My thoughts on how the world works

It is 1:27 AM. I woke up at midnight, and just finished listening to The Magnificent Ambersons, and don’t feel like sleeping. I was very impressed by this novel, not the kind of thing I usually enjoy, since my tastes run more to non-fiction.

It was about a prominent family in a growing town in the Midwest early in the 20th Century – and how they became less prominent. One thing it  stressed over and over was the filthiness of an industrial town of the time, due to the burning of coal.

This was the kind of town I was born into: Ft. Madison, Iowa, halfway between Chicago and Kansas City, where the Santa Fe Railroad had a large repair depot for its steam engines. Everyone in the West End of town worked for the railroad, directly or indirectly. And the steam railroad engines were some of the filthiest, and most dangerous machines that ever existed. The Santa Fe had its own hospital to patch up its employees.

It’s hard to believe now, but the Midwest used to be the industrial heartland of America – it is now referred to as the Rust Belt of America. But back then it was a lively place, full of workers. Not the cleanest workers, nothing could stay clean, but one’s with full lunch pails – and a cheap little home, also heated by coal. This was still the world of coal, the miracle fuel of the time.

As the oldest child in my family, I can just barely remember it myself. And I want to record my memories.

Avenue L was the dividing line between the blue-collar working district and the newer suburbs to the north. America was still a class-conscious society, to a degree we cannot imagine now, where the blue-collar workers were looked down on. My father was ashamed of his working-class family, although there was nothing really wrong with them. He married into a white-collar family, who thought highly of themselves.

My father’s family had started out as immigrant farmers, going broke on one farm after the other in Iowa, Nebraska, and the Ozarks. Then they heard about the jobs on the railroad and moved there, with many others. Grandfather Smith was a wheel-knocker - or as my father preferred to think of him: a safety inspector. When a train came into the yard a red flag was placed on the locomotive, and it could not leave until it had been inspected.

Grandfather would walk down both sides of the train, tapping each wheel with a long-handled hammer to see if it was cracked, and feeling for hot-boxes. The old journal bearings had a habit of seizing up and catching on fire. This was not a highly-skilled job, the main requirement was that the inspector be reliable: to show up on time, and be sober. Grandfather, a religious man, did not drink at all – and so was ideal for the job.

I can still remember visiting my grandparents home, near the railroad tracks, after WWII. Grandfather had chickens in the side yard and a pig pen across the railroad tracks. None of the houses were insulated because coal was so cheap, and long icicles would hang from the edges of the roof, caused by snow melting from the roofs. The roads were muddy and rutted, quite a contrast to my mother’s home town, just across the Mississippi River which had gravel roads.

The houses were so cheap their neighbors would just buy them and tear them down when they became vacant – to keep the neighborhood from becoming too run down. I was born in one of these, owned by my Grandmother Smith, who was the businessman of the family. Grandfather had no head for money, but was a charming fellow. She was determined to move up in the world, and this little house was across Avenue L, in a more upscale neighborhood. But it was still a real neighborhood where everyone knew everyone else, where everyone shopped at the same grocery store and went to the same churches, only a few blocks away. There was no need for a car.

When Father started making money, during the War, we moved to a better neighborhood, one block further away from Avenue L – but one that I hated, because I no longer had any friends there; people didn’t speak to each other; I only had girls to play with (Barbara White and Elvyn Weibler); at the time girls didn’t interest me much.

But I started to talk about dirt, and there was still plenty of that around. We were planning to move to my Mother’s home town, a lovely little fruit-growing area across the Mississippi River, and we used to go there often. The adults used to notice how the air quality improved as soon as we got to the bridge across the river. There was also a paper mill in town, where they made paper out of straw, and when they opened the vats after cooking the straw, the stink was overwhelming, even for Ft. Madison.

It was a rough town, in more ways than one, and I was glad to get out of it.