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CHAPTER 3
THE WINTER OF '49I'm skipping ahead here, because Kenny has heard this one at every Christmas since he was old enough to sit still, and he says it goes next whether I like it or not.
By the winter of 1948 I was the agent at Kestrel, out in western Kansas, a town of about three hundred people with two elevators, a stockyard, a café, a Methodist church and the depot. The depot had living quarters upstairs, and Cleo and I were raising two kids up there: Kenny's dad, Dennis, who was five, and his Aunt Carla, who was three. The trains went by under their bedroom window all night, and they never woke up for one of them. A thunderstorm would wake them every time.
The section foreman at Kestrel was James Pettway, who kept our stretch of track with four men and a motor car and more patience than any man I ever knew. The dispatcher on our district was Albert Cale, and I'll say it plainly: he was the best dispatcher I ever worked for. You'll see why.
It starts
New Year's had been mild. Then, in the first days of January 1949, it started to snow, and then it started to blow, and it didn't quit for the better part of three days. I'd seen blizzards. I hadn't seen anything like that. The wind came straight down out of the north and you could not see the elevator from the bay window, and the elevator was a hundred yards off. The snow wasn't so much falling as moving sideways. Every cut on the railroad filled up level, and the drifts in town were over the tops of the cars.
The westbound passenger train was due through Kestrel in the early afternoon the first day. It came in nearly two hours late, crawling, and Albert put out an order holding her at Kestrel. The cuts west of us were drifted solid, he said, and he wasn't going to have a passenger train stuck out on the prairie where nobody could get to it. I hung the order on the hoop and then walked it out to the engine myself instead, because nobody was going to see a hoop in that.
A depot full of strangers
There were about ninety people on that train. The crew kept the cars warm for as long as the fuel held out, and the diner fed everybody the first day, but by the second day the dining car was out of nearly everything, and the people started coming into the depot to get warm and see what was what.
That's when Kestrel showed what it was made of. The Methodist women opened up the church basement and started making sandwiches and soup. Families all over town took people into their houses, two and three to a spare bed. The café stayed open all night. Cleo kept a pot of coffee going on the waiting room stove and another one upstairs, and she must have made a hundred pots before it was over. Dennis and Carla thought it was the best thing that had ever happened, a whole train's worth of company.
I remember some of them yet. There was a soldier going home to California on leave who split wood for our stove the whole time and wouldn't take a dime for it. There was a hardware salesman with a suitcase full of catalogs who played checkers with Dennis for two days and lost every game, on purpose I think. There was an old couple going to their daughter's in Colorado who sat in the waiting room holding hands. There was a rancher who'd been back east to bury his brother, and he paced the platform half the night worrying about his cattle, and I couldn't blame him. And there was a young mother with a baby girl who turned one year old on the second night, in our kitchen. Cleo baked a cake with the last of our sugar, and the whole waiting room sang.
The wire
The second night the wires went down west of town, poles and all, and for about twelve hours the only thing connecting Kestrel to the rest of the world was the Morse wire east to the next station. Albert sent me what he knew and I sent back what I knew, and I stayed at that desk most of the night. Folks in town came to the depot to send messages to their families, and to people on the train, that they were all right, and I sent every one of them. There's no sound quite like a sounder on a night like that, with the wind howling outside and the stove ticking, and somebody a hundred miles away telling you that they know you're there.
Digging out
On the third day the wind finally quit, and the sun came out on more snow than I've ever seen in one place. James Pettway and his men, and half the men in town, went out with scoop shovels and started on the cut west of the depot. They shoveled until their hands bled. Then a snowplow came through from the east with engines behind it pushing, throwing snow higher than the telegraph poles, and it went on west and opened the line. Albert sent the passenger train on behind it the next morning, and the whole town came down to the platform to wave goodbye, and the people on the train waved back like we were family. I suppose by then we were.
When she cleared, Albert sent over the wire, "good work Kestrel," which from him was about the same as a medal.
That wasn't the end of it. More storms came that winter, one after another, and the trains ran late well into February. Some of the ranchers around us lost a great many cattle, and I won't pretend otherwise. But nobody I knew was lost, and that town took care of ninety strangers for three days without being asked, and I've been proud of Kestrel ever since.
The soldier sent us a Christmas card every year after that, for a good long while.
Kenny's note: Grandpa still has the soldier's Christmas cards in a shoebox in the hall closet. He got it down to show me. I counted twelve. Next chapter is the war years and the troop trains, which Grandpa says is the hardest one to tell, so it may take a few Sundays. Posted November 16, 1997. [email protected]