[PRCo] Rogues Gallery - Fred Schneider
Fred Schneider
fwschneider at comcast.net
Mon Mar 19 19:28:53 EDT 2007
OK, now come the pictures of Fred Schneider.
Bob Dietrict ask for Fred as a Strasburg Rail Road fireman and that
hurts because it is a real trip back into the past. I was 23, 24,
25 years old then. Remember that one of my two very best friends
today was a man I met at the Strasburg stock sale 49 years ago last
month. Been a lot of water over the proverbial dam since then.
The picture first attached was unattributed but I'm pretty certain
it was taken by Bill Moedinger. Some of you may recall his name in
Trains magazine, almost from the very first issues in 1940. Bill is
still living but he is in the Alzheimer's ward at Willow Valley North
retirement community. The picture shows Ben Kline (Benjamin Franklin
Good Kline, Jr. in his ever present derby hat at the throttle of 90
and Fred Schneider just after scampering up onto the gangway after
flagging Carpenter's Crossing. The red flag is still in my hand.
Ben's wife Patsy predeceased him ... I don't think she even lived out
of her 40s. And I don't think he made it out of his 50s. He was
noted for a long string of books with Walt Cassler and Tom Taber on
logging railroads of Pennsylvania. And the other people I worked
with? John Bowman was the regular weekday engineman whom I fired for
in the summers of 1964 and 1965. We spread his ashes three years
ago at the age of 86. Our boss was J. Huber Leath ... Huber is
living in the Bretheran Village a few miles from me and, I've been
told, suffering from cancer. I understand that Bud Swearer is
still pretty healthy. Red Shaub was hired the day I left engine
service and he was planted years ago. Warren Benner, our treasuer,
had a coach named after him some years ago. Many of the people I
worked with at Strasburg are now memorialized by the names on
coaches. It's difficult. There is also a color picture taken by my
father that shows me covered with filth, hanging out the gang way of
90, and Ben in the cab window; and a third of me acknowledging
completion of a brake test, also by my father. This is where I
learned that there was no such thing as a small wrench where steam
locomotives were concerned ... crescent wrenches started at 12 inches
and went up to 3 feet or more. It was hot, stinking, dirty work.
When I first picked up a coal scoop on the foot plate of a British
Railways Black 5 on a passanger train enroute to Mallaig in 1960,
that was fun. It was a thrill when I started doing it at
Strasburg. If you put a scoop back in my hand today, the fingers
would close around the handle. I've had enough of it.
I guess it's a mans thing to prove you can do it. I've proven to
myself that I can land a plane, back a semi-trailer into a dock
without scratching the adjacent trailers, drive the trailer 75 miles
over two-lane roads, drive school buses filled with kids, run street
cars, run steam engines. What isn't out of my system is China,
India, Australia, Japan.
Then there is one that shows just how well early Kodachrome stood the
test of time. It also shows why I am what I am. It's Christmas
day 1941 and it shows Fred (a.k.a. Billy) with his first Lionel
train. It looks like a trolley in the backround. No, I don't
remember any of it except for the building models which came from
Dad's OO gauge layout. I was approaching 22 months in age.
And these is a slide of me chasing the rattlesnakes out from under a
rented Mercury Zephyr out in the Mohave Desert at Klondike,
California on October 13, 1983. My good buddy Don Duke took the
picture. It was only lucky that we simply punctured one tire
getting back to the Santa Fe mainline. He remembered a time when a
rental car company towed him out and had to replace all four
tires. I also remember the idiots in L. A. suggesting we could
drive all the way in on that screwy donut and me telling them to put
it where the sun doesn't shine. It was bad enough that we had to
drive 50 miles by 5 PM to get a tire. Oh yes, and that flat caused
me to find the last operator exchange in the west ... Ludlow
California with eight phones. (I save for some other time the snap
that Bill Middleton took of me using an abandoned television set case
to gain elevation for a picture of a San Diego someplace in the
southern reaches of L. A.)
And if you've ever had any geology courses you understand that the
mites go up and the tites go down ... and when stagtites and
stalagmites grow together in a cave, they produce a column. And you
will see a picture of Fred inspecting a ice column in a subway
station in Philadelphia in 1982. It proves that SEPTA subway
stations are neither dry nor heated in winter. As I recall I was
there working for the state and it was a good excuse to go out to
dinner with a friend who worked as an engineer for SEPTA and he took
the pictures. His name? Russ Jackson. How did I meet these
people? Working as the Headlights magazine editor was a wonderful
way to meet some high up people in the industry who were also
railfans. Some other people I met through that job were Luther
Miller, the publisher of Railway Age, Harold Geissenheimer when he
was with PAT, George Krambles when he was running CTA, the chief
publicists of BART and WMATA. I highly recommend such a task to
anyone who is young, ambitious, talented and driven.
Mirrors are good for self portraits. Note the one of me holding the
camera and looking into the mirror. It's also good for
surreptitiously photographing the back end of the girl behind you.
The picture was in 2001 and it was taken at Three Bridges, Sussex,
England, on the London - Gatwick - Brighton line. By then the hair
had turned completely gray and Dunlaps Disease (as in the Gut Dun Lap
over the Belt) had forced the wearing of braces to hold up the
trousers. The pink shirt shirt came from a British Home Store in
Crawley because the airline lost my luggage on the trip over. The
shirt was so comfortable that several later I went into a BHS store
in Nottingham and bought another exactly like it.
Then there is a Christmas Day 2003 picture of my wife Marie and me in
front of the Capitol in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. That was a
wonderful day. That morning Ed Lybarger and Janice Lougee came down
to the hotel lobby with great big smiles ... Janice was wearing a new
diamond. Ed had picked a wonderful woman for a wife. And judging
from the smile on Marie's face, I think she agreed. The
photographer was Ed.
And the most recent picture shows me leaning on a cane in front of
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's vacation White House in Warm
Springs, Georgia in March 2006. Bruce Bente took the picture. We
were wandering down to Key West and back and we even had lunch with
Mark McGuire on that trip. Mark ... he was the guy I met at the
Strasburg stock sale 49 years ago and we're going to Hungary and
Austria in October and maybe India next year.
I've spared you the high school graduation, the wedding pictures, the
college graduation....
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