't well liked whenever we took off the
trains and went into the post offices.
Because we carried our seniority with us and most of us went
around a lot of the people that had been there
for just a short time.
We had other names also.
>> Mr. Bliss: It was a good job, a
real good job and I would not have retired at 55 if the
mail trains would have been on I'll tell you that.
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