My bizarre employment history, or how On the slow train became Home in the railroad earth

In April of 2005 I was living in an efficiency apartment in Northeast Philadelphia, while my wife and son were in Elkhart, Indiana. It was the fourth phase in my career with Amtrak, which began in Chicago in 1984, and contiunes today in South Bend. I started at the Chicago Reservation Sales Office in February, after working for the Franch National Railroads' Chicago office and then for CIT Tours, the agency representing the Italian State Railways.

Kathleen and I lived in Oak Park, Illinois at the time. Our two daughters were born there, and by 1989 we had a third chid on the way. Rents were high in Oak Park, and inexpensive places to live in the Chicago area often came with second-rate schools. So we were looking for a smaller city, where the cost of living was lower. We were hoping for something near Iowa, where we both grew up. I had put in for a voluntary transfer to work as a ticket agent in numerous cities in the upper Midwest. Elkhart, Indiana wasn't one of them.

But Frank Stoy, the station supervisor in Toledo needed an agent in Elkhart. We looked at the town, liked it, and I made the transfer. We bought a house and moved while Kathleen was eight months pregnant. Our son Jim was born October 10, 1989--a little over a month after we moved.
Four years later, after Amtrak closed the station in Fort Wayne, I lost my Elkhart ticket agent job. But because I hadn't yet worked five years under the voluntary transfer, I still had seniority in Chicago.

For ten years--from December 1993 until December 2003--I was back at the Chicago call center, commuting from Elkhart on Amtrak and/or the South Shore (the latter involved a drive to South Bend or Michigan City). In the last few years I had enough seniority to work a four-day, ten-hour shift.
That all came to an end when Amtrak management decided to close the Chicago call center. I still believe that was a mistake, but upper management had made the decision. Even Richard M. Daley's offer of giving us a rent-free lease in an upper floor of the Carson's building did not sway the top brass. I had the choice of staying in Chicago or transferring to one of the remaining call centers.

Given the unstable situation in Chicago, I went to Philly. The girls were both in college by this time, but Jim was still in high school. The original plan was for all of us to move to Philly, but it's not easy to sell a house and Jim really wanted to graduate from Elkhart Memorial. So I ended up commuting back and forth, usually riding down to Washington on the Northeast Regional and switching to the Capitol Limited back to Elkhart. Because the Capitol winds its way along the river valleys of Maryland and Pennsylvania, it was very much the slow train. I had a recording of the King's Singers performing the Flanders and Swann's song, "Slow Train, and I remembered Bob Dylan's rambling poem on the album cover of Highway 61 Revisited beginning, "On the slow train time does not interfere." "On the slow train" seemed an apt name for my blog.

I kept it after I transferred to Bloomington-Normal. Illinois, and began driving every week between there and Elkhart. In the spring of 2009 we were in the process of moving to Bloomington when, after getting indigestion from eating a toasted tortilla with Pace 3 Pepper Salsa, I went to the computer and checked the Amtrak job website and saw a job opening in South Bend. I was supposed to have been notified of the job, as I had a transfer application in. Once I got hold of the station supervisor, the job was mine. Since July of 2009, I've been living in Elkhart and working in South Bend, some 15 miles away. So I haven't been "on the slow train" for some time. I also haven't been blogging much, as other things have taken precedence. Still, I'd like to blog more, and changing the name to "Home in the Railroad Earth seems appropriate. It's a variation of lines from Jack Kerouac's prose poem, "October in the Railroad Earth," which has been a favorite of mine ever since I first heard it, with Kerouac reading the poem to Steve Allen's piano accompaniment.

Elkhart, a railroad town for more than a century, and still the home to one of the Norfolk Southern's biggest rail yards, is surely of the Railroad Earth.

Of course, the Republican Congress would like me to be unemployed. Not personally, of course, but because I work for Amtrak. And while it doesn't look as though it will succeed in killing my employer, it may very well force Amtrak to cut its long-distance service. I still have seniority in Philadelphia, so I could end up moving back. But Kathleen would be going with me. And with no slow train to ride, I'd have to come up with a new name for the blog.

To Althea, who rode the train

Checking a passenger list recently, I came across the name Althea. It's not a common name, and it brought to mind Richard Lovelace's poem, “To Althea, from Prison.” And it prompted me to revisit the poem and to look up Richard Lovelace on Wikipedia. The poem is a familiar one, if only for the first few lines of the last stanza. It was well-worth rereading, especially after learning that Lovelace actually did spend time in prison:

When Love with unconfined wings
Hovers within my Gates;
And my divine Althea brings
To whisper at the Grates:
When I lie tangled in her hair,
And fetter'd to her eye;
The Gods that wanton in the Air,
Know no such Liberty.

When flowing Cups run swiftly round
With no allaying Thames,
Our careless heads with Roses bound,
Our hearts with Loyal Flames;
When thirsty grief in Wine we steep,
When Healths and draughts go free,
Fishes that tipple in the Deep,
Know no such Liberty.

When (like committed Linnets) I
With shriller throat shall sing
The sweetness, Mercy, Majesty,
And glories of my KING;
When I shall voice aloud how Good
He is, how Great should be;
Inlarged Winds that curl the Flood,
Know no such Liberty.

Stone Walls do not a Prison make,
Nor Iron Bars a Cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an Hermitage;
If I have freedom in my Love,
And in my soul am free;
Angels alone that soar above,
Enjoy such liberty.

Lovelace, born in 1618 into a well-to-do family, was the son of Sir William Lovelace, a member of the Virginia Company, and Anne Barnes Lovelace, daughter of Sir William Barne and a granddaughter of a Lord Mayor of London and an Archbishop of York. Given his circumstances, he grew to be a strong defender of the King Charles I and the Royalists in the conflict between King and Parliament.

He fought on the Royalist side in the 1640 Bishops' War, after Charles imposed bishops on the Church of Scotland. It was a precursor to the English Civil Wars. In 1641 he led a group of men to seize and destroy a petition for the abolition of episcopal rule in the Scottish church. The following year he presented the House of Commons with a pro-Royalist petition, which was supposed to have been burned. These actions landed him in Gatehouse Prison on April 30, 1642, but he was released on bail on June 21 of the same year on that condition that he avoid communication with Parliament.

Yet that brief incarceration inspired one of the most well-known poems in the English language. For Lovelace, the power of human love transcends the confinement of the stone walls and iron bars. The sublime eroticism of the first stanza: “When I lie tangled in her hair,/And fetter'd to her eye;/The Gods that wanton in the Air,/Know no such Liberty.” ought to be as well-remembered as the first lines of the last stanza. His use of the “fetter'd” “bound” reminds us that there can be freedom in the bonds between lovers.

Was there really an Althea who visited Lovelace in prison? There is no evidence for it, but I'd like to think there was. While Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Reginald Frampton paints her as a redhead (with what would later be called a Princess Leia hairdo), I imagine her as having long, dark hair and sparkling brown eyes, and looking very much like the woman I married.

And for the Althea who rode the train, my thanks for reminding me of this beautiful poem.

Tenebrae

WEDNESDAY OF HOLY WEEK, 1940


Out of the east window a storm
Blooms spasmodically across the moonrise;
In the west, in the haze, the planets
Pulsate like standing meteors.
We listen in the darkness to the service of Tenebrae,
Music older than the Resurrection,
The voice of the ruinous, disorderly Levant:
“Why doth the city sit solitary
That was full of people?”
The voices of the Benedictines are massive, impersonal;
They never fear this agony nor are ashamed of it.
Think...six hours ago in Europe,
Thousands were singing these words,
Putting out candles psalm by psalm...
Albi like a fort in the cold dark,
Aachen, the voices fluttering in the ancient vaulting,
The light of the last candle
In Munich on the gnarled carving.
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
Return ye unto the Lord thy God.”
Thousands kneeling in the dark,
Saying, “Have mercy upon me, O God.”
We listen appreciatively, smoking, talking quietly,
The voices are coming to us from three thousand miles.
On the white garden wall the shadows
Of the date palm thresh wildly;
The full moon of the spring is up,
And a gale with it.

--Kenneth Rexroth


Tenebrae is Latin for “darkness” or “shadows.” Fifteen candles are lighted in a stand called a hearse. At the end of each reading one candle is extinguished, until all but one candle is left burning. And that candle is hidden behind the altar, putting the church sanctuary in total darkness. A loud noise (Latin streptius) is made, usually by slamming a book shut or stomping on the floor, to symbolize the earthquake after Jesus' death. After the great noise, the single lighted candle is returned to the hearse, signifying the light of Christ's resurrection.

Kenneth Rexroth, who spent his early childhood in Elkhart, was an Anglo-Catholic or High Church Episcopalian, and he deeply appreciated the service of Tenebrae. In 1943, depressed about the war and uncertain of whether his conscientious objector status would be approved, tried to persuade an Episcopal or Roman Catholic church in San Francisco to offer the service, but without luck.

But three years earlier, Rexroth and his second wife Marie listened to Tenebrae broadcast on the radio from a Benedictine monastery somewhere on the east coast. The early spring of 1940 was the time of the “Phoney War,” when the Germans and their Soviet allies were busy consolidating their conquest of Poland while the Western Front was relatively quiet. In fact, French troops had penetrated a few miles into Germany but then withdrew behind the Maginot Line.

Everyone knew a German attack on France was coming—the question was when, and Rexroth juxtaposes the dark service of Tenebrae with the tensions in Europe and the approaching storm outside his window. Rexroth mentions three European cities in the poem.

Albi, in southern France, was once the center of the Cathar Christians, deemed heretical by the Catholic Church and all but wiped out in the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229) under Pope Innocent III. (Like other crusades this one had as much to do with temporal affairs as theological ones. The French monarchy gained control of southern France by participating in the crusade.) In any case, Albi brings to mind we now call genocide.

Aachen, or Aix-la-Chapelle in French, was the seat of Charlemagne's Holy Roman Empire, and represents the triumph of Christianity over paganism. Many Nazi leaders wanted to exchange Christianity for a kind of neo-paganism. (I wonder whether the pre-Christian Germanic tribes would have recognized it as their religion.)

Munich, the principal city of Catholic southern Germany and Hitler's base of operations during the 1920s, was also the home of Cardinal Archbishop Michael Von Faulhaber, who spoke out against the Nazis' persecution of the Jews. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, return ye unto the Lord thy God,” Rexroth pleads, quoting from the liturgy.

The service of Tenebrae gives us an opportunity to reflect on the dark side of history and to take solace in the Light of Christ.

Image: Tenebrae hearse from Mainz Cathedral: Wikimedia Commons

"A Reagan Book for his 100th"

Thank you, Mark Souder. I'm not in the habit of thanking the former representative from the Third District of Indiana, but because of a column he wrote in the Elkhart Truth (“Pick up a Reagan Book for his 100th,” 5 February 2011), I have reason to thank him.

Souder, some of you may remember, was the Christian Right congressman who resigned after the public learned of his affair with a married woman on his staff. He resurfaced last month to urge Elkhartans to read a book about Ronald Reagan to celebrate the centennial of his birth.

Clearly, Souder idolizes Reagan: nearly all of the books he recommends are either hagiographies or extremely sympathetic to their subject. To give Souder credit, he does mention books by Lou Cannon, with the warning, “He does not share Reagan's worldview.”

Had Souder not published his list, I probably would not have reread Reagan's America: Innocents at Home by Garry Wills (Doubleday, 1987). It isn't on Souder's list; not only does Wills not share Reagan's worldview, he argues that it it is not based in reality: “A visit to his past is always a pleasant experience. Visiting Reaganland is is very much like taking children to Disneyland, where they can deal with a New Orleans cut to their measure. It is a safe past, with no sharp edges to stumble against. The more visits one makes to such a past, the better one is any troubling incursions of a real New Orleans, a real racetrack, the real American West.” (p387)
Wills calls the book's first section “Huck Finn's World.” In his autobiography, Reagan calls his childhood “one of those rare Huck Finn-Tom Sawyer idylls.” But Wills reminds us that “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in particular, takes place almost entirely at night, as a series of panicky escapes from one horror to another.” (p7)

Reagan was born in Tampico, Illinois, just a few miles from my father's hometown of Morrison. While Reagan's family moved many times during his childhood, he regards Dixon—one county over from Morrison—as his boyhood home. Reagan's first regular job was at WOC Radio in Davenport, Iowa. And while I grew up in Iowa City, I married a Davenport girl. So in a sense, Reagan's background parallels my own, though it's separated by some forty years. And while my father, who grew up in the same region as Reagan, voted for Dewey in 1944, but became a liberal Democrat not long afterward. Reagan supported Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, but took a sharp right turn sometime after 1948.

Wills shows how the white settlement of the American Midwest, along with the West, was made possible largely by government: the Hennepin Canal, which benefited Tampico, was a government project. He goes on to remind us that Reagan's father and brother both through the Depression as a result of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.

In Davenport, and later in Des Moines, Reagan worked as a sportscaster, transforming telegraphed signals from Chicago Cubs games into play-by-play coverage. And Wills points out that Reagan had spent his entire career as one of the “symbol specialists” Jeane Kirkpatrick attacked in her 1976 book, The New Presidential Elite: Men and Women in National Politics. Reagan went from sportscaster to actor to General Electric spokesman to politician.

“There is nothing wrong with any of these activities,” Wills writes. But it is strange that they should make up the sole background of a hero cheered by critics of mere 'symbol skills.'” (p101)

Wills follows Reagan's Hollywood career from his arrival to his 1942 triumph in Kings Row, to his transition from a movie to a television actor. As president of the Screen Actors Guild, Reagan helped engineer an agreement with MCA which allowed the corporation to act both as union representative of television actors an television producer—an obvious conflict of interest.

Reagan, according to Wills, came close to being indicted. Wills believes Reagan just didn't see it as a conflict of interest, but “was always always prepared to think the best of his own bosses.” (p278)

The main premise of Wills's book, though, is that Reagan's America is one of myth—a myth that millions of Americans hold as truth. In his chapter, “Greenfield Village on the Potomac,” Wills writes of Henry Ford's high schools, where students learned from McGuffey's Readers: “Ford kept creating new models of his cars to replace the old, but he would not allow his schools to admit new readers to replace McGuffey's... He could not take his old world with him as he whizzed off in his automobile time machine, which carried him in the wrong direction, forward to the future.” (p374, italics in original)

Reagan's America is one very much defined by Hollywood. Wills points out that the “Wild West” of movies and television is at odds with the real American West of the post-Civil War era:
“...Robert Dykstra, investigating the period of legendary drives through the towns of Kansas, found that places like Dodge City and Abilene averaged only one and a half murders per year, often having nothing to do with cowboys, and usually unconnected with 'shootouts.'” (p89)

In his 1976 primary campaign against Gerald Ford, Reagan repeated a story about a black Navy cook who was stationed at Pearl Harbor when it was bombed: “'He cradled a machine gun in his arms, which is not an easy thing to do, and stood on the end of the pier blazing away at the Japanese airplanes and strafing him and that [segregation] was all changed.'

“Reporters pointed out that segregation [in the military] persisted until Truman abolished it in 1948, three years after the war, but Reagan shook his head and said he did not believe them.” (p165) Wills surmises that he remembered the scene from a movie.

In a movie Wills does not mention, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), the old newspaper editor says, “When legend becomes fact, print the legend.” For Reagan, the legend has become fact. And because the legends are the same ones that Americans have learned from television and the movies, he was able to key into the American psyche in a way that few politicians have: “He is a durable daylight 'bundle of meanings,' as Roland Barthes called myth. Reagan does not not argue for American values, he embodies them.” (p4)

And perhaps the central American value he embodies is one that it is at odds with traditional Christianity: that of original sinlessness:

At one time a woman of unsavory enough experience was delicately but cruelly referred to as “having a past.” The doctrine of original sin states that humankind, in exactly that sense, “has a past.” And much of American thinking has been intended to exempt this country from that stigma. (p384)

Wills contrasts “the doctrine of the Fall” with “the doctrine of the Market:”

Modern capitalism lives by a counter-myth to the Fall of Man—one where benign nature makes everything go, miraculously, right... Individual greeds add up to general gain... Eden was lost by free choice in the Fall of Man. It rises, unbidden, by the automatic engineerings of the Market.

The earlier myth called for a repenting awareness of sin. The later one called for a dutiful innocence and optimism. (p384)

Jimmy Carter, though a far more devout and orthodox Christian than Reagan, lost the evangelical Christian vote because he believed in the Fall of Man: “religious voters found that Carter lacked the higher confidence in man, man's products, and America. He talked of limits and self-denial, of tendencies toward aggression even in a sacred or 'saved' nation like America. He believed in original sin.”

Reagan's ability to identify himself with that American counter-myth, Wills argues, is the reason Americans twice elected him to the nation's highest office. More recently, Tea Party activists have accused President Obama of not believing in American exceptionalism. It seems to be a myth that, however untrue, all American politicians must subscribe to. And Reagan articulated the myth better than anyone else.

Reagan, who misquoted John Winthrop's 1630 “city upon a hill” sermon, by adding the adjective “shining” to it, distorted Winthrop's message of caution and turned it into an optimistic declaration of a new Eden. Winthrop uses the line from from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:14): “...for we must Consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world...,” as a warning to his Puritan followers that their colony would be watched and judged by the world. Reagan's “shining city on a hill” had no such cautionary message; only the shallow optimism of “Morning in America.”

Mark Souder, who, I hope, has repented of his sins, ought to read Reagan's America. And I pray that he and his former lover can repair their respective marriages.

Sarah Palin and "Second Amendment Remedies"

Demonizing or ridiculing one's political opponents can be fun. I enjoyed calling George W. Bush an idiot and Dick Cheney an evil genius. Nixon was paranoid, Reagan a Grade B actor, and Gerald Ford played too much football without a helmet. Yes, we liberals have done some name-calling. But with the exception of the “Where is Lee Harvey Oswald Now that We Really Need Him?” buttons, which, as far as I know, never inspired anyone to try to kill Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon, we never talked about “Second Amendment remedies,” as did Nevada senatorial candidate Sharron Angle.
We've now seen a Second Amendment remedy in action, with Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) in critical condition, and six people dead, including a 9-year-old girl.

Rep. Giffords, a moderate Democrat in a Republican-leaning district, was one of those targeted for defeat by former Alaska governor Sarah Palin in the 2010 election. And I use the word “targeted” almost literally, for one of her political action committee's advertisements showed Giffords' district in what appears to be the crosshairs of a gunsight.

Palin has expressed shock and sadness at the shooting. I'm sure she never expected anyone would take her literally and try to kill one of her targets. But Palin and her supporters were having too much fun playing the political demonization game to think there might be consequences to putting their opponents in a virtual gunsight.

Palin loves the political game. So do I. In the summer of 1972 I worked on the staff of Iowa Democratic senatorial candidate Dick Clark. Four years later I knocked on doors for presidential candidate Morris Udall, and did the same for the Democrats in 1980. Since then, employment and family have kept me from devoting a great deal of time to political action, but I'm still very much a political junkie.

As we all know, the outcome of the political game has far greater consequences than the outcome of, say, the Super Bowl. While I've always been politically liberal, I know very well that many conservative Republicans want to cut Amtrak funding to zero, thus depriving me of a job. (Still, I don't plan to kill any right-wingers because of it.)

Palin seems to like the political game a lot more than she does the business of governing. Otherwise, why would she resign as governor of Alaska in order to be the Tea Party's Number One cheerleader? I'm sure Palin's advisers told her that her best strategy for winning the presidency in 2012 was to stay in the governorship, make a reputation as someone who can govern effectively, and begin full-time campaigning in 2011. But the lure of the campaign trail and the adulation of the Tea Party crowds was too great for her, and she succumbed to temptation.

And until now, it's been fun for her. Even though some of the wackiest candidates she backed, such as Angle, Delaware senatorial candidate Christine O'Donnell, and Alaska's own Joe Miller, lost, she picked up enough victories to celebrate. But now she has to face the consequences of her crosshairs ad, along with the Tea Party's view of opponents as The Enemy.

Here in northern Indiana, Kokomo radio talk show host Peter Heck referred to President Obama, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Indiana Second District Representative Joe Donnelly as “enemies of freedom,” while Donnelly's Tea Party Republican opponent Jackie Walorski (another Palin protege who lost) likened her campaign to the war against the Nazis.

I hope Palin and her Tea Party followers have realized, if they hadn't before, that their opponents are just that—opponents—loyal Americans who disagree with them on many issues, and that they are real people, with real husbands, wives, and children who love them. They aren't enemies or traitors, just as the Republicans aren't my enemies. I just happen to disagree with them.

And there are simply too many people in this country who don't understand that hyped political campaign rhetoric is not meant to be taken literally. We saw that Saturday in Tucson. Please, no more crosshairs, no more talk of “Second Amendment remedies,” and no more likening one's political opponents to traitors or enemies. From my position on the moderate left, I'll strive to do the same.

Blood, Guts, and Tattoos: My recent ordeal

“I'll never get a tattoo,” I've vowed to myself more than once. While I have many friends I like and respect who sport body art, I've never had any desire to have someone inject ink into my body. The vast majority of tattoos I've seen are no improvement on the original, natural skin. But I'm no crusader against the tattoo industry or against those who have tattoos. I just don't plan on getting any myself.

But recently I found that I had three “tattoos” of India ink, though they were in a place almost no one could see. And while I never consented to them, I was glad I had them. I'm not certain whether any trace of them remains. They served their purpose.

Over the past dozen years, I've had problems with gastrointestinal bleeding. In the spring of 1999 I spent close to a week in Elkhart General Hospital due to G.I. bleeding. The doctor told my wife I didn't have stomach cancer, colon cancer, ulcers, and probably a few other things. But he couldn't locate the bleed except to say that it was in that vast, 18-foot-long small intestine. The bleeding stopped on its own, and the doctor said it was probably a “vascular malformation,” in which a weakness in a small vein manifests itself in bleeding. I was told not to use aspirin or ibuprofen. For me, the Columbine massacre will always be linked to my time in the hospital.

The next year, at around the same time, I had another bleed, and another hospitalization. This time, a colonoscopy detected the problem—a lesion in the large intestine. The lesion was cauterized, and I had no G.I. bleeding for a decade.

But on Thursday, July 8, it came back, first in the form of dark stools, and by Saturday the 12, I it was clear that I needed to check myself into the hospital. I drove back from my job at the South Bend Amtrak station, left a note for my wife, and drove myself to Elkhart General Hospital.

I was there for just over a week, while the doctors and technicians tried to locate the source of the bleeding. I had an upper-G.I. endoscopy, which ruled out the esophagus and stomach. I had a colonoscopy, which eliminated the large intestine. Once again, I was bleeding from the small bowel. After a capsule endoscopy, in which I swallowed a capsule that took pictures of my intestines, gave inconclusive results, it was clear that Elkhart General had done all it could do. On Sunday night, July 18, I rode in an ambulance to the University of Chicago Medical Center, one of the nation's best hospitals for gastroenterology.

Things went slowly at the big hospital. While I did the preparation for the double-balloon enteroscopy on Monday (drinking a dreadful laxative concoction called GoLytely, which supposedly doesn't drain the electrolytes from the system, though it wipes out nearly everything else), I didn't have the procedure until Thursday. But once I finally had it, the physicians found the problem. The team spent about three hours checking my small bowel first by way of the anus, and then by way of the mouth. And in that second scan, they found “submucosal lesions,” which were responsible for the bleeding. And to mark the lesions, as well as the part of my small bowel which was not surveyed, I received three “tattoos” of India ink.

The next day, Friday, July 23, I had laproscopic surgery. I awoke to find five small scars on my belly. Later I learned that the surgeon had removed about 3 feet of my small intestine. “You'll never miss it,” he said.

I sill have to do follow-ups, and there's some possibility I'll have to do a round of chemotherapy if the labs find anything potentially cancerous. But right now, I'm glad to be home. And since I haven't heard anything from Chicago, I'm hoping no news is good news. And I'm happy to be in the land of the living, albeit with 20 percent less guts and perhaps some vestige of India ink tattoos.

Photo: University of Chicago Medical Center (Wikimedia).

Grammar Girl, August Dvorak, QWERTY, and the Art of Tai Ping

Grammar Girl says I should put only one space between sentences. It’s a hard habit to break. Back in the 1967-68 school year at Cedar Falls High, the typing instructor stressed that the break between sentences required two spaces. It was the one thing I really learned from that class, which I passed with a D. My biggest problem with typing, then and now, is that I can’t type without looking at the keyboard. Believe me, I tried. And I felt lucky to escape with a D.

According to Grammar Girl (a.k.a. Mignon Fogarty), typewriters were designed so that each character had an equal amount of horizontal space. To make a clear separation between sentences, a second space was necessary. But present-day word processing programs have done away with letter equality. They’re also designed to regulate the space between sentences, so the two-space rule can foul things up for the publisher.

She’s probably right. Still, I hate to give up the sum of my knowledge from that long-ago class. My girlfriend in my next and final year of high school, at University High School in Iowa City, was an ace at the subject (along with all of the other subjects), and referred to it as if it were a Chinese martial art: Tai Ping. She would have earned a black belt had the school awarded them. (Like most high school romances, ours did not last; she and I are both married, but not to each other. I'm really glad we're friends, though.)

She now makes good money with her prestidigitation, surely typing on the 21st century equivalent of what the Harvard Lampoon called a "a supercharged, fuel-injected, 345 hp Smith-Corona.” (Bored of the Rings) What’s more, she uses the Dvorak keyboard. Well, actually, she uses a QWERTY keyboard, but programmed as a Dvorak. For somebody who has to look at the keys, it’s well nigh miraculous. (Dvorak Simplified Keyboard below [Wikipedia])

A note of explanation: when typewriters were introduced in the nineteenth century, manufacturers experimented with a lot of different keyboard formats. The biggest problem with manual typewriters was that a fast typist would jam the keys; the QWERTY format reduced the jamming problem and thus became the standard of the industry. But in 1961 when IBM introduced the Selectric, with its rotating type head, there was no longer a jamming problem. And the QWERTY keyboard wasn’t necessary.

Enter August Dvorak, who had, in 1936, redesigned the keyboard with help from his brother-in-law , Dr. William Dealy and ther friend Etaoin Shrdlu. Shrdlu, as I discovered by reading Harvard Lampoon’s 1968 parody of LIFE, is not really somebody’s name, but the twelve most common letters used in the English language. If you look at the QWERTY keyboard, you’ll see that the three most common letters are on the left side. And most are not on the middle, or “home” row of keys. Dvorak's redesigned keyboard makes it possible for professional typists to type much more rapidly. This was true even before the IBM Selectric and computer word processing, but with the decline of the manual typewriter, the last reason for the QWERTY keyboard as a standard has disappeared—at least for touch typists, If you’re Steve Wylder and have to look at the keys, it doesn't much matter. I'll stick with QWERTY.

I'll probably keep typing two spaces between sentences. But the wizards at Sun Microsystems have made it possible for me to do so with no harm to the text. OpenOffice Writer's AutoCorrect function lets me keep typing the double space and still end up with a single space between sentences.

Maybe the "Worst" isn't so bad after all

During the time when I was an active Authonomy member, I read some incredibly bad writing. But a yellowed newspaper clipping reminded me that these Authonomists couldn't hold a candle to Michael “The Fastest Typewriter in the East” Avallone.

The article, a “Weekend Whodunits” column by Henry Kisor, in the April 17, 1987 Chicago Sun-Times, reviewed Gun in Cheek: An Affectionate Guide to the “Worst” in in Mystery Fiction (Mysterious Press) by Bill Pronzini, a compendium of bad mystery writing, mainly of the hardboiled variety. Kisor begins with this excerpt from “one of a series of abominable pulp mysteries of the 1950s by Richard F. Prather, that featured a private eye named Shell Scott,” Take a Murder, Darling:

He was dead, all right. He had been shot, poisoned, stabbed and strangled. Either somebody really had it in for him or four people had killed him. Or else it was the cleverest suicide I ever heard of.

Two of the funniest examples were from the speeding typewriter of Avallone, who seems to have had trouble with human anatomy:

“His thin mustache was neatly placed between a peaked nose and two eyes like black marbles.” (Don't Die in Bed)

“She...unearthed one of her fantastic breasts from the folds of her sheath skirt.” (The Horrible Man)

Pronzini even finds examples from more contemporary mystery writers: “The sun [was] shining its ass off.” (Looking for Rachel Wallace by Robert B. Parker, “who of all writers should have known better,” remarks Kisor.)

Pronzini's examples were not exclusively American. “Nobody,” writes Pronzini, “approached the art of name-calling with more verve and scorn” than British writer Berkeley Gray's detective, Norman Conquest. Kisor provides a few examples:

“'Reach, slugs!' he said calmly.”

“'There are a a lot of things you don't know, reptile.'”

“'It's a shame that a chunk of hellspawn like you should be one of the throng.'”

“'Say that again, filth, and my trigger finger will give a very nasty jerk.'”

But it's an American Kisor uses for the final quote in his column. “Nobody,” he writes, could construct a stumbling metaphor better than Joseph Rosenberger... in his Death Merchant spy series:”

Tuskanni stood in the open doorway at the top of the stairs, a .38 Colt automatic in his hand, watching as the burly drivers tried to bring down the two brothers—their efforts making as much sense as the termite who was a conscientious objector and went around trying to eat up draft boards.

The column inspired me to read Pronzini's book. As I recall, though, Kisor managed to get the best examples from the book. But rereading the article gives me pause to reconsider my judgment. All of the examples are in grammatical English, with no comma splices, dangling participles, or other errors. Richard Prather uses “all right,” as opposed to the “alright” which abounds in Authonomy—even among the better writers. (What's scary is that the spell check in Open Office Writer has no problem with “alright.”) Avallone may have had trouble placing the parts of the body, but he knew the parts of speech. Quite a few of my fellow Authonomists don't.

“May their roscoes forever spit 'Ka-Chow! Chow!'” concludes Kisor.

Amen.

Forgotten Books Friday: "Up 'Til Now," by Eugene McCarthy

Some months ago I found Eugene McCarthy's Up 'til Now: A Memoir (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987) on the library discard shelf. It's a witty and very readable look back at American politics from 1948 until the 1980s by the man who dared to challenge President Lyndon B. Johnson for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination.

Up 'til Now includes a large section about the '68 campaign, but McCarthy's bitterness over it—especially over Robert Kennedy's decision to enter the race—makes it the weakest part of the book. But when he writes about his 1948 campaign for Congress and his years in the Congress, he's at his best. Take, for instance, his comparison of 1968 and his first Congressional race in 1948:

The support I received in the anti-Vietnam campaign of 1968 was described by some observers as motley and unprecedented. It was in fact little different from that which I received in 1948—from students, some old enough to vote, some not, old liberals, and party persons, especially women.

Or his description of the Philadelphia delegation to the 81st (1949-1951) Congress:

It was a noteworthy bunch, consisting of four members: Green, Granaham, Barrett, and Chudoff. They were all of the same height, roughly five feet four inches. The word was that Bill Green, who was the political boss of Philadelphia, would not approve any Democratic candidate for Congress who was taller than he. None of the delegation was. Moreover, the delegation of four sat in the last row of the House Chamber and voted as one man.

When he gets to his 1968 campaign, he seems defensive. He never really explains why he made virtually no effort to win after the California primary, except to write, "After the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the chance of carrying the antiwar issue at the Democratic convention was, barring unforeseen developments, lost."

His bitterness about Kennedy colors his entire treatment of 1968. He has a point—Kennedy's organization did run a ruthless primary campaign against McCarthy, in addition to coming into the race only after McCarthy had made his impressive showing in New Hampshire. Still,
McCarthy has nothing to say about the 1968 Democratic Convention or his lukewarm endorsement of Hubert Humphrey after Humphrey broke with Johnson on Vietnam.

He's surprisingly kind to Richard Nixon. "I think it fair to say... quite possibly no one could have done any better in ending the war unless he had ended it sooner, but quite certainly no one could have done any worse."

But he does go on to write that "traces of the old Nixon showed through." McCarthy is bothered

less by Watergate than by Nixon's 1971 "enemies list."

In the final section of his book, "Entropic Politics," McCarthy writes,"The politics of the United States, and especially of the Democratic Party, following Watergate and the end of the Nixon administration might best be labeled 'entropic,' a state attributed to society generally by Professor John Ahearn of Stanford University as having 'no goal' and 'no path of effective action.'"

McCarthy sees the America of the late 1980s as "overtransported and overfueled... overdrugged... overadvertised, over info-tained...overbureaucratized... overincorporated... overdefensed."

In the course of his scathing, but largely accurate assessment of American society, he goes on to say, "President Reagan and his administration have judged the growing power of the corporation to be a good thing." Yet he does not explain his 1980 endorsement of Reagan over Jimmy Carter, who had proposed an extensive program of energy conservation in 1979. While McCarthy's personal dislike of Carter is well-known, McCarthy must have realized that Reagan was working hand in glove with the multinationals.

In spite of all its shortcomings, Up 'Til Now is a refreshing look at American politics. And in a time when the TEA party folks are screaming for term limits and denouncing career politicians, McCarthy's book reminds us why we need professional politicians. In what is really a eulogy for Senator Philip Hart of Michigan, he writes:

Philip Hart was a politician. He recognized politics as an honorable, necessary, and difficult vocation. He practiced it not as "the art of the possible," which is wholly inadequate as a definition, but as a discipline of mind and will, as a profession that should carry the common good beyond what is considered prudent and possible. He knew that politics is not a game to be scored, to be marked by winning and losing, but that it is a continual challenge.

I was too young to tramp through the snows of New Hampshire for Gene. I did what I could, selling McCarthy's Million buttons to my high school classmates, and working to nominate McCarthy at the Cedar Falls High School mock Democratic convention. (See "When I was Clean for Gene.") Even though it reminded me of McCarthy's many contradictions, quirks, and foibles, reading Up 'Til Now gave me a new respect for the man, who died in 2005, and for the thousands of idealistic students who cut their hair, put on suits and dresses, and went off to campaign for the only Democrat willing to challenge LBJ over Vietnam.

Last Train to Des Moines, Forty Years Ago

Note: The following was submitted to the Des Moines Register as a guest editorial. As the Register has apparently decided not to use it, I'm posting it here. Photo Credit: Ron Goodenow. (Train No. 7 near Grinnell, IA, late 1960s or 1970)

On May 31, 1970, I took Trailways from Iowa City to Davenport, walked across the Government Bridge to Rock Island, Illinois, and walked a few more blocks to the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad station. I was there to ride the last run on the Rock Island Lines' Train No. 7, which, along with its eastbound counterpart, No. 10, were the only passenger trains serving Des Moines and Iowa City. The Rock Island depot was filled with families taking the children for a first, and presumably last ride on the train. They rode from Rock Island to West Liberty, West Liberty to Iowa City, and so on down the line to Council Bluffs, the train's western terminus. Forty years later, Des Moines, Iowa City, and the entire state of Iowa north of U.S. Highway 34 still have no passenger train service.

From the vantage point of 1970, that wouldn't seem very startling. Louis W. Menk, who was about to become chairman of the newly-merged Burlington Northern Railroad, appeared on NBC's Today Show on February 26, 1970, and said, "in my view we ought to let the intercity passenger train, the long-distance passenger train, die an honorable death, like we did the steamship, or the riverboats and the stagecoach and the pony express." Gasoline was cheap, the airlines were profitable and expanding, and passenger trains were being eliminated all over the nation. Des Moines wasn't even the biggest city in America without rail passenger service. Dallas, Texas had that dubious honor.

But even though things looked bleak for the passenger train, there was change in the air. Congress was working on a bill, popularly known as Railpax, that would create a quasi-public corporation to operate a national network of passenger trains.

In fact, the Rock Island was desperate to eliminate its passenger service across Iowa because the Railpax bill would put a hold on train discontinuances. And because membership fees in the proposed National Railroad Passenger Corporation would be based on the railroad's passenger train losses for 1969, the Rock Island wanted to stay out. (The railroad had claimed a $1.3 million loss on Nos. 7 and 10 for 1969. It had also run a Minneapolis-Des Moines-Kansas City train for the first half of 1969, for which it claimed huge losses.) It was cheaper to run its two remaining intercity services: Chicago-Rock Island and Chicago-Peoria, than join NRPC.

The Interstate Commerce Commission, the agency with jurisdiction over passenger train discontinuances, gave the Rock Island what it wanted, and allowed the line to drop Nos. 7 and 10 before the ICC held hearings on the discontinuance petition. Normally the ICC would order the trains continued during the hearing process. As expected, the Commission reaffirmed its original decision, and the Rock Island remained "freight service only" west of its namesake city. (The Rock Island and Peoria trains survived until the end of 1978.)

Meanwhile, President Richard Nixon signed the National Railroad Passenger Act of 1970 on October 30 of that year, and Railpax emerged as Amtrak on May 1, 1971. In spite of efforts by every administration from Nixon through George W. Bush to curtail or eliminate Amtrak, passenger trains continue to cross the nation. And President Obama, with assistance from his train-riding vice president Joe Biden, has made high-speed rail a priority of his administration.
In 1974, when the energy crisis made the fuel-efficiency of rail attractive, it seemed likely that passenger trains would return to central and northern Iowa. The Iowa Legislature even approved $4 million for passenger train service that year, but in what state Representative Stephen Rapp (D-Waterloo) called a "sell-out," the appropriation was eliminated in conference committee.

Amtrak planned a Chicago-Des Moines train in 2000, when then-CEO George Warrington thought the corporation could make money by hauling freight as well as passengers. The expected freight contracts never materialized and the plan was dropped.

In the forty years since I stepped on board the last No. 7, I've promoted rail passenger service both as a citizen and for the last 26 years, as an Amtrak employee. But though I've lived out-of-state since 1981, I'm still an Iowan at heart. It's refreshing to hear of Governor Chet Culver's interest in reviving intercity rail service in Iowa.

I hope Iowans will continue to work for fast trains in the Hawkeye State. Another forty years is too long to wait for good public transportation in Iowa.

Happy Flora Day!

Every year, around May 8, the people of Helston, Cornwall celebrate Flora Day, culminating in the "Hal an Tow," with the plays of St. George and the Dragon and St. Michael and the Devil. I'm sure the celebration evolved from a pre-Christian Celtic spring festival. Here are the lyrics:


Robin Hood and Little John
Are both gone to the fair-O
And we will to the merry greenwood
To see what they do there-O
And for to chase-O
To chase the buck and doe

Chorus (after each verse):

Hal-an-tow, jolly rumbalow
For we are up as soon as any day-O
For to fetch the summer home
The summer and the May-O
For summer is a-coming in
And winter is a-gone-O


As for St. George-O
St. George he was the knight-O
Of all the knights in Christendom
St. George he had the right-O
In every land-O
The land where'er we go

But for a greater than St. George
Our Helston has the right-O
St. Michael with his wings outspread
The archangel so bright-O
Who fought the fiend-O
Of all mankind the foe

Maybe I made a mistake by allowing AdSense

Last week I decided to try to make a few bucks from this blog by allowing Google AdSense. I've had two politically-oriented posts which clearly indicate that I'm a liberal Democrat and opposed to the the worship of markets. Yet I'm getting ads urging people to urge Senator Bayh to vote against environmental legislation and the regulation of banks. I'll keep AdSense on for a while, but if my liberal blog is going to become a platform for right-wing nuts, I'll have to forgo the money.

Kent State and the Rehabilitation of Richard Nixon

The verdict of history is never final. Warren G. Harding, almost universally considered one of worst American president, has been rehabilitated by at least some historians. Conservative columnist Mona Charen, in an October 13, 2009 article in the National Review, quotes two historians who lionize Harding.

Richard Nixon has never lost his defenders. And sometimes they make a strong case for him. The historian Robert Dallek, in his Modern Scholar lecture series, The American Presidency , gives Nixon high marks for his economic program and his ending of the Vietnam War. And Dallek is very much in the progressive school of historians. Yet the memory of the Kent State killings, which happened forty years ago this week, reminds us of the vicious and divisive nature of the Nixon presidency.

George W. Bush's campaign strategy of polarizing the American electorate and demonizing his opponents was nothing new. While Nixon used the slogan "Bring Us Together" in his 1968 campaign, by 1970 he had become the most divisive president in recent history. His vice president, Spiro Agnew, began the assault on intellectuals, the press, and dissidents. In 1969 he made headlines with the line, "A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals." The Nixon machine, while never employing the outright racism of George Wallace, the 1968 American Independent Party candidate for president, took advantage of racial prejudice in what was called the "Southern Strategy."

Nixon, in his 1968 campaign, promised "an honorable end to the war." But once he became president he widened the war while launching a domestic offensive against the antiwar movement. The Johnson Administration took no action against Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, and others who demonstrated in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. It was the Nixon Administration which ordered the Chicago Eight (later Chicago Seven after Seale was tried separately) trials.

In the spring of 1970 Nixon widened the war by approving an invasion of (he called it an "incursion") of Cambodia. As a result, there were antiwar demonstrations on hundreds of American campuses. Nixon's widely-quoted May 1 reaction to the demonstrations was:

You know, you see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses. Listen, the boys that are on the college campuses today are the luckiest people in the world and here they are, burning up the books, I mean, storming around about this issue, I mean, you name it. Get rid of the war, there'll be another one. (American Experience, Nixon).

Three days later National Guardsmen fired on students demonstrating at Kent State University, killing four. "My child was not a bum," said the father of one of the girls killed.

Many Americans blamed the students for the deaths, as they had blamed demonstrators for the violence at the 1968, Democratic Convention, which the Walker Commission deemed a "police riot." The Republican National Committee decided to make campus riots, or "law and order" the main theme of its 1970 campaign.

The culmination of the 1970 Nixon effort was an election-eve broadcast:

SAN CLEMENTE, Calif. (AP) President Nixon will climax his strenuous role in the 1970 campaign by appearing on major television networks tonight in filmed segments of a speech decrying violent dissent..." -Elkhart Truth, November 2, 1970.

The broadcast turned out to be a disaster. The grainy black-and-white film, with a poorly-recorded soundtrack, showed an angry Nixon who seemed out of control.

The Democrats aired a speech by Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine (the 1968 vice presidential candidate). It was in color and professionally recorded. Muskie exuded calmness and rationality in contrast to Nixon's anger. Charlayne Hunter-Gault of the PBS NewsHour put it this way: "In 1970, Muskie's star rose when he responded in a nationwide speech to a divisive Republican campaign that attacked the patriotism of college students and Democrats."

In fact, polls showed Muskie beating Nixon during much of 1971. And so began Nixon's "dirty tricks " campaign, which succeeded in eliminating Muskie as a 1972 presidential candidate.

Nixon may have been progressive in his economic policies. The Environmental Protection Administration and Amtrak began under Nixon's watch. He helped bring about detente with Moscow and opened up relations with China. And after four bloody years, he removed our combat troops from Southeast Asia. But all that pales in comparison to his campaign of division, anger, dirty tricks, and yes, hatred.

Indiana's Third District: A Race for the Extreme Right

It's Primary Election Day in Indiana: the first Tuedsay after the first Monday in May. I'll be taking a Democratic ballot, so I won't have many choices. But I've had fun watching the Republicans trying to one-up each other. The Third District of Indiana, which includes part of my hometown of Elkhart, is represented by Mark Souder, a Christian Right Republican who's best known for his "Drug-Free Student Loan Amendment" to the federal student aid law. While the restrictions have been softened in recent years, the gist of his amendment was that students with drug convictions were ineligible for federal aid. Or, as my daughter Sarah put it, you can be an axe murderer and get student aid, but not if your record is clean save one conviction for marijuana possession. In any other state, Souder would be considered a right-wing extremist.

But apparently not in Indiana. He's got a primary opponent this year, Fort Wayne car dealer Bob Thomas, who virtually calls him a tax-and-spend liberal. Thomas is from the business right. He's against professional politicians and wants to impose term limits. And while Souder has been known to vote for omnibus bills which may contain things he doesn't like, Thomas appears to be a no-compromise conservative.

After enduring Thomas's attacks from the right, Souder began airing a rather clever commercial:



I live in the Second District of Indiana, currently reperesented by Blue Dog Democrat Joe Donnelly. But if I did live over in the Third, I think I'd take Souder over Thomas. At least Souder has a sense of humor.

The Strange Saga of the Akkadian Libation Vase

My father -in-law, who worked for the Davenport City Sewer Department before he retired, would sometimes bring back some strange items from the world below. And surely the strangest was this heavy stone vase. Kathleen took possession of it, as she recognized it as something ancient, or at least a reproduction of something ancient. When she first showed it to me, she said it was probably a museum-quality reproduction of something very old from the Near East.

After watching too many episodes of The Antiques Road Show, she began to think she may have a real ancient relic. She had identified it as a libation vase, and thought it might be Akkadian. But why would something that ancient end up in the sewers of Davenport, Iowa? Actually there was a plausible reason: Davenport was once home to a museum called A Little Bit O' Heaven, which housed an eclectic collection of art and kitsch assembled by B.J. Palmer of the Palmer Chiropractic School (now the Palmer College of Chiropractic). One visitor to the museum recalled that he saw a magnificent Buddha next to a plaster frog. Sadly, A Little Bit O' Heaven closed in 1973. (Kathleen and I blew our chance to see it--it cost $3.00 per person in 1973, the equivalent of $14.38 in 2008, according to The Inflation Calculator.) In any case, the vase might be something Palmer would want, especially as a triumph over medical doctors, who would envy his possession of something with a caduceus design. And someone who stole it and had no knowledge of its value might indeed throw it down a sewer grate.

After doing some online research, I discovered that Kathleen was right all along: it had to be a museum-quality reproduction--the original is in the Louvre.

it's the libation vase of King Gudea of Lagash, (ruled circa 2144-2124 B.C.). Under Gudea, Lagash was a semi-independent city-state in the Akkadian empire. The vase seems to be the first use of the caduceus, which later became the symbol of the medical profession.It seems likely that our vase is a reproduction, perhaps from the Louvre, of Gudea's vase. Whether it was discarded by its owner, most likely a medical doctor, or stolen and then discarded, we don't know. My father-in-law found it sometime in the 1960s or early 1970s. Who knows how long it had been there before.

Authonomy: The Game

In November I uploaded the bulk of my novel, Things Done and Left Undone, onto the HarperCollins Authonomy website. Authonomy's motto is "Beat the Slush." The idea is to supplement the "slush pile" editors, who sift through the thousands of unsolicited manuscripts HarperCollins receives, with what amounts to volunteers. I suspect that Amazon.com's reader reviews were the inspiration for it.

The publisher has apparently found some gems among the slush. And I've read some fine writing. I've also read some writing that needs a team of editors to work overtime to get the writing in shape. One such book, which has a very interesting storyline, has potential. It's a Black Mask-style detective novel set in 1945 New York. But the author is British or Australian and uses terms that would be foreign to an American. I've made some comments on the book, explaining, for instance, that "suspenders" in American means "braces" in British. The term he needed was "garter belts." He uses British/Australian terms such as "whilst" and "walkabout" and puts in a lot of anachronisms, such as a reference to the New York Mets in 1945. I'm afraid this author will get his book to the Editor's Desk before it's ready for the editors. Maybe I'm wrong. In any case, he's extremely good at playing the game.

The object of the game, of course, is to get published, and a big step toward getting published is to reach the Editor's Desk, where a real, professional team of HarperCollins editors will review your book. Every month the top five books are sent to the Editor's Desk. But getting a manuscript to the Editor's Desk has less to do with writing than with horse trading. I haven't been playing the game very well. Each book has a ranking, based on the number of people who have recommended it by placing it on their bookshelves. You can back up to five books at a time. I wasn't sure how it worked, until another writer let me know:

"A good tip--you can back any number of books and if you take one off your shelf to save space it loses no points."

I thanked him for the tip and got a further explanation:

"I'm afraid it's a bit of a game on site here, the more books you look at, the more people are likely to look at your book. The better ranked a person is that backs your book the more points you get."

I replied that I thought the point of looking at books is to provide constructive criticism. His reply:

"HC would love you to read whole books and make weighty comments. But I'd only get through 2 or 3 books per week. And that's not going to compete with someone who's apparently reviewing twenty books a day. I usually judge on one chapter plus the pitch. I honestly think that's enough."

I backed his book, even though it's not the type of book I'd normally read. It was well-written.

So it's back to Authonomy, to rewrite my pitch and start judging books one one chapter plus the pitch.

I haven't quit--honest!

I haven't been keeping up with my blogging recently. One regular reader even decided I'd quit blogging. It's mainly because I've been spending a lot of my time at the squat blue building pictured above (courtesy of TrainWeb).

While working at the South Bend station has been a blessing to me because I can now live in the same house as my wife, it's a place with no Internet access. So while I've been able to get writing done during the slow times, blogging has been another matter. And because we had no extra-board agent to fill in for vacations and personal days, I've had very few days off during the month of December. I hope to return to the blogosphere soon, now that I've got a few days off. And an extra-board agent is in training right now.

P.S. I'm not the one driving the Taylor-Dunn baggage cart. I think it's Dale Crawford, whose retirement allowed me to get the position.

Latest Examiner Articles: Heywood Shepherd, Zeppelins, and The Great Peril

Recent Examiner.com articles have included Hallowe'en, the infamous Heywood Shepherd Memorial, and comments on a couple of century-old cartoons:

Women: "The Great Peril?"

Heywood Shepherd: first casualty of the John Brown Raid

The "Faithful Slave Memorial Committee"

A defense of slavery and a rebuttal

W.E.B. Du Bois responds

The Heywood Shepherd Memorial: A personal reflection

Hallowe'en

The Zeppelin: threat or menace?

"The Unfortunate Rake" and its many variants, including one of my own

Cab Calloway, here singing as Koko the Clown, performs a beautiful rendition of the "St. James Infirmary Blues," in Fleischer Studios' "Snow White," with Betty Boop in the title role.

My son James made a reference to the song on his Facebook page, and it got me thinking about the song and its song family. There are probably hundreds of songs in the family, and dozens of variations of each one. If we're to believe Wikipedia, the great granddaddy of the family was an eighteenth-century English ballad called "The Unfortunate Rake," about a young man dying of venereal disease. Its lyrics recall the line, "A night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury," though for the man in the song, it was too late even for this dubious cure:

"And had she but told me before she disordered me,/Had she but told me of it in time,/I might have got pills and salts of white mercury,/But now I'm cut down in the height of my prime."

In 1960, Folkways Records issued an album with twenty variants of the song. including the one most familiar to Americans, "The Streets of Laredo," or "The Cowboy's Lament."

Which is a long way of getting around to my take on the song. During the 1990s, when Amtrak had more money than it usually did, presidents Thomas Downs and especially George Warrington squandered huge sums of it in trying to remake Amtrak's image. Downs decided to use a General Electric model and split up the company into "strategic business units." It made sense for GE, which was extremely diversified; Amtrak was just split into geographical regions, all of which were offering the same product. Warrington was heavily into "branding." Warrington dropped the headless arrow logo and gave us the three wiggly lines, as well as the Acela brand for the high-speed service.

The reservation offices were subjected to endless analysis by outside companies, especially MCI and CMC (a Memphis-based training company, which is no longer with us). CMC came up with having call center agents answer, "May I make a reservation for you?" The company wanted agents to be plugged in 100 percent of the time--taking one call after another. But to do a good job as an agent, you need to be off the phone occasionally, if only to cough, clear your throat, or take a drink of water. Thankfully, that craziness is over with--at least I think it is.

Sometime around the year 2000 the late lamented Amtrak Chicago Call Center had a cowboy-themed end-of-fiscal year celebration and I expressed my frustrations with the following ballad. Now that George Warrington has been gone from Amtrak for quite some time, and present Amtrak management is focusing much more on real customer service and safety, here's "The Dying Agent."

A few glossary notes first:

Six buckets--You know when you call Amtrak or the airlines and get a fare quote, then call back the next day and the fare's higher? That's revenue management--a way to apply supply-and-demand to transportation. The available seats for a given train and date are divided into "buckets." For instance, the fare from Bloomington-Normal to Chicago could be $12, $16, $21, $27, or $34. On a 200-seat train there might be 50 seats in each bucket. Once the $12 seats are sold out, it goes to the $16 bucket, and so on. The revenue management gurus adjust the number of seats in each bucket based on demand. There will be fewer in the lowest-fare bucket around holidays; more on slow travel days. (Amtrak has four regular buckets plus two others for miscellaneous fares.)

Thirty-eighth floor--The Chicago call center was on the 38th floor of the 55 East Monroe building until 2000, when we moved down to the 20th.

AFREND--The Arrow Front-End system. It was an experimental program to make it the reservation system easier to use. I used it during its last days of experimentation, and thought was a very good program that needed some more work. I was on the beta test team for the front-end system we got, called RailRes. It's a good system, but I thought a modified AFREND would have been better.

Forty-five minutes--The basic lunch period, of which 15 minutes were paid. While you wouldn't be brought up on charges for being late once, a few times could get you in trouble.

The Dying Agent
(Sung to the tune of “Streets of Laredo”)
　
As I walked out in the streets of Chicago,
As I walked out in Chicago one day,
I spied a young agent all wrapped in timetables,
Wrapped in timetables, and cold as the clay.

“I see by your T-shirt that you’re a res agent.”
These words he did say as I slowly walked by.
“Come sit down beside me and hear my sad story.
I’m fried in the brains and I know I must die.

“It was once in the office I was a top seller.
Once I was pride of the thirty-eighth floor.
But then MCI came, and CMC trainers,
My dialogue’s broken; I’ll plug in no more.

“Those CMC trainers, they plied me with trinkets.
Made me and my friends play ridiculous games.
I had to say ‘May I make a reservation for you?’
Which was awkward, insulting, tongue-tying, and lame.

“My team leader told me I wasn’t productive,
That ninety percent was just not the right stuff.
I struggled, I labored, I sweated six buckets.
I reached ninety-seven; it wasn’t enough.

“My fingers are callused, my shoulders hunched over,
I’ve festering blisters upon my rear end.
My carpals are tunneled, my eyes are all frazzled,
My system is down and I’m without AFREND.

“Get six burly redcaps to handle my coffin,
Get six coach attendants to sing me a tune,
Take me down to the train yard and lay the ties o’er me,
As the Zephyr rolls by on a gray afternoon.”

I heard the young agent tell all his sad story
Of pressure, harassment, the stresses and lies.
His story took longer than forty-five minutes.
I’m brought up on charges; I think I will die.

Latest Examiner story--Ferdinand Pinney "Affinity" Earle surely would have been a regular feature of "Entertainment Tonight" if it had been around in 1909. Check out the story of this early Hollywood artitst's marital and extramarital adventures here.