Kathy Sue Loudermilk, I Love You: A good beer joint is hard to find and other facts of life

by Lewis Grizzard

  I said we would probably see pigs fly first.

  The young man introduced himself as a songwriter from Nashville. He said the work was indoors and there was no heavy lifting, but he was having a hard time feeding himself.

  “All day,” he began, “I’ve been sitting here trying to write a good song about trains. ‘City of New Orleans’ really ran trains down. I just can’t think of anything good to say.”

  The Floridian has been called the “dirtiest and smelliest” train on the Amtrak fleet. It isn’t dirty. The smell is from another coat of fresh paint. The train is simply worn out and tired from overuse.

  The cars were taken from the pool of equipment donated by the nation’s freight-minded railroads when Amtrak was established in 1971. Some of the shorter runs are now using modern equipment built for Amtrak. The Floridian gets mostly scraps.

  The Amtrak color scheme inside is a horrid scarlet and purple. The lounge car decoration is something from topless-a-go-go. It is kept spotless, however, by a pleasant bartender. Drinks are $1.50. Beer is 80 cents. The sterling of years past is gone from the dining car, but on each table sits a pair of fresh carnations.

  The rest rooms are usable. In each are two signs. One is the familiar, “Kindly flush after each use EXCEPT when train is standing in the station.” The other is, “It is impossible to clean restrooms after every use. Please consider the next passenger.”

  It has been my experience that people who do not consider the next passenger—or people who can’t read—are usually responsible for dirty restrooms on trains.

  The Floridian has had a number of accidents, although none has resulted in a passenger fatality. Once I was on this train and the bartender, a woman, passed around color photographs of a recent wreck. It was an unsettling experience.

  A couple of months ago near Plant City, Florida, the Floridian hit a camper as the camper attempted to cross the tracks. Ten people in the camper died.

  Some of the waiters were talking about train wrecks at lunch.

  “My wife told me to get off this train,” says one. “She says it’s always trying to jump off into the woods.”

  “It’s better than being on one of those big planes when it goes down,” interrupts another. Everybody agrees to that.

  One of the waiters was on the train when it hit the camper. He gives all the details. It is a gruesome description.

  “Everybody is always wantin’ to beat the train across the tracks,” he says. “All they got to do is be patient for a couple of minutes and then go on about their business. Those people in the camper got plenty of time now,” he goes on. “All the time they need.”

  Food is not included in the price of a ticket. A breakfast example is juice, two eggs, bacon or sausage, and coffee for $2.75. Lunch is a cheeseburger and potato chips for $2.35. Or an Amtrak Chef’s Salad Bowl for $3.

  Dinner might be a ten-ounce sirloin for $7.50. Or red snapper filet for $4.25. Or broiled chicken for $4.25. Wine is $2 per half-bottle.

  The food is only fair. But the service is excellent. A conductor told me about the food on the old South Wind.

  “The railroad raised its own pork,” he said. “And everybody knew it had the best country ham anywhere. Everything was cooked right on the train. First thing the cooks would do is start baking. They baked all their own pies.

  “Breakfast was something. Country ham, red-eye gravy on the grits, and hot biscuits. People would ride that train just to have the breakfast.”

  Grits aren’t listed on the Floridian’s menu. You have to ask for them. They are instant grits.

  Smoking is not permitted in any of the coaches or in the dining car. You can smoke in the restrooms, in private rooms, or in the lounge car. If you do not smoke, you will appreciate all that on a long train ride. If you do, it will drive you slightly crazy.

  We arrive in Bloomington, Indiana, 200 miles out of Chicago, on time. Same for Lafayette, where the train station is the Lahr Hotel in the middle of town. There are two hours to go. The route has straightened. It is smoother than before, which is saying very little. At times, we have crept along. After Lafayette, the train picks up speeds that reach eighty miles per hour. Just before sundown, I looked out the window near Cloverdale, Indiana, and saw three deer huddled together in a clearing in the woods.

  Chicago comes at us suddenly. The lights of the Hancock Building and the Sears Tower are visible for miles over what is now flat terrain. At seven minutes until nine—nine minutes early—we are standing in Chicago’s massive Union Station. A miracle has occurred.

  I can’t recommend the ride, but I can’t curse it, either. There were no telephone calls. There was time to read, and time to think. A man who made the entire trip from Miami said he felt “defloovicated.” I suppose that meant drained from the experience.

  There was another conductor on the trip. His name was McWhirter. He had been on this run for twenty-five years. Promotion, he felt, would have been the Floridian’s saviour.

  “There is nothing wrong with this train some advertising couldn’t change,” he began. “I pick up the paper everyday and see these big advertisements on airplanes. I never see anything on Amtrak.

  “Why don’t they spend a million dollars advertising this train? It would get ’em 5 million back. Nobody knows about us.”

  As he talked, I remembered a conversation with a Birmingham bartender long before Amtrak’s management decided the Floridian should be scuttled. I asked him if people in Birmingham were concerned they might lose their train to Atlanta.

  “What train?” he asked back.

  JIMMY HARMON

  IT WASN’T THAT LONG ago all little boys loved trains. Most of them grew out of it. Some of us didn’t.

  Jimmy Harmon, who was thirty-one, didn’t. He knew the joy of dinner in the diner and watching America go by at eye level.

  He knew about the lights of Washington passing behind the Southern Crescent as it pulls away from Union Station on its daily run to Atlanta. He knew about crossing the Potomac and catching pitch darkness in the woodlands of northern Virginia, rolling gently on Southern rails.

  And morning on the Southern Crescent, he knew about that. Breakfast at sunrise in the mountains near Toccoa. Then, Gainesville, and finally Atlanta.

  Atlanta is bustling and traffic-snarled as the train arrives here shortly before 9 o’clock. And Atlanta in her morning greenery from the window of a train can be a magnificent way to welcome another day.

  Just a few days ago, Jimmy Harmon experienced all that again. He rode the train from Atlanta to Washington and from Washington back through Atlanta and on to New Orleans—the Southern Crescent from start to finish.

  It was his idea—he was a news film photographer for Channel 11—to put together a thirty-minute documentary on the Southern Crescent for his television station. The train’s future is in doubt. Southern Railway wants to orphan it to Amtrak.

  Jimmy Harmon went to work with John Pruitt, the new man at Channel 11 who was lured away from Channel 2. They took the long ride up and down the Southern line together.

  John Pruitt was telling me Wednesday, ”I didn’t know anything about trains, but Jimmy did. He was a train freak. He could tell me what kind of diesels were pulling the train. I didn’t even know that train Arlo Guthrie sings about, the ‘City of New Orleans,’ was a real train. Jimmy told me it was, an Illinois Central train.”

  The documentary will be aired as planned on Channel 11 some time in September. It will be dedicated to Jimmy Harmon—news photographer, husband, father—who died Wednesday trying to make the product just a little better.

  From a number of sources, here is what likely happened to him:

  The filming of the documentary was actually completed. But he had been out each morning this week, trying for even more footage of the train’s arrival in Atlanta.

  Wednesday morning, there was fog in Atlanta. Jimmy Harmon may have envisioned a shot of the Southern Crescent rolling out of that fog.

  He set up
two cameras on a relatively new trestle that crosses North Druid Hills Road near Peachtree Road in DeKalb County.

  One camera, a sound camera, was rolling at one side of the tracks where the train would soon pass. A silent camera, small enough to be embedded in the gravel between the tracks, would perhaps pick up a dramatic shot of the train roaring directly over it.

  There are two buttons to be pushed to activate the silent camera. One button starts the camera. The other locks it into the “on” position.

  Jimmy Harmon apparently tried to wait until the last moment before the train’s arrival from around a curve to activate his camera.

  He moved too slowly. The engineer of the train said he was directly in front of the huge diesel when he was swept underneath the train and dragged 600 feet.

  “I’ve just come to work here,” John Pruitt was saying, “and I hadn’t really known Jimmy that long. But we worked closely together on the documentary. I feel like I’ve lost my best friend.”

  They called Jimmy Harmon a “damn good photographer” at 11. They talked about the grief of his wife, Donna, his son, Cary, twelve, and his daughter, Shana, six. They were working at the station to produce for the evening news broadcasts a sensitive goodbye to one of their own.

  A little boy never lost his love for trains. Wednesday, in the line of duty, it killed him.

  THE SMILING CHEF

  YEAH, I KNEW LEWIS Price. I have eaten his cooking, and I have shaken his hand. And what comes back now is the recollection of the morning I poked my sleepy head into his office—the kitchen of the Southern Crescent passenger train dining car—and inquired as to the state of his general health and well-being.

  We were northbound, a few hours out of Washington. He had been up for hours and busy every minute. He made his own bran muffins for breakfast, a South Crescent speciality.

  He replied to my inquiry, smiling. “Everything is beautiful, Cap’n. Everything is beautiful.” The man used all his face when he smiled.

  He went to work as a chef on the Southern in 1941, and for thirty-seven years to come, he would practice his arts midst the grease and smoke and crowded dining-car kitchen facilities.

  Company executives, the story goes, often tried to lure him away from the passengers to their private cars. And once he left the rails altogether to become chef at the Alabama governor’s mansion. He could cook, understand.

  But he was back on the trains shortly. “Too many female bosses” is why Lewis Price said he departed Montgomery.

  He died Sunday morning. Lewis Price, sixty-four and a native of Athens and a resident of Atlanta, was one of six people killed when the Southern Crescent left the tracks in Virginia shortly before dawn on its daily Atlanta-to-Washington run.

  The smiling chef—wearing his starched white frock—was preparing breakfast when the crash occurred.

  The photographs of the wreck were horrible. Twisted cars strewn about the tracks. I make a habit of riding the Southern Crescent. I might have been in the dining car talking to Lewis Price.

  He leaves a widow. He leaves five children—the youngest a daughter enrolled at Georgia State—and five grandchildren.

  Larry Price is one of his sons. He is twenty-nine and a real estate developer. He was at his father’s Burbank Drive home Monday, awaiting news of when his father’s body would be returned from Virginia.

  “We waited all day Sunday to hear the inevitable,” he said. “Finally, at about six o’clock in the evening, we heard the news.”

  I asked him to talk about his father. He complied without further persuasion.

  “He had an eighth-grade education,” Larry Price began. “And what he wanted most was for his children to have the education, the independence, the chances he never had.

  “When he went to work for the railroad, black people didn’t have that many choices. But he liked the railroad, and he worked hard at his job because he wanted to provide for his family.

  “And he did provide. We never lived in Sandy Springs or anything like that, but we never wanted for much, either. We were never hungry. We were never cold. And we never went barefooted.

  ”I never heard him talk about it, but I suppose he thought some thing like this could happen. There is always that chance.

  “All his children were close to him. He taught us to have pride in ourselves. He instilled that in us. And he made us happy.”

  The Southern Crescent’s future is in doubt, of course. Southern Railway wants to discontinue the train because of heavy operating losses.

  “That bothered my father,” Larry Price said. “He was thinking about retiring early because of it. I think he would have retired next year if the train had been stopped.”

  I will remember Lewis Price mostly for his smile and his food and the fact he was a vanishing breed. Passenger trains and the people who made them the Grand Conveyance of another time are running thirty years behind schedule and losing ground.

  “All my father would want,” the son said, “is to be remembered as loyal to the Southern Crescent. It was his life.”

  ENGINE RIDE

  ABOARD THE SOUTHERN CRESCENT—This weirdo little kid I know who loves passenger trains and wouldn’t give you a dime for what the Wright Brothers thought was such a big deal got to ride in the head engine of the Southern Crescent twice this week.

  North to Greenville, South Carolina, in the evening, and south back to Atlanta early the next morning.

  I went along as a sort of chaperon.

  It was the kid’s last opportunity to experience such an adventure. Wednesday night, Southern Railway got out of the passenger train business, 149 years after it began, when the last Southern Crescent pulled out of Atlanta’s Peachtree Station bound for Washington, D.C.

  As of Thursday, Amtrak controls Atlanta’s only passenger train. It is now called, simply, “The Crescent,” and even its future may be limited.

  This kid should have his head examined. Once he paid $50 for a conductor’s hat. He wears it when he listens to his record of train sounds. He has pictures of trains on his walls, and once he even spent a honeymoon night on a train.

  He’s a mature kid.

  He climbed up the side of the green and gold Southern engine Number 6914 shortly before 7:30 p.m. at Peachtree Station, and he heard the conductor from the back of the train, “Train Number Two, the blue flag is down! Let’s leave here!”

  He remembered to go to the bathroom before his trip began. That is important for a little kid because riding in the engine of a passenger train is very exciting.

  He got to sit next to the engineer and watch him pull back the throttle and turn on the air brakes and blow the whistle of the ancient, snorting diesel when school buses approached crossings.

  There are fifty-two crossings between Atlanta and the train’s first stop, Gainesville. The whistle must be blown before reaching each one. Two long blows. One short. Another long.

  That is 208 pulls on the train whistle the first hour of the trip.

  “I love my job,” said the engineer, “But people at crossings will drive you crazy. I fear school buses and tank trucks. In that order.”

  Occasionally, people attempt to beat trains across road crossings. Occasionally, they don’t make it and get themselves wiped out.

  The engineer’s name was M.D. Hester, a man steady-handed, clear-eyed, and steel-jawed. He wore a green baseball cap and said he has been at his job for thirty-nine years, the last six of which have been spent driving the Southern Crescent between Atlanta and Greenville.

  He will continue to drive the train for Amtrak “until I get disgusted.” You know how working for the government can be.

  A passenger train engineer stays busy. He reads signals that tell him which track to take because there is a freight train on the other one. He reads orders to tell him now how fast to run the train.

  His maximum speed on curves is sixty miles per hour. His maximum speed on straight track is seventy-nine. In December, the Southern Crescent ran off the trac
k in Virginia because the train was going too fast for a curve. Six people died.

  A foreman in the engine explained how that happened. The engineer had sent the fireman, his co-pilot, back into the engine because of a power malfunction.

  Alone in the cab, the engineer was busy with controls at his back and did not notice he had reached the curve at a speed of eighty miles an hour. Once he realized his mistake, he attempted to brake the train. When he applied the emergency braking system, the second engine came off the tracks and all hell broke loose.

  Human error, they call it.

  M.D. Hester was driving the Southern Crescent into Atlanta one morning and hit a local television cameraman filming his train. The cameraman was killed.

  It wasn’t Mr. Hester’s fault, but he doesn’t want to talk about it, other than to say he still has trouble sleeping at night.

  He did say, however, the person driving the train is often in danger, too.

  “We’re sitting ducks up here,” he explained. “People throw things off overpasses and hang things off overpasses for us to hit. Once I hit a concrete block hanging from a rope off an overpass.”

  Why aren’t people who would do things like that in institutions?

  “You never know what you will see,” the engineer went on. “One morning I was coming in and a man appeared at the side of the train. He wore a hat he had made out of honeysuckles, a pair of clod hoppers and nothing else.

  “He ran along the side of the train, flapping his arms trying to fly.” Probably somebody late for work at the state capitol.

  We were thirty-four minutes behind schedule leaving Atlanta for Greenville. You cross Piedmont Road, then Interstate 285, on and on out through Duluth and Buford and Flowery Branch.

  We whisked past Bill Miner’s Crossing, named for the last person to hold up a Southern Railway passenger train. That was 1907. He got $18,000 in gold but was captured a few days later, passed out drunk in a Dahlonega hotel room.