Railroad Retirement Quotes

To get things going he dispatched a man named Edwin Drake—always referred to in history books as “Colonel” Edwin Drake—to Titusville with instructions to drill. Drake had no expertise in drilling and was not a colonel. He was a railroad conductor who had lately been forced to retire through ill health. His sole advantage to the enterprise was that he still possessed a railroad pass and could travel to Pennsylvania for free.

I wanted to get as far as my proto-dream-house, my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box set up on pilings, shingled green, a sort of artichoke of a house, but greener (boiled with bicarbonate of soda?), protected from spring tides by a palisade of—are they railroad ties? (Many things about this place are dubious.) I’d like to retire there and do nothing, or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms: look through binoculars, read boring books, old, long, long books, and write down useless notes, talk to myself, and, foggy days, watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light. At night, a grog à l’américaine.

FOOL, n. A person who pervades the domain of intellectual speculation and diffuses himself through the channels of moral activity. He is omnific, omniform, omnipercipient, omniscience, omnipotent. He it was who invented letters, printing, the railroad, the steamboat, the telegraph, the platitude and the circle of the sciences. He created patriotism and taught the nations war — founded theology, philosophy, law, medicine and Chicago. He established monarchical and republican government. He is from everlasting to everlasting — such as creation's dawn beheld he fooleth now. In the morning of time he sang upon primitive hills, and in the noonday of existence headed the procession of being. His grandmotherly hand was warmly tucked-in the set sun of civilization, and in the twilight he prepares Man's evening meal of milk-and-morality and turns down the covers of the universal grave. And after the rest of us shall have retired for the night of eternal oblivion he will sit up to write a history of human civilization.

You are God. You want to make a forest, something to hold the soil, lock up energy, and give off oxygen. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to rough in a slab of chemicals, a green acre of goo? You are a man, a retired railroad worker who makes replicas as a hobby. You decide to make a replica of one tree, the longleaf pine your great-grandfather planted- just a replica- it doesn’t have to work. How are you going to do it? How long do you think you might live, how good is your glue? For one thing, you are going to have to dig a hole and stick your replica trunk halfway to China if you want the thing to stand up. Because you will have to work fairly big; if your replica is too small, you’ll be unable to handle the slender, three-sided needles, affix them in clusters of three in fascicles, and attach those laden fascicles to flexible twigs. The twigs themselves must be covered by “many silvery-white, fringed, long-spreading scales.” Are your pine cones’ scales “thin, flat, rounded at the apex?” When you loose the lashed copper wire trussing the limbs to the trunk, the whole tree collapses like an umbrella. You are a sculptor. You climb a great ladder; you pour grease all over a growing longleaf pine. Next, you build a hollow cylinder around the entire pine…and pour wet plaster over and inside the pine. Now open the walls, split the plaster, saw down the tree, remove it, discard, and your intricate sculpture is ready: this is the shape of part of the air. You are a chloroplast moving in water heaved one hundred feet above ground. Hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen in a ring around magnesium…you are evolution; you have only begun to make trees. You are god- are you tired? Finished?

As with most small town southerners, respectability was as much a part of my DNA as was my hair and eye color. It was the goal everyone strived for, the standard by which every citizen of Morganville was judged. And while my family, the Frenchs, weren’t the richest- that honor going to Ian and Helena Morgan- we were one of the most respected. Thanks mostly to the Judge, my grandfather. His name was Carl, but no one, including his daughters, had ever called him anything but Judge. He retired from the bench when I was five, and since my own father pulled a vanishing act shortly before my birth, the Judge stepped forward to fill that role for me. I thought the man walked on water and took every word from his lips as gospel. “Alix,” he told me. “Stay away from the railroad tracks. A wowzer cat lives under the trestle, and you don’t want to get tangled up with one of those.” “What’s a wowzer cat?” I asked, enthralled. “It’s a fifty pound cat with eight legs and nine bung holes, and it’s meaner than a gar.” The Judge had an odd sense of humor.

Rose’s dreams are primarily visions of a personal future, but they are linked to a social vision and to a larger mythos of America by an offhand remark Herbie makes. He tells Rose that when he first saw her, she “looked like a pioneer woman without a frontier.”11 The frontier thesis, as articulated by Frederick Jackson Turner, is a particular manifestation of the American Dream in which the continual movement west in the nineteenth century was a means both of personal advancement (owning land, expanding business, starting over, striking it rich) and of societal evolution (claiming territory, controlling it, exploiting it—all justified and mandated by the guiding master narrative of Manifest Destiny). But by the 1920s, when pioneer woman Rose and her brood set out in pursuit of her dream, there is no more frontier—the West Coast, where the action of the play’s first scenes takes place, is settled. It seems significant that Rose’s father worked for the railroad, that key player in the expansion westward, but is now retired.12 No longer able to head west toward a frontier, Rose loops back into already settled America, Manifest Destiny’s straight, east-to-west line now giving way to a circle, the vaudeville circuit. Gypsy makes use of dreams in multiple senses to articulate a vision of an American society folding back on itself entropically and becoming an image—a dream—of its own myths.

One of the most important lessons to be learned from Delta history is the relationship between representation, social control, and taxation. Democrat organizations such as the White Men’s Clubs and the Taxpayer League grew rapidly. The latter was composed of planters who accused the Reconstruction governments of mismanagement when they were not complaining about the cost of governmental services, high taxes, and the state debt. They wanted social service monies redirected to levee construction and the retirement of their own back taxes. One traveler found that at every town and village, at every station on the railroads and rural neighborhood in the country, he heard Governor Ames and the Republican Party denounced for oppressions, robberies and dishonesty as proved by the fearful rate of taxation. White Leaguers knew … that they must appeal to the world as wretched downtrodden and impoverished people.

Wyoming doesn't rhyme with anything, but it would make a good title. Della told him a their wedding supper that when she was a child there was an old man in her father's church who had retired from the railroad. She asked him if he had ever been to Wyoming. He nodded. "Nothing there," he'd said. "Just a bunch of half-wild white folks doing whatever they damn well please. No need to leave Memphis to see that. You got no business with Wyoming." She said, "Well, it's part of America," because she'd read about it in school. He said, "It is. You ain't.

The Turner Café was a gathering place for the locals. Businessmen, merchants, active and retired ranchers, railroaders, law enforcement officers, and families made it part of their daily routine to stop by the Turner Café for coffee and conversation. Over the years, the café hosted many colorful, local characters, who trading their stories and discussed their lives and current events over coffee.