Birth of a Rail Fan
If there was one thing in this world that my uncle, Roy, loved more than anything else, it was the passing of the Illinois Central freight trains and coal trains in front of the house where he lived with my grandmother and my aunt. No matter what he was doing, when he heard a train approaching, he would run to the front of the house, take out the handkerchief that he always carried in his hip pocket, and wave it back and forth over his head as the engine passed and again when the caboose came by. (In those days every train had a caboose.) The engineers would always reward Roy’s waves with waves of their own and with some nice long blasts of the train whistle, which would cause him to squeal with laughter.
When trains passed after dark but before everyone had gone to bed, Roy would turn the front porch light on and off repeatedly, and the engineer would always sound the train whistle.
Roy was my mother’s brother, and he had Down’s syndrome. He could not live independently, so he lived with my grandmother and my divorced aunt in a little country house on a one acre lot in rural western Kentucky. There was a set of IC RR tracks that passed within one hundred feet of the front of the house, so close that passing trains would shake the old house and rattle the windows.
Roy had the mind of a ten year old child, and he had a child-like innocence about him. He loved everyone and was quick to forgive whenever someone teased him; Roy never held a grudge against anyone in his life. If all of us could love and forgive others the way Roy did, the world would sure be a better place.
Roy was the “man of the house,” and he chopped kindling, brought in coal from the coal shed, and started a fire in the cooking stove every morning. There was no running water in the old house, and one of Roy’s chores was to draw water from the well just outside the back door. He also kept the yard mowed and the weeds cut during the summers. Roy took great pride in performing all of his chores, and my grandmother and aunt depended on him.
I spent entire summers at my grandmother’s house in 1957, 1958, and 1959, when I was eight, nine, and ten years old, and I shared Roy’s love for those trains, especially when the steam locomotives, which were in the process of being phased out, were still in use.
One day a minor miracle occurred. The train, which had been going back and forth doing some switching of coal cars at the tipple about an eighth of a mile down the tracks, stopped dead still in front of my grandmother’s house, and the engineer climbed down from the cab of the locomotive, motioning for Roy to come to him. He then handed Roy a railroad lantern! Needless to say, that lantern was Roy’s prize possession for the rest of his life.
Roy died at age 51 in January of 1976, and the railroad men sent flowers to the funeral home for him. I know that they must have missed his enthusiastic greetings as they passed that house.
Sadly, the old house has been torn down, and even the railroad tracks have been taken up. That little one acre paradise of my childhood summers is gone forever, but it lives on in my memories and always will.
