Upheavings of justified emotion and nostalgia fill the press on the news of Les Paul's demise at 94. Aside from swinging to his and Mary Ford's reverbed version of How High the Moon and many other multi-tracked, electrified tunes on the radios and phonographs of my youth, it was the train that paused at the depot on Wiliams Street across from the tavern owned by Les Paul's parents' where he played long before the Iridium in New York, our local tavern named after the mighty streamliner, The (Club) 400......it's the train that again captures my imagination on this day for eulogies.
That temporarily famed train, the 400 about which I sing, was a part of my youth along with enduring Les Paul (Lester Paulfuss), also down the track.
Were You Pulled by the 400?
The 400 was the Chicago and Northwestern's
first mile-a-minute
steam-operated streamliner
regularly scheduled to operate
over a distance of 200 miles;
its name came from its unheard-of ability
to pull a train 400 miles
in less than 400 minutes
and the name suggested the future,
the next decade coming up.
The 400 was introduced on January 2, 1935
and in 1936
it got the first oscillating headlamp,
a safety feature for high-speed trains;
people and animals weren't used to such swiftly-approaching
danger
'Here comes the 400!'
Waukesha kids would shout,
Those of us lucky enough to live
Near the tracks in the 1940s
We would run down
To the train depot to see the 400,
hoping it would stop
in its mighty glory;
sometimes it even had an American flag
flying above the oscillating safety lamp.
The Germans had their dirigibles
but we had our streamliners!
I walk that way now,
our curative Waukesha water debunked,
a legend gone plain,
flags out of style among the hip,
the war is over,
trains rusty drones
competing with trucks,
the good buddies of the roadway
are in our way.
Maybe sporting flag decals
next to permit decals on their window glass
but beating out the iron rails?
Not quite yet; no, never!
But in the 40s the 400 ruled
among the regular high smoke-stacked
black as coal
guts-hanging-out-for-all-to-see
steam engines
pausing at the Waukesha depot
to take on Waukesha water,
give entertainment to TV-less children
and to get their giant wheels oiled
by trainmen in bib overalls,
their bucket oil cans with specially-long spouts
and their watch chains guarding
marvelous timepieces tucked in
those bibbed blue and gray-striped upper pockets;
watches that were cherished
possessions
setting those men apart
amidst the bursts of steam trackside
like dry-ice effects on a stage.
Times were hard and my mother and grandmother
would warn me at dusk
'Don't go down there!
There are tramps down there!'
And there were sometimes
but I never saw one that meant
me any harm.
Like the 400 and the other plainer trains
the tramps were transitory
unlike today's homeless;
they were said to hole up briefly
in camps outside of town
sometimes they would beg door-to-door
and scratch a secret code mark
Where they were treated kindly;
I featured them cooking stews in old tin cans
staying away, embarrassed
but I never truly met a tramp to find out;
they didn't seem to want to know us
and we didn't seem to want to know
them in the 1940s.
My church was and is just on the other side
of those train tracks
and I don't remember them teaching us
to worry about these homeless people
like they encourage us to do now
but they might have done.
I was little,
I wondered.
The mighty 400 flew through town
sometimes at night without stopping,
it's oscillating headlamp showing
like Diogenes' lantern.
It might have been looking for an honest man
an honest boy
an honest tramp?
It was an elite train bent on getting
where it was going,
it's trainmen a cut-above;
their denims seemed starched,
their watches looked even better.
The uncluttered lines of this engine
showed little of what was going on
inside.
A thing of wonder in the change of the age.
I saw men stopped at railroad crossings
interrupted by the coursing 400
not cursing their bad luck
but getting out of their cars and doffing their hats
at the swiftly arriving and disappearing
engineer who would wave.
An eddy of wind left behind
might swirl a newspaper and dust up into the air
and in a moment the 400 was gone!
What happened?
There are still pictures of the 400 in the museum here
and a local tavern across from the depot
still bears its name;
reliquaries hold the engines remaining now.
We would put our small feet on the tracks
to feel the power of the still-out-of-sight
behemoth 400,
horn blaring its look-out;
no old-fashioned bell dinging!
look out for the swinging BEAM!
So connected,
we felt
we were going somewhere;
and the tramps rode the rails
a mile a minute sometimes
if they were pulled by the 400
(D.D.)
Reprinted from the Waukesha County Historical Society quarterly, LANDMARK.
.........................................
RIP, Les Paul!
Vaya Con Dios!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqCrilvnSsE
