More stuff that makes me cry

by beksbks 7 Replies latest social current

• 

  beksbks

  Why can't I copy and paste??? (that's not what makes me cry, it was the article)
• 

  beksbks

  Porters ride in fitting tribute at Oakland event

  By Cecily Burt
  Oakland Tribune Posted: 02/10/2009 09:27:22 PM PST Updated: 02/11/2009 12:07:06 PM PST
  

  Troy Walker relaxed on Monday in a plush, rose-colored club chair on Amtrak's Coast Starlight and watched the scenery whiz by the window. It was 7:30 a.m., but Walker, 90, a habitual early riser, already was nattily attired and had enjoyed a hearty breakfast in the dining car.

  As the train whistle blew and San Francisco Bay came into view, Walker recalled the bygone days when he was the one serving passengers in the dining cars of the Railway Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway Railway, not the other way around.

  "I only made $80 a month, but I made good tips," said Walker, one of thousands of African-American waiters, cooks and porters on whom railroad travel and service depended

  for nearly 100 years. "Meeting different people, famous people like Elizabeth Taylor and Orson Welles; most of the movie actors and actresses road the train at that particular time. We had a first-class train and first-class food."

  Dedicated employees such as Walker and Thomas Henry Gray, 71, fellow travelers on the Coast Starlight from Seattle, spent decades cooking, serving or changing the linens for passengers riding fancy railroad sleeping and dining cars. The porters and waiters were admired and looked up to in their communities, but on the job they were segregated from white employees.

  Before a union was established, they routinely were made to work around the clock without compensation — cleaning sleeping berths,

  shining shoes, polishing silver. All too often they endured horrible racism from passengers and bosses until anti-segregation laws were passed.

  To honor their loyalty and years of service, Amtrak invited Walker and four other men who worked as porters or waiters during rail's heyday to travel — by rail — to Oakland for a special ceremony Tuesday at the C.L. Dellums Amtrak station at Jack London Square. Amtrak already had held similar events in Washington, D.C., and Chicago last year.

  "Without these men, the trains are just cold steel," said Brian Rosenwald, Amtrak's chief of product management. "They gave the trains soul. They are my heroes, my role models, and I'm actually inspired by their example and courage."

  Starting in 1869, just a few years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, George Pullman offered jobs to black men to serve as porters on his luxurious Pullman sleeping cars. Although the work was long and grueling, especially during trips that could last as long as nine days, jobs as porters or waiters provided stable employment and allowed the men to support their families, have their own homes and send their children to school. In fact, all of the honorees went on to have other careers as businessmen, engineers or in other fields.

  In 1925 the Pullman porters formed the country's first black labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. It took 12 more years of struggle before the union would win its first contract with the company. A. Philip Randolph was the founder and representative, and the union had chapters in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Oakland. C.L. Dellums, uncle to Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums, was the West Coast representative for the union, and the Amtrak station is named in his honor.

  The men and their families were treated like royalty during their visit, and all were quite pleased by the fuss. Gray brought his 92-year-old mother to the ceremony. Gray worked for the Santa Fe Railroad, while his father worked for the Pullman Co. As their trains passed during the night, Gray would shine a flashlight, and his father would wave the lantern back at him.

  James Smith, 83, joined Southern Pacific on the West Coast when he was 18, earning 36 cents an hour as a dishwasher before working his way up to fourth cook, third cook, and finally, a dining car waiter.

  "I had to work 100 hours to make $36, but we survived," he told the rapt crowd at Tuesday's ceremony.

  He worked the luxurious Lark Pullman car from San Francisco to Los Angeles, carrying 1,000 passengers, including many movie stars and businessmen, every day each way. The dining car served 144 people at one time. Smith also worked the Sunset route from Los Angeles to New Orleans and the Golden State from Los Angeles to Chicago. Although the porters' union was powerful, Smith said he did not envy them because they did not earn tips and he did. However, it was hard work.

  "When I was working the transcontinental to New Orleans, we'd work 16 hours a day, from 5:30 in the morning until 9:30 at night," Smith said. "If you had a load on, you worked as long as they came in the diner. It was just one of those things."

  Before they had rail cars with dormitories, the sleeping arrangements were makeshift.

  "In some of the older diners, you slept right in the dining car. You'd move the tables and chairs, peel back the rug and pull up the floorboards to get the mattresses and blankets stored there. There was a wire that ran from one end of the diner to the next and we'd put curtains up, and that would be how we slept."

  Smith said that despite the segregation, he did not encounter much racism. He was working when Jack Benny's entire Hollywood entourage traveled to Houston to open the Shamrock Hotel, and he worked the 10-day trip that boxer Jack Dempsey took to Mardi Gras.

  "Bozo the Clown was on board," Smith remembered. "The stories, especially in the bar car, it was a lot of fun. Making money and serving the people, it wasn't all drudgery."

  Samuel Coleman, 80, was still in school when he hired on with the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad as a cook, a position that really turned out to be a dishwasher.

  "On my first trip I washed so many dishes from Chicago to Denver. I never saw so many dishes in my life," he said. "On the way back to Chicago, I promised myself that I was quittin,' but the old-timers convinced me to stay on, that it would get better. I stayed for 25 years."

  After 10 months, Coleman was promoted to a waiter position, but the living conditions for African-American workers were pretty much the same — namely, lousy. During layovers in Oakland they stayed in a one-story shed off Seventh Street in the west side of town, surrounded at night by hobos and populated by rats and cockroaches. After a lot of complaints, the group was moved to the California Hotel on San Pablo Avenue. In other small towns such as Billings, Mont., and Casper, Wyo., there were no hotels for them.

  "We had to go to the (train) station at night, after it was closed, to use the facilities in the station," Coleman said. "It was a small town, no shower and only one washroom and one face bowl, 10 to 12 men lined up trying to keep to themselves as clean as they could. It was very difficult."

  The porters were ambassadors for the railroad and role models in the black community, said Lyn Hughes, founder of the A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum. They were always impeccably dressed in their uniforms, unfailingly courteous and professional to the passengers, even when the passengers called the men "George," instead of their real names, or worse, she said.

  "They were ordinary men who did an extraordinary thing," Hughes said. "No one told them they had to be the best, or do their best — it was self-pride."

  Coleman, who helped the waiters gain recognition under the powerful Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union, said they did what they had to do.

  "There was racial prejudice, but we worked through it to take care of our families," he said. "We were like the ambassadors for the company. "... We had to stand tall and walk tall in order to achieve the things we wanted in our lives."

  Lee Gibson, at 98 the oldest honoree in the group and the only sleeping car porter, was 26 when one of the deacons at his church asked if he wanted to work on the railroad. He jumped at the chance, although he earned so little at the time, he cannot even remember what it was. There were tough times, he said, but he enjoyed it. And he still is a railroad man at heart, sporting a railroad spike tie tack that commemorated the 100-year anniversary of the meeting of the eastern and western rail lines at Promontory, Utah.

  "I've been on a high for the last two months, really, ever since I first heard about the (event)," he said. "It was nice. I got the service I used to give."
• 

  John Doe

  Try "control + c" and "control + v." That works for me even when right clicking doesn't.
• 

  beksbks

  http://www.insidebayarea.com/oaklandtribune/ci_11675982

  Looks like it was the pictures, I took them out and it worked.
• 

  snowbird

  Don't cry for them, Bek.

  They are MEN! who stood proud in their communities. They used their meager wages to buy property, send their kids to college, and fight the inequities that surrounded them. You can find a lot more info on men like these by googling Thomas Sowell's website.

  I've been blessed to know only one, and the stories he used to tell!

  Thanks and kudos to you for bringing this to the board.

  Sylvia
• 

  IP_SEC

  I think guys with guts and balls like that would be offended at you crying. I know... you a softie at heart.
• 

  purplesofa

  "They were ordinary men who did an extraordinary thing," Hughes said. "No one told them they had to be the best, or do their best — it was self-pride."

  These are the people who make it. No matter your sex, nationality, race, or income, they do eventually make it.

  purps
• 

  beksbks

  I don't even know why it makes me cry, it just does.

  And this, who doesn't cry when you hear something like this?

  "I've been on a high for the last two months, really, ever since I first heard about the (event)," he said. "It was nice. I got the service I used to give."