Tales from the Tracks and Beyond

I was born on May 17, 1959, and for the first eighteen years of my life, I lived in a beat-up little house on the SouthSide of St. Louis. Five of us were crammed into two bedrooms and a single bathroom, an arrangement where privacy was not so much rare as nonexistent. You could hear everything and smell everything everywhere. If my old man let one rip in the back room, you might as well evacuate the house.

Why he insisted on remaining in that suffocating box of a house remains a mystery—Maybe he liked the feeling of walls closing in, a kind of confinement fetish, more likely it was a refusal to change and in addition he just didn’t give a shit about anyone else. Regardless, those were my circumstances and we were forced to endure it. That was kind of his thing. Selfish. Mean. A guy who could turn a dinner into a disaster just by walking into the room. He was a petty, self-absorbed man whose presence poisoned the air more thoroughly than his flatulence ever could.

It was my mother—long-suffering and near-saintly—who bore the worst of his abuse alongside me. He’s the reason she had a heart attack before she was forty. We became kindred spirits, both the victims of his volatility, weathering his tantrums as one might endure a Midwest storm: powerless to stop it, praying it would pass quickly, and hoping it wouldn’t leave anything broken in its wake.

I walked to school — first to Oak Hill, just half a mile away, with the same core 15 kids for nine straight years and then to Cleveland High, a solid two-mile hike each way. There were no buses, only my feet and my thumb. I hitchhiked every day for three years and just because I stuck out my thumb doesn’t mean I got a ride. Walking was a solid 45 minutes, longer in the winter with heavy clothes and boots and even longer when I stayed for an after school activity and it was dark outside.

When I turned 18, my Uncle Bob handed me a union job with the Missouri Pacific Railroad. One month after graduating from high school I was officially a Brakeman (on the road) and Switchman (in town). It also meant I was on call 24/7/365. You got paged, you had to show up two hours later, rain, shine, sleet, snow, you name it no excuses.

Now, my first night on the job? It was an absolute nightmare. After two weeks of classroom-style “training” in Texas, I was tossed straight into the deep end. Midnight shift. Middle of nowhere. Picture the sketchiest, grimiest industrial zone you can imagine then times it by ten. I park in a pitch-black lot, stumble my way to a beat-up shack (affectionately called “a shanty”), and walk in to find a bunch of crusty, grizzled dudes grunting around a man who looked like a cross between a methed out Santa Claus and WC Fields if he had been beaten up by a biker gang. Not sure what Dante’s nine circles of Hell are but I’m pretty sure I was in somewhere between rings six or seven.

The guy everyone was huddled around had a long white white beard, massive bulbous red nose, bib overalls — was chain-smoking cigarettes in a way I’d never seen before. I swear the cigarette never left his mouth. He just talked around it out the side of his mouth like Popeye. He let the ash build up like a science experiment, and then casually blew it off like it was some weird party trick. When he found out I was new meat and the boss’s nephew, he said I was a good looking boy and that I must get a lot of cock. I wouldn’t find out till decades later that Southerners sometimes refer to punanny as cock. It was the stupidest thing i’d ever heard and I couldn’t wrap my head around it and I refused to play along.  Everyone stared at me, nodded like zombies, and I had this moment of, What the fuck? What level of hell have I reached now?

At first working on the locomotives was exhilarating then it just became filthy, time sucking, dangerous work. I’m  talking black grease and grime, oil-spewing engines, and ballast (rock) dust everywhere. I quickly learned that I had to have a dedicated set of “ruined forever” work clothes — speckled with oil, stinking of sweat and soot. The coal trains were next level hell. We'd depart the rail yards and travel about an hour outside St. Louis and make our way to a humongous, stark, alien looking, industrial electric power plant filled with strange blinking lights and smoke/steam spewing from random smokestacks. It was the modern version of Mordor. Once there, we'd unload the coal from between 80 and 120 railcars—each carrying roughly a hundred tons of coal—into massive, gaping metal pits. My job was to walk beside the coal cars as the train slowly moved over the pits and insert a small allen like key into the side of each car that opened the bottom doors of each coal hopper. Timing was crucial. I had to make sure the coal would come out of the hopper over the pitt and not on the concrete apron before or after which could derail the train.  I walk beside then at the right time I stick the key into the side of the hopper and turn it. The bottom doors would bang open and the coal would rush out making a screeching sound as it scraped the sides of the metal car. Coal fell into the giant pits of hell where it would explode onto the bottom with a thundering boom sending up huge carcinogenic clouds of toxic black death. The clouds of black death would engulf me and I’d be covered in black soot from head to toes— inside and out. There were no masks, goggles or protective gear of any sortl

One hot summer day, I’m in my standard warm-weather gear (bib overalls, boots, no shirt), walking beside the train when I feel something crawling up my leg. Cue a full-on panic dance. Something is heading toward the family jewels. I tore off my bibs in the middle of the power plant, down to my skivvies, swatting and yelling at what turned out to be a giant water bug. It was probably harmless enough but it totally freaked me out. From that moment on I started taping my pant legs closed every time I dumped coal. Call it a weird fashion choice if you want, but it was necessary for my sanity.

Over the next couple of months, I bounced between a few rail yards in St. Louis, switching and brakeman-ing as needed. When switchman gigs dried up, I took a run from St. Louis to Jefferson City. The day my friends started college, I got laid off — poetic timing. I immediately moved to Jeff City and ran routes out to Kansas City. My job? Throw track switches, look for hotboxes (overheated wheels), and do whatever the engineer and conductors told me to do. No radios except on the engines and for the life of me I couldn’t understand the noises that came out of the speakers. For communications while on the ground we used hand signals during the day and lanterns at night. It was a whole new world of silent languages.

The train rides were long — 8 to 16 hours — and unpredictable. Food was your own problem. If you didn’t pack it, you didn’t eat. I starved often, still young and dumb, I didn’t plan ahead and I went without. My co-workers might have felt bad for me but they didn’t share. I didn’t have a phone in my cheap apartment where I lived alone so when the pager went off I had to drive to a pay phone only to be told to be at work in two hours. It was a lot of fun when the pager went off at 2am and it was cold out. 

I’d hop on trains in Jeff City, I was always the head brakeman, the guy who rode with the engineer in the front of the train and started the long trek west. If I was lucky it would not be a “Local” which meant we’d stop at businesses along the way and either drop off railroad cars, pick them up or both. Those trips took for ever and involved a lot of standing around passing along signals. Most of the trains were more than a half mile long and to be able to communicate from the rear of the train to the engine we would space out and pass signals from one person to the next. Timing was crucial and it took a lot of patience and stamina. On a thru train at the midway point, the engineer would slow down, I’d hop off into the wilderness, inspect each car as it rolled past, and then at about halfway of the length of the train I’d crawl through and walk back to the engine and inspect the other side of the train. — all while trudging over rocks, in the dark, in rain or snow just me and my lantern. Real glamorous stuff. I spent one Christmas Eve working, and Christmas Day in a dormitory and diner in the middle of KC’s giant rail yard with a grumpy old waitress who shared my lack of holiday enthusiasm. We were both miserable.

Now, here’s something no one tells you about KC’s rail yard: grain cars leak like sieves. And every farmer within 200 miles Corn, soybeans, wheat — you name it — ships their crops through KC. And the grain hoppers spill everywhere, and after a rain or two the grain starts to ferments into the most vile stench you’ve ever smelled. Lots of things love the spilled grain, especially the rats and grain fed rats are  MASSIVE. Like, raccoon size big. When we rolled in at night and the train’s piercing headlight would split the darkness and when we came around the corner and entered the railroad yard it would illuminate thousands of giant rats all gourgin themselves at an all you can eat buffet. Seeing the ground crawl and move was disturbing, watching the headlight split the moving ground was like watching Moeses parting the Red Sea. The first time I saw it, I laughed. Then I realized I’d be the one hopping down into that rything party of teeth to throw the switches. The regular switchmen wore pistols strapped to their thighs. I just wore a deep sense of fright and dread.

Once, after I threw the switch a rat got its tail caught in the track points. It it jumped and thrashed around until it broke its tail off and scampered free. I stood there for a moment then I flew back up the ladder like I was in a Marvel movie into the safety of the engine compartment. That’s when I really started to question my life choices.

Lucky for me, one of my best buds was living the dream just 22 miles away at Mizzou—basking in the glow of academia, pizza boxes, and coed optimism. Visiting him was like stepping through a wormhole into a parallel universe: his days filled with lectures and late-night parties, mine with steel, soot, and the symphony of clanking iron. I was a gritty grease monkey riding the rails, raking in decent coin for an 18-year-old, sure—but at what cost? Danger lurked like a bad punchline, and derision was my coworker.

So, I made a plan: use the railroad to pay for school and make the escape. I enrolled at Southeast Missouri State University, the cheapest school in the state and the easiest to get into and went about trying to figure out my life. I had no direction, it’s not like I was particularly good at anything and I got no input from my parents. I was 18 and they stopped looking at my report cards in the 8th grade. The only thing I could come up with was to work in television. Why? Because unlike my current occupation there were a lot of pretty girls and there seemed to be a potential to make a lot of money too.  

After a couple of years bouncing between school and work I ended up working the Poplar Bluff to Little Rock route. I still stunk at ever knowing what I was doing or where I was at any given time. I just didn’t have the knack for remembering geography so I just tried to do what they told me to do when they told me to do it. Poplar Bluff was about 90 minutes from school, and I played the system — working just enough to keep my seniority and pay for school and living expenses, sometimes grabbing unemployment, sometimes juggling shifts and classes. I even slept in my van in the Popular Bluff Walmart parking lot, waiting for my pager to go off so I could call a payphone for my next assignment and I wouldn’t have to drive the two hours. (Fun fact: that’s also how early TV production worked — pagers and payphones.)

What I wanted was a technical job in television—something hands-on, behind the scenes. A degree wasn’t necessary, but every time I applied, I was turned away. Eventually, I finished my degree—a journey that stretched nine and a half years. I applied for tv jobs in Springfield and St. Louis. Nothing Nada.

One production house—the one responsible for broadcasting Cardinals games—told it like it was. “Unless your dad runs the place, you’re not getting in,” they said. The message was clear: talent came second to nepotism. It was the unspoken code of a tightly wound union world. I already had my union job, the one for my family, I had inherited it. It felt like an industrial caste system.

My Mass Comm professor — who’d taught TV production with nothing more than a geography degree, sometimes you get what you pay for in education— was finally told he needed a Master’s to keep teaching. So, he went back to his home state and went to Emerson College in Boston. When I told him about my job hunt struggles, he said, “Why not grad school?” Brilliant idea! After nearly a decade trying to earn a bachelor's degree from the cheapest school in Missouri, being taught from a guy without a degree in the subject he was teaching, in the easiest major possible, what could possibly go wrong?