4. Mama’s Nice Little Man

Perhaps I should help you to locate Monroeville on your map of the World, for this may be difficult. Our little town was (and is) on the Pennsylvania Railroad, sixteen miles east of Fort Wayne and four miles west of the Indiana-Ohio border. The altitude for some thirty miles in each direction was level; and as the New York Central which cut across the country about forty miles north of us was then engaged in a speed rivalry, between New York and Chicago, the fast trains fairly tore up the ground when they swept past us.

We had two local trains, en route east and west, daily except Sunday. They always stopped to take on and discharge passengers. Monroeville, when in need of something that Mr. Redelsheimer didn’t handle, could take a morning train to Fort Wayne and be back home by 9 p.m. The evening train always brought a crowd to the station, not only to welcome the incoming local but to see the flyer swoop through.

Usually the evening local was detained on a siding, a half-mile west, to let the roaring monster go by. This was a terrifying experience that deserves mention here. While still a mile away, the frantic locomotive would shriek two long and two short whistle blasts. Everybody backed away from the track and lined up against the station. You held tightly to Papa’s hand and shivered. The awful Thing was growing fast. It was howling again! Surely the Day of Judgment could never contrive a threat comparable for sheer terror! Now! The monster was here; it was zooming by; it was gone; each car of the long train saying “Zip!” as it rushed past us. “Zip!”… “Zip!”… “Zip!”… “Zip!”

Now a choking, blinding wave of dust and cinders ebbed, and the acrid, stinging stench of coal smoke cleared. It was an aroma we associated with the railroad, for very few people burned coal in their houses. Coal was expensive, and you could buy all the firewood you wanted for a dollar fifty per cord. (More recently I have paid twenty-seven dollars for a cord of wood in California.)

During the time I was chattering about coal smoke and firewood, the eastbound speed demon has crossed the state line at Dixon and is yelling at Ohio to get out of the way; and our local, which had been steaming and panting on the siding, has coughed up a few puffs of black smoke and is ambling out onto the main track.

I’m afraid that the American kids of the future will have lost something when the new Diesel engine has supplanted the steam locomotive. We concede that the locomotive has always been an extravagant contraption, never able to convert into power more than seven per cent of the coal it devoured. And we agree that the Diesel gets off to a smoother start and doesn’t jerk you wide awake in the night. But the Diesel has no more personality than a caboose. From the air you look down on it and its long train of tightly integrated cars, winding through the ravines like a blindworm.

The locomotive inspired a quality of respect that has nearly vanished from our present state of mind and soul. There are very few institutions left now to make a young heart skip a beat and then bound so hard that the startled eyes suddenly swim with tears. It is not the youngsters’ fault, but their misfortune, that life has been made so smooth, so slick, so free of shocks and surprises. They have become too sophisticated, too soon. Doctor Gaius Glen Atkins has laconically fixed the boundary line between the departing era of respectful belief and the fashionable new cynicism as “the retirement of Amen and the introduction of Oh yeah?” There is nothing left now to fear: we have been assured that we have nothing to fear but fear: but when all fear is gone, there may be little remaining that is worthy of respect… The ancient sage who wrote, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” must have had something there, or the ages would have allowed his words to die.

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