Former Pullman porters are all aboard for Train Day tribute
— -- As U.S. rail buffs anticipate the expansion of high-speed rail under President Obama's stimulus plan, four railroad veterans will board a Philadelphia-bound Amtrak Acela Express today to remember a slower, but certainly more genteel, era of rail travel.
The men, ranging in age from 86 to 95 whose collective passenger train service totals more than a century, worked as Pullman porters or dining car employees from the 1930s to the 1970s. On Saturday, they'll be feted as part of National Train Day ceremonies at Philadelphia's 30th Street Station. This is the second annual Amtrak-created commemoration, which features musical performances, displays and other rail-related fare at stations in Washington, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Chicago, as well as smaller events in about 130 communities nationwide.
Perhaps no image personifies the golden age of U.S. rail travel in the late 19th and early 20th centuries more than that of the Pullman porter. Originally hired by sleeping car inventor George Pullman shortly after the end of the Civil War, they swelled to 20,000 in the first half of the 20th century. Pullman recruited recently freed "house slaves" who were adept at providing refined service, says Lyn Hughes, curator of Chicago's A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum on the city's South Side.
"They were happy to do this job because it meant freedom and the opportunity to travel and be paid," she continues. "But they were more than just men who attended to the needs of passengers. They were confidants, people you could hold a conversation with. They had a quiet dignity."
Indeed, the Pullman porter ranks, made up exclusively of African American men until the 1960s, was for many, an entree into the middle-class.
Frank Rollins, 93, who worked first as a dining car waiter for the Illinois Central Railroad and later as a Pullman porter on the Chicago to Oakland, run, recalls that most porters "were homeowners and family people and most I met put their kids through college."
Rollins eventually opened a jewelry store in Houston, where he now lives, but working on the trains in the '30s and '40s gave him access to a "different caliber of the white population. People of power and authority. There was a lot of exchange of information."
There were also opportunities to encounter luminaries of the day. Cincinnatian I.T. Hector, 93, who worked for 15 years as a porter, recalls overhearing black educator and presidential advisor Mary McLeod Bethune tell a baggage handler who didn't want to put her bags on FDR's train: " 'The day will come when you will see black faces in high places.' "
The hours were long, but the money could be good. Hector remembers making $20,000 one year, most of it in tips.
Percy Lee, 86, of Fulton, Ky., who retired in 1979 as head chef after 38 years on the railroad, says he hasn't been on a train since his last career run, when he was severely injured in a train derailment. On today's trip, from Baltimore to Philadelphia, he isn't expecting to eat as well as the passengers he catered to in his day. "We peeled potatoes and cut up chicken and made cobblers and doughnuts and soups. From scratch," he says.
These days, hungry passengers are likely to settle for re-heated fare. Despite changing times, Willie Varnado Sr., 95, still sets high standards on the train. "I expect the best, because I gave my best," says the Florence, Miss., man who worked his way up from busboy to dining-car steward over 32 years on the rails.
Amtrak has arranged several other reunions in various parts of the country in recent years. "Amtrak is always surprised at the people who show up," says Hughes. "They're train buffs and people who are interested in this history and legacy and want to meet these men."
In 2001 Hughes estimated about 200 former Pullman porters were still living. Today, Hughes estimates fewer than a hundred former Pullman porters, most in their 90s, remain. "I think this is the last tribute." she says.
For details, visit nationaltrainday.com.