Nostalgia & History > R.R. mentions in Ernie Pyle newspaper pieces

I've been reading an old book called "Home Country" which is a collection of pieces written by Ernie Pyle in the late 1930s. The only major R.R. item is an interview with Sim Webb, Casey Jones' fireman. He was in another wreck during a flood in 1918, when a trestle gave way and the engine fell on its side into a river. In 1919 he became a bricklayer which he thought would be less dangerous, but once "a wall caved in on him, covered him with six feet of rock, broke his leg, and put him in the hospital for two months."
A shorter item is about Irene Fisher, who lived in a boxcar (refrigerator car actually) four miles north of Albuquerque, "because she was arty like the people at Santa Fe." She paid $40 for the car and $40 for a trucker to move it. Then she created a homey interior. "She said the only thing wrong was that the railroad had painted out the bawdy poems that knights of the road always write on the inside of boxcars."
Ernie also visited a cousin who drove a cat for Pacific Lumber Company at Scotia, California. (Just a bit of R.R. detail in this one.)

My grandmother was from Indiana as was Ernie Pyle and she absolutely adored his writing. He was a very well known correspondent during WW II and was published in many papers. Unfortunately, he was killed in action not too long before the war ended.
C.

Carol Voss
Bakersfield, CA

I remember articles read by our government and civics teacher Mrs. Pohlmann
that she read every morning at Montebello Hi School..Class of '46..age 17 yrs..
then went with the AT&SF for the nexr 39 years...

When I was a boy my father told me about Ernie Pyle dying in the war, and how beloved he was. This is my first time reading his work. Seems like a regular kinda guy who went all over, talking to interesting people like a man who worked the mines under Virginia City for 58 years, and a woman who worked fur trapping lines in Alaska with her three young daughters.
There's an "Ernie Pyle School" not far from here. I'll go and see if they have historical material in their lobby. Guess I should hurry before they rename it after Che Guevarra or some such person.