Railroaders' Nostalgia > Bayshore Shops Machinist Fred Boland; Kiesel&Garden Club photos

Fred Boland
Some deserving guys never get recognized because they work in candlelight, instead of the limelight. Up until now, Fred Boland was one of those guys, literally working under candlelight at times in the depths of SP's Bayshore backshop, and later, roundhouse. His career as a machinist spanned 1928-1980, and only ended in forced-retirement at age 70. You rails know full-well the type of constitutional fortitude that it takes to endure such a lengthy career in that kind of less-than-hospitable environment, but what makes Fred all the more remarkable was that he loved railroads and his job to the end, and recorded same in personal stories and photos.

In the past, his son Walter's (drumwrencher) has posted many of his dad's stories and photos on TO's, causing me to be intrigued by a guy who began railfanning long before the term was coined, and who railroaded long after the age that most of us willingly threw in the towel. Thus, I initiated a correspondence with Walter, which has resulted in a substantial series of Wx4 web pages devoted to his life and personal photos / stories. I've placed them in my Southern Pacific Railroaders' Pages under People that I Would Like to Have Known.

main page:        http://wx4.org/sp_employees/pages/people/boland/bio.html

Hopefully, you former SP San Francisco rails may be able to identify the Bayshore roundhouse workers in the photos of Fred's 1980 retirement party. Gad, I wish that I was better at recalling names...
http://wx4.org/sp_employees/pages/people/boland/photos/retirement/party.html

AND...
Ernie Kiesel Collection of Southern Pacific Photographs at History San Jose - Update
As previously advertised on TO's, the collection of 375 photos came from the walls of San Francisco's 7th St. (a.k.a. Townsend St.) Diesel Shop in the early 1970's, and most decorated the engineers' Blue Room at Mission Bay Roundhouse before that - some date to Mission Bay's predecessor Harrison St. Roundhouses. The photos are now scanned and shall begin appearing on Wx4 in mid-December.
main page:    http://wx4.org/sp_employees/kiesel/spcoast.html

AND... AND...
Garden Club Photos
For some time, former SP Coast-Side Engineer Greg "Dr. Doom" Welker has had several photos posted on Flickr San Francisco of engineer's Garden Club events back in the early 1980's while he was local secretary of Division 161. Unfortunately, Flickr literally means flicker, as repeated efforts to link same on Wx4 initially work, then flicker out to a dreaded "404 Not Found" message. In light of this, I'll be placing these photos on Wx4 coincidental to Kiesel's next month. Stay tuned, old farts!

I''l be incommunicado in the malarial depths of the Amazon swamps until early December (hence the delay in the Kiesel/Welker posts). Pray for me!

EO

 



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/03/15 05:16 by hogheaded.

Hogheaded, you are so right with your comment. Looking at your website I was able to identify SP employees Sal Lopez, Ahmad Khan and Glen Ransford. An email to you matches these names with the photos. Of all who worked there only a handful were successful in transferring to other SP locations when Bayshore roundhouse closed. I saw the same thing happen again and again as various departments of the SP shrank or eliminated various locations.

Hogheaded wrote: ... Some deserving guys never get recognized because they work in candlelight, instead of the limelight...

 

Thanks for identifying some of those people in the party photos, Gary! Hopefully we'll get most of them figured out eventually.

EO

Ed,

Thank you for all the effort in working with Walter and putting all this up on the site.  It's much appreciated here.

Mark