All the Live Long Day

I was really fortunate as a young high school student to have a job. Cliff Smith hired me to work in his gas station when I was about 15 or 16 and it allowed me to continue to participate in athletics and still make some money. During the week, I was allowed to come to work after practices (either baseball, basketball, track or cross country) and I could also work on weekends. It was initially a DX station (our SUNRAY DX motto was "Known by the Customers We Keep), but after the 1968 merger it was transformed into a Sunoco station and at some point Cliff sold out to Jack Dicus and I continued working for Jack. This was a full service station where you had someone pump your gas, wash your windows, check your oil, put air in your tires and then run in and bring back your change. This was when gas was still well below 50 cents per gallon and you actually got change back. Inside the two-bay facility, which was located at the junction of Highways 59 and 48 on the outskirts of the greater Jasonville metropolitan area, just across from Hoosier Pete, we washed cars (inside and out), changed oil and lubricated joints, fixed tires and whatever other mechanical work that Cliff and/or Jack would perform during the day. Of a night, when I was there alone, I didn't do much inside, other than fix an occasional tire, because one person was just too busy manning the four pumps on the lot.

It was a good time in my life and I enjoyed the work. In the summer after my freshman year, my Dad got me a plush job on the railroad, which I held for 3 summers. The opportunity to work on an extra gang was quite fascinating to a young lad and I enjoyed it immensely. This gang travelled up the tracks, replacing old worn out ties with brand spanking new ones. Ah, how I loved the smell of creosote in the mornings. Being the son and grandson of railroaders, I was familiar with most of the people and the sights and sounds of railroads, but not until I worked on the extra gang did I gain a true appreciation for the culture of the rails.

Replacing ties sounds like a relatively simple task, but I can tell you that there was a lot of thought put into this, at some point, to have been able to do it properly. The first requirement was for someone to survey the line and draw a big yellow "X" on those ties, which were deemed ready for replacement. Then a work train would deliver the new ties to this location (they would dump them at convenient locations along the track somewhere near the yellow "Xes"). Most of the time this would be down at the bottom of a gully, so the extra gang could get warmed up by pulling them back up with a pair of tie tongs. I had this job a few times and I was amazed at how much of a thrill it was to drag these ties back up to the rail, one at a time.

Ties are secured to the rail with steel spikes, which had to be removed on those ties selected for replacement. Someone, probably a mechanical engineer, had designed a bar, which weighed approximately, oh let's say 9 thousand pounds, that you carried and used to leverage the feisty spikes out of their resting place for the past 50 or so years. After the spikes were extracted, the track was raised with a track jack, the tie plates were knocked out and then a couple of the extra gang would yank the unserviceable tie out with tie tongs. There were some members of the gang who would dig out the ballast (dirt and rock in the general consistency of concrete) at the end of the tie, with pick and shovel, to provide for a smooth extraction. These worn out ties were quite a bit smaller, after years of aging and neglect, so the ballast had to be dug out for the length of the tie to accommodate the insertion of one of the newer, larger ties. Once this was done and the new tie was inserted, the tie plates were replaced and someone would grab a spike mall and hammer in the new spikes.

All in all these were relatively simple tasks, which were accomplished in unison by the fine tuned artisans of the extra gang. Of course there was a lot more to this and I couldn't do it justice in just one article, so I'll elaborate on some other details in a follow-on article, where I'll discuss how my life was dramatically altered by one Clarence Berry.

Life on the extra gang, with some great guys like Wino, Red and Spike, was an eye opener for a young lad back in the 60's. It was a time when I was awakened to a true cultural renaissance that guided me through my formative years. The type of education that I received along the rails was far beyond what my teachers could have supplied inside of a classroom. It was during this period of time that Ol' Simmons finally said to himself, "I ain't doing this the rest of my life."