Given a longevity that borders on surprising, I resolved to offer up, as a form of thanks, a pilgrimage to the Grand Canyon. Dear Reader, Your New Favorite Writer had never been there before, in person.
I decided to ride Amtrak’s Southwest Chief from Chicago to Flagstaff, Arizona. It’s cheaper than flying, if you forgo a sleeping compartment and settle for a 36-hour ride in a coach seat. But railroad car seats are more spacious than those in airplanes.
Taking the train is old-fashioned and romantic—an enjoyable way to go. You travel across space but also across time.
An inter-city bus brings me to Union Station. It’s a grand old pile of marble that weighs down a full block of real estate beween Canal and Clinton Streets in Chicago. (The passenger concourse and tracks occupy another eight blocks, mostly under other buildings.) I used to ride trains to and from Union Station quite a bit . . . but that was sixty years ago.
In those days there was a concourse with a high roof girded by steel columns. It was a dim cavern, crisscrossed at all hours by bustling businessmen, students, soldiers, and starry-eyed kids, their needs met by ticket agents, shops, restaurants, news stands, and kiosks whose lights deflected the gloom up toward a ceiling so distant you had to imagine it. Dozens of dark porters in red caps threaded through the throng, guiding carts piled with leather and Samsonite bags, while in the basement other black men toiled at the Sisyphean task of keeping the men’s room clean—and by the way, you’d better have a dime in your pocket if your needs required opening a stall door.
Those parts of the station were demolished in 1969 and remodeled into catacombs that may be more utilitarian but are less exciting.
Today, Union Station’s Grand Hall—the anteroom, you might say, to the business at hand—is airily majestic, blessed by natural light which filters down from vast skylights. It has benches and waiting areas, an information desk, and miles of clear marble floor that today’s train-riding public is not numerous enough to crowd. It’s a serene, august space. But they still run a lot of trains from there, shooing passengers efficiently through a corridor that leads to the same old shed full of tracks. It’s all grand and functional for the postmodern age, but I do miss the buzz and hustle of the old place and the delicious cheesecake at the Fred Harvey café.
On this occasion I make do with a quickly gulped BLT club sandwich, french fries, and coleslaw at Lou Mitchell’s, a typical old Chicago diner just down Jackson Street from the station. Then I burrow through the underground tunnel and board the Southwest Chief, Amtrak’s main long-distance train between Chicago and L.A.
It is an amalgamation of the Santa Fe’s iconic Chief, Super Chief, and El Capitan trains of yesteryear. It follows the old Burlington Route from Chicago into Iowa and Missouri but switches to the Santa Fe main line for the rest of the trip. All these tracks are now owned by the giant BNSF Railway, but back then they were separate companies—the Chicago, Burlington, & Quincy, and the Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe—in competition with each other.
Famous old Route 66 paralleled the Santa Fe main line through much of the Southweast. Thus, many of our station stops will sound like Bobby Troup’s old song honoring the highway—“Gallup, New Mexico . . . Flagstaff, Arizona . . . Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino . . . .” I’ll be getting off at Flagstaff.
As the train leaves Chicago, my seatmate is a young man named Max. He’s been in the Windy City on business and is headed home to Fort Madison, Iowa.
“Fort Madison,” I say. “My mother used to work there, back in the War—the Second World War, that is. She worked at the Sheaffer Pen Company.”
“Yeah,” says Max. “My dad worked for Sheaffer Pen.” I suppose he means his dad worked his whole career at Sheaffer and is now retired. That would make him about my age or maybe as much as a generation younger. Looking at Max, a nice young man in early middle age, I figure the latter is more likely.
“Mom was part of the steno pool there,” I tell Max.
“Steno pool—what’s that?”
Oops.
I laugh, caught in my ignorance of the passage of time.
“In those days,” I explain, “companies like Sheaffer—or any big company—hired lots of young women as stenographers, hired them right out of high school. When an executive needed to send a letter, he would call in a girl from the steno pool and speak the letter out loud. She would take it down in shorthand on a notepad. Then she went back and typed it up at sixty-five words a minute, errorless, and brought it back so he could sign at the bottom with his Sheaffer White Dot fountain pen. All the typing was done on a clunky manual typewriter. The job took strong fingers.
“My mother went to Sheaffer’s in 1940, right after graduation, and shared an apartment with three other girls her age. They were in their first jobs and excited to be on their own in the big city.”
“Yes,” Max said. “Fort Madison was bigger back then. But the W. A. Sheaffer Pen Corporation closed a few years back. You can still see their building just as the train crosses the river. It sits empty—nobody’s done anything with it yet.”
The Southwest Chief rattles down the rails toward familiar Prairie State stops—Naperville, Mendota, Princeton, Galesburg. I feel rattled also by the mere speed of change: how soon a svelte writing instrument lined with a rubber ink bladder becomes a museum piece, how fast the wheels clack over the rail joints, how swiftly Lou Mitchell’s diner and yesterday’s Chicago slip away behind us where the rails come together and vanish.
On we rush, after dropping Max off in Fort Madison—on toward the high plains of Colorado, the brown sands of New Mexico, and Arizona’s eternal canyon. If the train runs me right, I’ll be in Flagstaff tomorrow night.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers
Your New Favorite Writer
