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Gandydancer'S Children: A Railroad Memoir

por Frank Wendell Call

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This memoir focuses on the now-vanished lifestyle of railroad hands and their families who lived along the Southern Pacific railroad tracks in the 1920s and 1930s
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    A baggage car with lace curtains por Kay Fisher (alco261)
    alco261: These two books describe the family side of individuals who worked for the railroad.
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In 1928 Mr. Call was all of eight years old when his father announced he had decided to join the Southern Pacific Railroad as a gandydancer* with the intent to work his way quickly up the ranks to the position of section foreman. This change in career pursuit would also entail a major change in family lifestyle and location – a move from a comfortable house in Ogden, Utah to a two room shanty near the small “depot” (it consisted of an old boxcar and a dirt platform) of Moor, Nevada.

What follows is an account of the ups and downs of family life/railroad life (in a place like Moor the two were completely intertwined) just before the Crash of 1929 and its aftermath. Within 6 months of their arrival the author’s father was promoted to relief foreman on the Salt Lake Division of the Southern Pacific railroad…and then came the Crash. The end result was downsizing by the railroad and with every downsizing came changes in job seniority for Mr. Call’s father. As a result the planned 1-2 years as a gandydancer turned into a 10 year job with occasional assignments as relief foreman.

While his father was dealing with the slings and arrows of outraged fortune the author and his brothers and sisters were growing up in some very unusual surroundings/circumstances. From the sudden need to fetch wood for the kitchen range (“Mother’s cry of “Boy’s the wood box is empty!” was something we came to hear in our sleep”) to the discovery of fresh bananas in a Pacific Fruit Express reefer that, along with a large string of other freight cars, had been stored on a siding due to the lack of business for the railroad, the author provides the reader with an excellent word picture of a gandydancer’s life and the life of his family in an out-of-the-way corner of the U.S. during the Great Depression. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in first person accounts of railroad life and to anyone interested in first person accounts of life during the Great Depression. See Common Knowledge for an example of the writing style.

*Gandydancer is the railroad name for a track laborer. Their work involves any aspect of track laying, maintenance and daily walking inspection of an assigned section of railroad right-of-way. The name comes from The Gandy Manufacturing Company which made the tools the track laborers used. (Text Length - 153 pages, Total Length - 167 pages includes index, notes, bibliography.) ( )
  alco261 | May 29, 2016 |
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It must have been in August or September that Dad brought home the news that changed our life from humdrum existence in the city to high adventure in the Nevada desert.
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During the summer, the railroad’s problems with the depression became increasingly evident. Train crews began setting out surplus Pacific Fruit Express cars on any convenient side track for storage. Almost every station with a little-used side track was put to use, and there were hundreds of cars to store. The cars were spotted in sets of five coupled together, with a space of a car length or two between sets. The side track at Shoshone got its share. A day or two after the cars were set out, we discovered that it was great sport to climb to the top of the first car, walk along the catwalks on top of the set, climb down, and go on to the nest set and repeat the process until we got tired of climbing. The first car of one of these sets, however, had water dripping from the drain under the ice bunker at one end of the car. When we had climbed to the top of the car, we opened the cover to the ice bunker, and, sure enough, there were several hundred pounds of ice that had still not melted. We didn’t need ice. There was plenty of ice in the icehouse at Shoshone. But what intrigued us was the strong smell of bananas.
We climbed down and went to the main door of the car. It was sealed with a metal seal and a red tag. We broke the seal, climbed into the car, and, to our delight, found bananas scattered all over the floor. Most of them were green, but there was also a big pile of overripe ones near the door, the source of the aroma we had noticed. Overjoyed by our discovery, we ran home, got some bushel baskets, went back, and gathered up every ripe and green banana we could find. Some of them had slipped down between the floorboards . Those boards were braced a few inches above the main floor of the car to allow the cool air from the ice bunkers to circulate. We raised the boards and salvaged every last useable banana, nearly two and a half bushels in all.
Proudly we carried them home. For once in our lives we were going to have all the bananas we wanted. We were going to gorge on bananas. We might even get sick on bananas. When we showed Mother what we had found, her eyes lit up with pleasure. But then here thrifty European upbringing took over.

“You may each have one banana. Then you must put the rest down in the cellar. You may each have one banana every day until they are gone.” There was no use arguing; we did as we were told, regretting that we hadn’t eaten two or three bananas while we were still in the PFE car.
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This memoir focuses on the now-vanished lifestyle of railroad hands and their families who lived along the Southern Pacific railroad tracks in the 1920s and 1930s

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