The Railway Mail Clerk and the Highway Office

CHAPTER 1

MY FIRST DAY AS A RAILWAY

POST OFFICE CLERK

When I resigned my position as Home Office Auditor with The Life Insurance Company of Georgia in Atlanta and accepted the position of postal clerk in Asheville, I had no idea this position involved working as a substitute railway mail clerk.

Three to four months into this new job, on a Thursday, I got a call at home from the Superintendent of Mails.

Kennith, we need you to go to Knoxville today.

Go to Knoxville for what? I asked.

Work the mail on the train; letters, newspapers and small parcels. He went on. You did pass the North Carolina and South Carolina sorting schemes, didn’t you?

Yes Sir, I replied, but I have never been told that I would be working on the train.

You can do it. Have your wife pack you a bag lunch and a change of clothes … wear blue jeans. Be down at the rail yard in about an hour and the trip foreman will issue you gloves, a finger knife, and labels for your letter cases and for your pouch and sack racks, he said.

Well, those instructions meant about as much, or as little, to me as they do to the reader.

Anyway, I was down at the Southern Depot early and found the mail car at about the middle of the rail yard, not hooked to a train. As I walked up to the door of the mail car, the doorway was stacked high with sacks of mail. While I was standing there trying to figure out a way to get inside, I saw a beady-eyed little guy with a bill cap pulled down over his face, looking out the window. Then I heard a shrill voice say, Here comes another g-d-stupid sub that doesn’t know (unprintable).

Some very mixed thoughts went through my mind. What had I gotten myself into?

I crossed the track and found the door on the opposite side not blocked. I climbed into the car and looked around. Near the entrance was a man hanging mail sacks in an iron rack. He told me his name was Gary and pointed to the other end of the car.

That’s the foreman down there.

Lo and behold! It was the beady-eyed little guy that had made the ugly remarks.

I walked up toward the front and told this little guy my name and that the Superintendent of Mails sent me to work on the Knoxville run. He looked up with a snarl on his face, then went back to working on his trip report, never saying a word.

I put my ditty bag on the floor and stood around watching Gary work for about 30 to 45 minutes.

The foreman stood up, opened his cabinet, shoved his stuff into it and got something out. He slammed the cabinet door shut and came stomping back through the car. He pounded some stuff on a work table that had wooden sideboards. He then lit his pipe and climbed off the car.

Who did you say that old grouch was? I asked Gary.

That’s Rabbit Richard, the foreman for today, but don’t let it bother you. He doesn’t even like himself. Look up there on his table at the kind of books he reads. Hell, his bark is worse than his bite. He went on, "I think those were your labels and supplies he threw on the table. As soon as I get through with this, I’ll help you label your letter cases and paper racks. You’ve got your work cut out for you … Thursday is weekly newspaper day and that makes it the hardest day of the week. You’ll have to work fast.

Many a lowly got his start as a Railway Mail Clerk in a mail mill like this one. The noise level was high. This made the slang names easier to hear than some of the long names on the pouches and sack labels.

(COURTESY OF ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN RAILROADS.)

He ran my labels into the slots on two letter cases while I watched.

You’ll work Ohio and Indiana letters going north today and South Carolina letters coming back south tomorrow, he added. I’ll help you all I can. You are supposed to help on the newspaper rack, too, but you’d better let me throw off for you.

Ken, Have you ever worked on a RPO or HPO before? He asked.

No.

You’d better learn fast then, because we don’t stop at many stations. What we do is this: Rabbit Richard pulls down the local letter cases and locks out the pouches. You pull down the local newspaper sacks and I’ll pull down the parcel sacks and throw off at the stations where we don’t stop. I’ll use the ‘catcher arm’ to pull the ‘catcher pouches’. That’s usually your job, but I’ll do it ‘til you learn how it’s done.

What’s a ‘catcher arm’ and a ‘catcher pouch’? I asked.

Come on up here and I’ll show you, he said.

We went up to the letter dump-up table and he picked up a canvas pouch that had a leather belt attached in the middle that divided it into two halves, like a wasp waist. Then he took me to the center door and showed me the ‘catcher arm’ and how it works.

The catcher arm is a V shaped iron bar with a half loop in the center of the V that, when extended, grabs the pouch in the middle as the train speeds by the catcher crane, and is brought back into the mail car by reversing the arm. He explained that it was a tricky and sometimes dangerous operation. If the iron lock comes off while it is being ejected from the crane, it can konk you on the head.

He said that if I missed a ‘catcher pouch’, or threw the mail off at the wrong place, Rabbit Richard would write me up on the trip report and my Postmaster and Superintendent of Mails would know about it. I fully agreed with his suggestions and thanked him.

A mail messenger truck backed up to the open car with a full load of sacks of mail. Gary told me to stand in the doorway and catch the sacks as the driver threw them to me and to pitch them to him. He knew where to stack them.

Now this was one more job! There wasn’t enough room in the bins for all this Thursday mail, so we had to put some of it in the aisles on the floor where we walked.

While this was going on, Rabbit Richard climbed up into the car and walked over the sacks of mail in the aisles, kicking some of them out of his way, while cussing his luck.

Gary unlocked several pouches of letter mail and dumped them on the work table. He then pulled out the Ohio and Indiana bundles and got me started sorting letter mail. Then he stepped over to the work table next to the newspaper sack rack and dumped the newspapers on it. He began to throw them into their respective sacks.

Plop, plop, plap, plap, his papers went as he emptied the table and reloaded it again and again.

Bang, crumple, crumple, bang, bang!

My teeth chattered and I nearly lost my balance. We were so busy working mail that I didn’t hear the engine coming to couple us up to the train.

We were going to be running behind today, Gary said, and he suggested that I stay at my letter case and when we were running on the station, that he would call me to help him pull down and lock out sacks. He said again that he would do all the catcher pouches.

Well, I am a person prone to get motion sickness. We were so busy working and under so much stress that day, that I forgot to get sick.

Robert V. Rector, Second Clerk, and Caleb Abernathey, Clerk in Charge (background), Salisbury and Knoxville

RUN IN 1952. (COURTESY OF R. L. RECTOR.)

The space is crowded, the pace is fast, and the train doesn’t wait on slowpokes.

(COURTESY OF ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN RAILROADS.)

When we got to Knoxville, Gary told me I didn’t have to stay on the train and help unload if I didn’t want to. My pay stopped when we arrived at the station, but he, Rabbit Richard and the other clerk got 20 minutes unloading time. I stayed and helped them unload anyway.

Rabbit Richard cleared his throat, Harrack-harrack and looked toward me, and for a minute there, I thought he was going to thank me for helping unload. If he was thinking that, he must have had second thoughts and didn’t. Anyway, the other two fellows told me they appreciated the help.

Rabbit Richard and the other clerk left for home, as they lived somewhere in the area, while Gary and I went to the little White House Cafe for a meal. We both had stew beef with vegetables, fried okra, corn bread and blackberry cobbler pie. He drank two glasses of iced tea and I had a quart of buttermilk. Working the mail while standing on a train or bus seems to dry a fellow out.

We then checked into our room at a flop house hotel, to get about five hours shut-eye. You didn’t stay in the Conrad Hilton on our four dollars per diem travel allowance.

This had to be my worst day ever as a RPO clerk. It could only get better!

THE TRIP BACK TO ASHEVILLE

When Gary’s travel alarm clock went off, it didn’t seem like we’d been in bed two hours. The room, and especially the bed linens, had a sweaty smell to them. That was from having so many hard working Railroad men and postal workers sleep there in shifts. The room just didn’t get aired out. I made a mental note to have Margaret pack me a pillow case in my ditty bag for future trips, to pull over the one furnished by the hotel.

Gary and I got up early, shaved and showered, and made our way back to White House Cafe for breakfast. He had bacon and eggs and I had the House Special, Whitehouse Pancakes with Karo syrup, right out of the bottle. The batter must have been made the night before, because the pancakes had sort of a sour-dough taste to them. Nobody seemed to notice this but me. The railroad crews that were eating with us ate them like they were candy. I had been spoiled by clean housekeeping and cooking, but I tried not to let it show.

Anyway, counting the meal the night before and the three dollars for the room in the flop house hotel, I had over-spent my four dollars per diem travel allowance a little, but I still had some peanut butter crackers and cookies from the bag lunch Margaret had packed me. I snacked on that during the trip back to Asheville.

When Gary and I got down to the tracks and located the mail car, the foreman was already there, starting on his trip report. It wasn’t Rabbit Richard!

I was introduced to an elderly gentleman named Bert Gillespie, known affectionately by the crew as Bird Dog Gillespie.

The contrast between Bird Dog Gillespie and Rabbit Richard sure made my day. This gentleman was very patient in teaching me the duties of first clerk, second clerk and third clerk.

You’ve got to learn to work fast, even on a slow day. Stay in the habit, and if you get caught up, rest a while, he told me.

That made sense.

By the time we got our sacks hung and the labels run-in, a locomotive hooked onto our mail car and started shuttling us around the Knoxville yards, while making up the train. The car doors were open and the breeze made it cool in the car. I kept my jacket zipped up long after the others had peeled theirs off. The crew ribbed me a lot about being cold natured.

After the train was made up, the railroad crew hooked up the steam to our car and the car began to warm up, and we were on our way to

Asheville … running on time. The smell of steam and hot railroad lubricating grease sorta sticks in your nostrils. That, and the clickety-clack of the unwelded rail joints made me feel like I had