[PRCo] B&O Industrial Accident

[Fred Schneider]

Having finished 1963, I asked myself, where should I begin now.  Nineteen sixty-four?   Naw.   Nineteen-forty seemed good because that was my birthyear.   No.   Lets go back farther.   So I moved back to 1935, the year my parents got married.
There is no newspaper on line for January 1st.   Here on January 2, 1935 is an item on a railroad industrial accident.   I might add that, from reading newspapers early in this century, I learned that railroaders had a knack of finding the most imaginable ways of killing themselves.    If it could be done, they would find a way. 

You ask how the elevator operator falls down the shaft?   Well, I had a great grandfather killed that way.   He was pushing a hand truck of groceries onto a warehouse elevator in Pittsburgh except somebody had moved the elevator to another floor.   The gates were still open and he didn’t know the lift had gone elsewhere.   He died of a ruptured liver …. the tangs of the hand truck went through it when he landed on it at the bottom of the shaft.   This may be similar:

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Pittsburgh Press, January 2, 1935, digital page 4

 

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=eQAdAAAAIBAJ&sjid=ZY4EAAAAIBAJ&pg=3636%2C37993

 

ELEVATOR OPERATOR KILLED IN PLUNGE 

   A 22-foot fall down an elevator shaft in the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad freight Station, Allegheny Avenue and Isabella Street, North Side, today killed Thomas McGrath, 25, of 1230 Resaca Place, elevator operator.    Found at the bottom of the shaft at 8:15 a.m. with a broken back and a fractured skull, McGrath died in the Mercy Hospital shortly after 2 p.m.    Railroad officials said they were unaware of how the plunge occurred.