Edna St. Vincent Millay, circa 1920. Public Domain.
The railroad track is miles away,
And the day is loud with voices speaking,
Yet there isn’t a train goes by all day
But I hear its whistle shrieking.
All night there isn’t a train goes by,
Though the night is still for sleep and dreaming,
But I see its cinders red on the sky,
And hear its engine steaming.
My heart is warm with the friends I make,
And better friends I’ll not be knowing;
Yet there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take,
No matter where it’s going.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 – 1950)
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Trains roll through my years. . . .
1948
A black shiny engine flies along the Burlington main line, just across Cherry Street, pluming white smoke behind it, dazzling in December sun, nothing but delight and awe.
Steam locomotive. Fair use.
At night, the rummmmmble-bang! of freight cars in the hump yard lulls me to sleep. I peer into Teddy’s beady black eye and conjure underground works and scrapyards, machinery grinding to the rhythm of switch engines.
1952
I am seven. Mommy dresses me nice and puts me in a coach car, hands a dollar bill to the steward—brown-skinned, white-coated, rotund—to keep me safe.
When you ride the train, the conductor, a white man in a dark blue coat, takes your ticket, punches it, puts it in his pocket, swaying in rhythm with the coach, and snaps a white slip into a slot above your seat. The slip shows where you are going, and you’d better get off there.
Teddy and I make this epic journey all by myself, with pride. I learn the side-to-side sway of railcars, the clack-clack-clack as wheels run over jointed tracks.The conductor opens the loud door at the back of the car and walks through, calling “Chillicothe, next stop! Chillicothe.” Galesburg is after Chillicothe. It’s time to pay attention.
The brown man has watched me kindly for a hundred miles. He makes sure I get off at Broad Street in Galesburg, where Grandma waits in her big gray Hudson.
1958
North Shore cars. Don Ross photo, fair use.
On a certain Friday, I go with Mom and my little sister, Cynda, and we all ride the Chicago North Shore and Milwaukee Railroad from its station on 27th Avenue in Kenosha, to meet Dad in Waukegan. The inter-urban car runs from overhead electric wires, like a trolley, packed with commuting men. They dangle from straps one-handed, the Sun-Times, folded with cunning for an efficient read, held in their free hands.
The North Shore Line is on its last legs, its stations and cars dirty and unkempt. People still ride it because the fare is less than for the Chicago and Northwestern, which parallels its route a few miles closer to the lakeshore.
1960
Fifty thousand Boy Scouts assemble for the week-long jamboree in Colorado Springs. Hundreds of us depart from Milwaukee, on a special train. Sunset splashes us as we dine with silver and linens, hurtling across a bridge over the Mississippi.
At dawn, we get boxes of cereal with half-pints of milk, sit at sawn-timber tables bolted to the baggage-car floor, and down our breakfast as chill, cow-scented air dashes in the open door. Swales, coolies, bunch grass, and incurious Nebraska cattle swoop by at eighty miles an hour.
1962
From Galesburg, we ride the Knox College Special to Chicago for Thanksgiving. We get off at Union Station—all color and bustle, shops and kiosks that sell everything known to man—and I slog two long city blocks at night to the Northwestern Station, for the North Shore Line is defunct, to catch my train to Kenosha. Chicago’s wintry wind, “the Hawk,” etches canyons in me as I struggle down Canal Street, lugging a suitcase, clad in a wool overcoat.
1966
Home on leave, I travel to my next Air force duty station at Monterey, California, by train rather than air. The Union Pacific’s City of San Francisco leaves from Union Station and heads west for two days. We stop briefly at Green River, Wyoming, under a scorching sun. At two a.m., we roll through Reno, “The Biggest Little City in the World,” its all-night neons flashing like competing rainbows as we slide by the main drag, swallowed up on the other side by dark desert.
Always: the side-to-side sway and the clack-clack-clack as the wheels rack up the miles.
Before too long some folk singer will ride down the Mississippi Valley on the IC, noodling up a train-ride song, “The City of New Orleans,” for his fellow artists to record.
1960-something
We’re at the end of an era. We all sort of know it, because the service is not what it ought to be. To tell you the truth, it’s a lot nicer to ride airplanes, where you can sit in comfort while a pretty stewardess brings a great meal on a tray, with bright stainless cutlery, crystal glasses, china cups, and hotel-grade coffee. Airline service being so good, we may as well forget about trains.
Note: This is a republication of an item originally posted April 15, 2019.
Daisy smiled at the uniformed operator, an old black man, as she and about twenty well-dressed men and women squeezed into the car, closer together than decent folks ought, even in this new century. Or maybe decency was different here. Still, she would not let the yoke of her new sailor-style blouse get crushed on her first full day in Chicago.
The door clanged shut. The operator moved his handle and the car rose, pushing up on the soles of Daisy’s feet. She had ridden an elevator before. The Palmer House, where she and her parents were staying, had one. But this one, in the Montgomery Ward office building, scaled a full twenty-five stories—and Daisy was determined to ride it clear to the top.
She floated almost off her feet as the driver slowed to let a man off at the fourth floor. He cranked the handle to bring the car up even with the approaching floor, his bright smile never dimming. The serious man in the gray suit got off, brandishing papers. The operator pulled the door shut and started the car hurtling upward again. Daisy tried to act nonchalant.
Most of her fellow passengers stayed on. They were going where she was going: the observation deck, under the ornate pyramid, lantern, and statue at the peak of the tower.
They reached the twenty-fifth floor and the operator opened the door. The crowd around her dispersed and headed for the large observation windows. Daisy stood stunned with wonder. Light flooded in from huge windows all around. Near the elevator stood a sales counter, where ladies sold sandwiches, soft drinks, and souvenirs. How could Daisy have guessed, when ordering goods from Montgomery Ward’s catalog, that her custom supported all this grandeur?
After hours of gawking at the spectacle spreading out beyond Chicago to all points of the compass—most especially the endless blue, coruscating expanse of Lake Michigan to the east—she left the windows and visited the sales counter. She was not hungry. The sandwiches did not even look good; better food would be on offer back at the hotel. Still, she wanted to buy something. She wanted to spend a little money here, at the pinnacle of American commerce.
Cheap trinkets were on display—mostly little molded replicas of the building itself. Wholly inadequate, and pointless besides. Then she spotted a rack of photographs. Some were side-by-side stereopticon views, others simple postal cards. But sepia and white could not capture the magic of the view. One of the cards, however, was a line drawing of the building itself. Now she recalled that Cousin Millie had begun collecting postal cards.
Daisy put down ten cents—outrageous!—to buy one of the cards that showed the building. “For only twenty-five cents more,” said the saleswoman, “our calligrapher will inscribe an elegant, rhymed message on it for you.” She pointed to a woman at a writing desk, who smiled and chatted as she wrote on a customer’s card.
“No, thank you.” Daisy smiled. When she got back to the Palmer House, she would pen her own thoughts to Cousin Millie.
A fictionalized account of true events.
Daisy’s postcard to Cousin Millie. From my grandmother’s collection.
Deltiology
Professor Randall Rhoades of Ashland, Ohio, coined the word “deltiology” in 1945 to mean the study and collection of postcards. But my grandmother, Millie Marie Gunsten Sommers (1889-1971), was done with the hobby eight years before it was named. Grandma was always ahead of her time.
Mail Order Headquarters
The earliest card in Grandma’s collection made it through the mail without a postmark, but the sender dated it by hand: July 27, 1906. The card shows a corner view of the Montgomery Ward & Co. Building in Chicago, “one of the largest commercial buildings in the world.” Several electric streetcars navigate the intersection of North Michigan Avenue and East Madison Street; a couple of early automobiles are also depicted. But most of the traffic in the picture is pedestrians, cyclists, or horse-drawn commercial wagons.
Ward’s was the first big mail-order catalog and department store retailer and operated for 129 years, from 1872 to 2001. The headquarters building on Grandma’s postcard was designed by architects Schmidt, Garden, and Martin and was built in 1898. It was superseded as corporate headquarters in the 1920s but survives to this day—minus its ornate pyramidal cap. In fact, you can rent the penthouse apartment at the top of its now-truncated tower for $20,000 a month. (Good location.)
Write on the Picture, Please
Grandma was unmarried, a few days shy of seventeen, when she received the Montgomery Ward postcard, with its message: “How are you by this time? I am up in this tower twenty five stories high. The view over the lake is so fine I can hardly leave it. I am going home next Tuesday. Give my love to Lizzie and John and all the children. Daisy.”
“Lizzie and John” referred to Grandma’s parents. I have no idea who Daisy, the writer, was, but in the fictional vignette above I have made her out to be a young cousin from downstate, about Millie’s age but traveling, probably for the first time, to Chicago.
Daisy had to write her message in the blank areas on the front of the card, along with the picture, because postal regulations reserved the entire back of the card for the address. The Postmaster General hadn’t figured out picture postcards yet. The following year he changed the rules, dividing the back side of the card into two spaces, one for address and the other for message. Thus began the modern age of postcards.
Social Media
In Grandma’s heyday, picture postcards were a novelty but also filled a real need. They were social media, the perfect way to send a bit of chatter to a friend, just to let her know you’re thinking of her.
“Hello! This is what they call Lovers Lane. How would you like this for a change. How is Billie—Ta Ta.”
“Hello Millie—How did you enjoy the 4th. Myrtle.”
Many messages, different in content but similar in spirit, adorn the rest of Grandma’s saved cards, from 1906 to 1937, when the collection ends. In her early years Grandma was a shrinking violet, so she would have doubly appreciated all these sociable greetings from friends. Maybe that’s why she kept them.
Speedy Delivery
Mail was efficient. On every fast passenger train, U.S. postal employees stood through the night in a swaying mail car or “Railway Post Office,” sorting letters and cards by hand even as the train carried them toward their destinations. Mail almost always arrived the next day—unless it was sent across the whole country, in which case it might take two or three days. Airmail service would not begin until 1918, and then at a significant extra cost.
Sorting mail on the rails. USPS photo.
In 1906 a postcard cost one cent to mail and a first-class letter two cents. When I was a child in the 1950s, the “penny postcard” was still in use, but letters had gone up to three cents. They went to four cents in 1958; since then rates have increased every two to five years, except for one small decrease in 2016.
Home Town Boosters
The art on postcards became more and more captivating. Monochrome gave way to color; color gave way to better color; and many of the cards became downright artistic.
When people traveled to exotic places—Chicago, Omaha, Denver, or Seattle—they sent postcards to show the home folks their experience. “Having a wonderful time, wish you were here.” But picture postcards showcased the wonders of every city, county, town, and hamlet. So you could say “Hi” with a postcard of your local bank, park, or grain elevator. By making contact with your friend in another city or state, you also boosted your own hometown’s image.
Even when folks stayed at home and sent postcards of purely local wonders, I imagine Grandma was glad to get them.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Author
Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.
Price of Passage
Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois
