The Tracks of
Memory
By George Brose
An Essay on Trains, Family, and Growing Up in Ohio
My
first memory of trains was watching from two blocks distant at the corner
nearest to my maternal grandmother's house in Northeast Dayton. I wasn't
allowed to go beyond that corner, but from there I could make out the cars as
they rolled between foundries and factories on their way north, maybe to Toledo
or perhaps Detroit. Trains going directly east would have required
taking the tracks running parallel to Third Street. Yes, I'm sure those trains
were headed north. I could stand on that corner formed by Chapel St. and
Milburn Ave. and look as long as I liked, but there was a crack in the sidewalk
I dared not pass alone. That was in 1947, and I was four years old, conscious
that there was a greater world beyond that crack, but not explorer enough to
risk the penalties of transgressing that line in the concrete.
Halfway
down Chapel St. to the tracks sat Falb's Cafe, a working man's bar where my
father took his afternoon beer on hot summer days. He often brought me along
with him and sat me at a table in the back room, the afternoon sun roasting the
windows on the west wall and filtering the tubes of light that worked their way
through the darkened room. I could see the cigarette smoke soaring from the
tables up through those light rays and returning downward in cloud-like
patterns over my arms, and I could touch them and disturb them and feel the
difference in temperatures between the smoke-filled rays and the sheltered
darkness of the room. We shared a waxed paper bag of potato chips. My father
had his bottle of beer, I had a Tru-Ade orange drink. He drank a ratio of two
to my one. We both drank straight from the bottle, my hands holding steady on
the raised bumps of the bottle covered with the cold wet moisture condensing on
it. We contested every day who would find the biggest chip in the bag. Somehow,
even when he found it, I would get to eat it. We never stayed for more than two
beers and one orange, then it was back to the house where supper would be ready
by five.
My
father worked in those factories although his was across town. He left home
early each morning driving one of several cars that seemed to pass through the
family. The one I remember distinctly was Josephine, a 1937 Dodge Coupé, black,
with running boards on the sides, a two-seater with a high wobbly gear shift
between the two passengers. There was a recess in the gear shift knob with a
place for a picture to be attached. Patrick, one of my father's hunting dogs
from between the wars, could be seen on that knob. My place in that car was the
shelf in front of the rear window. I could stretch out comfortably on it and
see out all the windows. I could sleep if we were returning from somewhere late
at night. I don't recall ever riding on the passenger seat, because sitting
there, I could not see where we were going. A unique feature in Josephine was a
crank on the dashboard that when turned would allow the windshield to open
slightly on the bottom edge, giving better ventilation in summer. We opened it
occasionally but the windshield always leaked afterwards in wet weather.
We
took that car occasionally to visit my paternal grandparents and drove a
seemingly endless fifty miles north of Dayton on the major north-south artery
running from Detroit to Florida, Route 25, a two-lane thoroughfare that crossed
Route 40, the old National Road in Vandalia, Ohio, making it one of the true
crossroads of America. We travelled up through the farmlands passing through
Troy, Piqua, switching to Route 66 and carrying on through Houston (pronounced
House-tun), then Fort Loramie (I dreamed of a great rampart to protect the
settlers from Indian attacks), Minster, and then the family homestead on West
Monroe St. in New Bremen where people who were born there still spoke German
and had strange-sounding names like Fledderjohan, Landfersich, Meisenbrink, Dietrich and
Dammeyer. The names around us in Dayton had been more of an East European
nature and the accents of my grandmother, a Dombrowski from Lithuania, more
indecipherable when I heard them spoken with Mrs. Andretchik when they visited
in each other's homes.
The
common tie between these two places were the trains. A small rural line
connecting a few of the farm towns in West Central Ohio provided a daily
freight service. I was lucky beyond belief. The railroad ran right beside my
grandmother's house and I could stand in the vacant lot between her house and
the tracks and see the trains so closely that the engineer quickly became a
familiar face to me. He must have been a man who liked children, because each
day as he passed slowly going south he would throw candies or lollipops to the
two or three kids who stood by the line. Just across the road was a dairy where
the train turned off on a spur to deliver equipment or pick up milk, and on one
occasion the engineer brought us ice cream from the plant. Twice we were given
rides with my father and aunt in the caboose down to Minster and back, a round
trip of four miles, but an adventure that seemed a lifetime in duration to me.
On one run back to New Bremen, they brought us into the cab of the locomotive,
a steam engine that probably finished its active days on that country line that
ran from Lima each day to Minster.
Josephine (note the Dodge Ram hood ornament)
Falbs' Cafe, 77 years later and still going strong. Now I drink the beer.
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