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FROM brake-wheel to the Interstate Commerce Commission
is the record of Edgar E. Clark, recently appointed to
the reorganized and enlarged commission by President
Roosevelt. Mr. Clark began his railroad career as a
brakeman on a Western road in 1872, at the age of
sixteen. For fourteen years he served in that capacity,
becoming a conductor on the Denver and Rio Grande in
1886; Two years later he was elected grand chief
secretary of the conductors' organization, and two years
after that became its chief. He was a member of the
Anthracite Coal Strike Commission, which settled the
great strike of 1903. Mr. Clark's salary in his new
position is ten thousand dollars a year.
BEGAN WITH CARNEGIE.
And Served the Pennsylvania Railroad
Faithfully for More Than Half a Century -
Now a
Pensioner.
FIFTY-TWO years and three months' service, without an
absence of a day from the pay-roll, came to an end when
Herman S. Delo was placed on the pension list of the
Pennsylvania, June 30, at the age of seventy. He entered
the employ of the road as a clerk in the Altoona yard the
same year that saw the beginning of the service of Andrew
Carnegie and Robert Pitcairn. In 1858 he became
live-stock agent in Pittsburgh, where he handled
thousands of dollars for the company without bond or
loss. Six years later he was made assistant motive-power
clerk in Altoona, and in 1882 he was transferred to a
similar position for the lines east of Pittsburgh and
Erie, a position which he held at the time of his
retirement.
RIDDEN A MILLION MILES.
Joe Speck's Record on a Passenger
Engine
Without Counting the Thousands of Miles
on Freight Runs.
JOE SPECK, a Missouri Pacific passenger engineer,
figures he has ridden more than a million miles on
passenger locomotives in his thirty years' service with
the Missouri Pacific. In this count he does not figure
the many thousands of miles of travel on freight
locomotives before he was promoted to a passenger engine.
His run is now between Kansas City and Falls City, a
distance of one hundred and one miles, and if he bad
traveled the total distance over this route it would have
been equivalent to more than five thousand round trips.
It would equal nearly seventeen hundred round trips
between Kansas City and Saint Louis. The distance
traveled exceeds that of a round trip over every mile of
railroad in the world. - Kansas City Journal.
THE OLDEST ENGINEER.
Asher Smith, of Kansas, Who Ran an
Engine in Maryland in 1849 -
Three Generations On the
Road.
ASHER SMITH, now living on a farm near Melvern,
Kansas, is the oldest locomotive engineer in the United
States. His experience dates back to 1849, when he began
running on the Mount Savage and Cumberland Railroad, in
Maryland. After two years there he turned his face
westward and ran for a few months on a road just opened
between Chicago and Elgin, Illinois. His next berth was
with the Milwaukee and Mississippi, now a part of the
Northwestern. It was the day of the old wood-burners, and
the rails were hewn scantling with an iron strip nailed
on top.
Mr. Smith gave up railroading in 1859 and settled on
the farm where he now lives, passing through much of the
border and guerrilla warfare which distracted the State
before and during the Civil War. He was in Lawrence when
Quantrell's band sacked and burned the town, but escaped
unharmed. After the war he lived the peaceful life of a
Kansas farmer until the call of the railroad became too
strong for him, and he entered the service of the Santa
Fe in 1878 and remained there until his final retirement
in 189~~. He is now eighty-one years old. At the time of
his service on the Santa Fe there were three generations
of his family in the employ of the road. Asher Smith was
running out of Emporia, his son, B. E. Smith, out of
Topeka, and his grandson, B. F. Smith, now a full-fledged
engineer, was firing out of Topeka.
MARKED FOR MISFORTUNE.
An Engineer Who Rubs Elbows With
Death Again and Again,
and Finally Dies of Heart
Disease.
MATHEW DE COURCY, the veteran engineer who dropped
dead of heart disease while sitting on the stone abutment
of the Northern Central bridge across Frozen Run Creek,
in Pennsylvania, recently, had a unique record for
daredevil runs and narrow escapes. In his first year as
brakeman on the Northern Central he had two accidents,
the first of which cost him two fingers and the second
three toes. His next mishap was years later, when he was
running an engine on the Union Pacific. Lightning struck
the locomotive, and De Courcy was taken out of the cab
apparently dead. For weeks he lay in the hospital more
dead than alive.
After his recovery he tried his luck on an Eastern
road running into Washington. Here misfortune attended
him ill the shape of a live wire which dropped down on
the engine as it stood in the yards and became entangled
about the cab. When he caught it to throw it out of the
way he received the full force of a heavy current of
electricity, and was unconscious for forty-eight hours.
The accident which finally retired him from active
service came a few months later, when his right foot was
ground off at the ankle by his own engine. Then he turned
his attention to more peaceful pursuits, and wrote and
published "Sons of the Red Rose: a Story of the
Rail." One paragraph in this hook is evidently
written from the depths of De Courcy's own experience of
hospital wards. In a tribute to the boys of the
switch-shanties he says:
"A cheery 'The boys send you this' casts a living
ray of Christ's sunshine through the black hell of
crutches and bandages. There has never been another lot
of men in the world welded together like the boys of the
switch-shanties. For danger to life and limb, nothing in
the world compares with it. The soldier who rides a
hopeless charge, the sailor flattened on a lofty yard,
swinging in the blackness of an Atlantic night out over
white-maned hungry waves, the quiet-eyed scout riding
alone through the perils of an Indian country, the
fireman on his mission of mercy, high on an icy ladder
against a tottering tenement, have all, through the magic
of the brush or pencil, a deathless life on the walls of
Valhalla, but the bright young lives crushed into eternal
dust beneath the wheels of modern commerce leave only a
haunting memory ever present in the hearts of their
comrades."
"FAITHFUL MIKE" GRIFFIN.
Gate-Tender at One Crossing for
Twenty-eight Years
and Never a Complaint of Neglect of
Duty.
WITH the retirement on half pay, August 1, of
"Faithful Mike" Griffin, gate-tender for the
Boston and Maine in West Medford, Massachusetts,
forty-one years of faithful service came to an end.
Griffin began his work for this road as section-hand on
the old Boston and Lowell, now the southern division of
the Boston and Maine. For twenty-eight years, however, he
has been gate-tender on the High Street crossing. During
that time he has not had a single accident on his
crossing, nor has he ever been called up "on the
carpet" for neglect of duty. |
