The Owl

Around 4:30 one morning in 1976, an unexpected visitor walked into Center Tower, the nerve center of the railroad where I was working at the time. I looked up from my paperwork and somehow managed to calmly say “Good morning, Mr. Elder”. At the same time, Tom, the train dispatcher on duty, was coming out from behind the huge electronic model board holding a cup of coffee. He smiled casually and offered the same cheery greeting. The visitor nodded at both of us with a terse “Good morning”, unlocked the door to the tower supervisor’s office and sat down at the desk.

Tom and I glanced at each other, exhaled, and were surely thinking the same thing: “Holy fuck– that was close”.

To those who worked under him, James F. Elder was always Mr. Elder, never Jim. He was the Superintendent of Railroad Operations and a real bastard. I suppose he had to be in order to put the fear of God into the men (yes, it was all mostly men in those days) responsible for running a safe and efficient operation. His office was in the rail yard 10 miles east of Center Tower, but he had this annoying habit of showing up when and where he was least expected, trying to catch anyone who worked for him in even the slightest rules violation. Tom and I both suspected that he was disappointed at not having caught his overnight tower crew literally asleep at the switch, and now he had to look like he had another reason to be there. We had just barely dodged a very real, very big bullet, and we knew it.

Because if Mr. Elder had walked in 10 minutes earlier, I would have been at my desk doing my job while Tom serenaded me at the top of his lungs from the kitchenette behind the model board with a rousing chorus of “Eat Me Raw, Balls and All, Bay-BEE!” Most guys just strut to demonstrate confident, macho nonchalance. Tom had a theme song.

But if he had shown up 20 minutes earlier, I still would have been at my desk, but Tom would have been stretched out across three office chairs at the dispatcher’s console. If Mr. Elder had walked in on THAT, he would have fired both of our asses on the spot, with me as collateral damage for not ratting him out.

Tall and lean, and the spittin’ image of Clint Eastwood in his Dirty Harry days, Tom was quite a character. We worked the 11:00pm– 7:00am shift together three nights a week, and we got along famously. He was a devoted family man, with a wife and three kids holding down the fort at home. It seemed like he worked around the clock– in his brother’s truck refrigeration shop by day and then as a train dispatcher on the overnight shift. Every night, his wife fixed him a “platter”, a full cookie sheet covered in tin foil and piled high with leftovers that he reheated in the tower’s toaster oven. His fashion sense was typical of the era, but with a twist: patterned sport shirts tucked into polyester flared-bottom slacks that always seemed about 3 inches too short for his lanky frame. It was the same with every pair of pants he wore, so one night, I finally asked him why. Looking down at his faux leather brown boots and white socks, he replied “I like a straight crease.”

My job title at Center Tower was “PBX/TV Monitor”, which meant that I sat in front of a bank of closed-circuit video feeds and answered customer service telephones from 13 train stations in southern New Jersey and in the subway beneath Center City Philadelphia. My girlfriend’s father, the railroad’s personnel manger, got me the gig when he found out the kid his daughter was dating skipped college because he wanted to be a photographer. I suppose he figured he’d better do something fast in case she started thinking about marrying a deadbeat. That was never a problem though, because shortly after I got the job, she dumped me. But my nickname with the old timers at work, “Fager’s son-In-law”, stuck.

Each night after chowing down, Tom would put the state-of-the-art railroad on autopilot. With only a single train making the 28-mile return loop every hour from midnight until 5am, that was a pretty simple process. Officially designated as Train 51, or The Owl (for “Night Owl”), it would follow a predetermined route across various interlockings (switches and signals) from one end of the line to the other and then back again. The orientation of every switch, the aspect of every signal, and the location of every train was displayed in flashing lights on a long model board in the center of the room. Facing it was the equally long dispatcher’s console lined with clusters of glowing pushbuttons that controlled the operation of each switch and the illuminated wayside signals that governed train movements. By setting each switch on “AUTOMATIC”, the train’s route was “picked” by electronic sensors in the tracks and on The Owl. The train operator, cruising along at 75mph, simply watched indications on his own console and the wayside signals along the tracks to make sure everything worked correctly. If he spotted anything unusual, or had a mechanical problem with his train, the operator could talk to the dispatcher via a train phone handset on the left side of the console. Novel at the time but now nearly universal, the complex system was known as ATC, or Automatic Train Control, and railroad managers from all over the world visited Center Tower to learn how we implemented it.

With everything basically running itself (as per the rules), Tom would roll those 3 chairs together and tell me to wake him up if anything happened. That was nowhere near as reckless as it might sound, because his immediate reaction to a ringing telephone, or a radio or train phone call, led me to believe that he was never actually asleep. But on the face of it, it was very definitely AGAINST every rule in the rulebook.

Every dispatcher handled the tedium of the graveyard shift differently. Vic, a slicked-back player from South Philly fond of tight silk shirts, gold chains, disco clubs and his Mercury Cougar, obsessively spray-cleaned the dispatcher’s console and phones multiple times a night. Matt, a tattooed, crew-cut, no-nonsense fire plug of a guy spent several hours each night in the men’s room with a newspaper. One night, he forgot to set one of the switches to be picked automatically, which caused The Owl to stop a few hundred feet short of a station. The operator called it in on the train phone, so I knocked on the door and asked him what I should do. There was silence from the other side for a moment, then the sound of a rapidly spinning toilet paper dipenser followed by Matt’s overly officious voice: “now listen to me VERY CAREFULLY…”

I really loved all these guys.

Later that year I was promoted to train operator, at 19, the youngest ever at the time. Some nights I even ran The Owl, with Tom’s, or Vic’s, or Matt’s voice on the other end of the train phone. While I was a dues-paying member of Teamsters Local 676 less than a year after Jimmy Hoffa disappeared, I got the sense that I was being groomed for management.

That was my life back then– days turning into weeks turning into months, all flying past me like the crossties disappearing under my rushing train. It was a master class in how the vast majority of the population relates to work– on time, by the book, around the clock and under the thumb. I just did my 8 out-and-back trips every night, rocking gently on welded rail and dreaming, with eyes wide open, of a very different life.

I quit the railroad in 1978 to work at a local camera store, foolishly thinking it would be my first step toward becoming a professional photographer. I was way too young and stupid to realize the long-term consequences of giving up a state job, good money, a generous pension, and a secure and nearly guaranteed future with almost unlimited potential for…none of the above. We live and we learn.

On my last day on the job, I worked an afternoon/evening shift that included the PM load line (rush hour). Right around 6:00, I was leaning out of the cab window at the 16th and Locust subway station, watching hundreds of commuters pile on to my six-car train. Just before the departure bell rang, the door to the little supervisor’s shack at the end of the platform swung open and Mr. Elder walked up to me. It was unusual to see him there at that time of day, and I’ve always wondered if he was there specifically to deliver a message. He put his face a few inches from mine, looked me in the eye and said “this is the biggest mistake you’ll ever make in your life”. Then he turned and walked away.

I’d love to be able to tell him that there hasn’t been a day in all the years since that I haven’t thought about that moment. I’ve made some pretty big mistakes, but I’ve also accomplished so much more than I could even begin to dream of back then. In my mind, the jury’s still out on the question of whether Mr. Elder was right or wrong. All I can say now is that no matter what HE was, I was on my way, and I was 21 years old.

--from Negative Thoughts: A Photographer's Life, In Pictures