Pullman Conversation

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

HE WAS a Pullman porter on the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad. I had asked him, shortly after we had left Chicago, for a table on which to set my typewriter.

As he set it up, there were the usual innocuous and inevitable pleasantries of conversation — the weather, the ride, the news, and so forth. Then, as a passenger walked past us, the porter steered the conversation into more specific channels.

‘See that man who just walked through the car? Never seen him before, but I bet I can tell you where he’s from.’

I was interested and smiled questioningly.

‘He’s probably from Idaho or Utah or one of the big Western states. You don’t have to look at that leather face of his to tell it, either.’

By this time I was intrigued. Was it his clothes, or his shoes, or his stride, or any other external giveaway?

‘No,’ said the porter. ‘It’s just what he does and the way he does it. After ‘bout twenty years on this job, it’s pretty easy to tell them apart, which ones are Westerners, which are Easterners, which are Southerners, which are foreigners. This one got on at Chicago just five minutes ago, and he’s probably covered every inch of this train by now, outside the engine, and he’d probably be in that, too, if he could. That’s the way Westerners is. They like to move around. Sit down. Up for water. Down again. Out for a smoke.

‘Easterners. It’s not so easy to tell Easterners. But most Easterners come in, sit down, reach for their newspapers or their books — or, like you, start working right away. You don’t mind me guessing that you’re from somewhere in the East, maybe somewhere in New England?’

It pleased him when I told him he was right; then he went on: —

’Most Easterners, and I don’t care whether they’re on the way to a vacation or traveling for business — most Easterners never ask you the time or about how long it’s goin’ to take to get to their station. They carry their own watches, their own timetables, and far’s I can make out, their own cups and water coolers, ‘cause Easterners never have to get up for water.

‘Southerners aren’t like that. They don’t move around much, like the Westerners, and they don’t keep to themselves, like the Easterners. They generally like to talk to someone — the passenger in the next seat or someone in the smoking room or the lounge car. ‘Course, when the Southerner begins to talk, you can tell he’s a Southerner, but even if you couldn’t tell, he gives himself away by the things he talks about. He likes to talk about the number of times he’s made the trip and compare this railroad with all the other railroads in the country.’

He finished adjusting the typewriter table and sat down in the chair opposite me — I was sitting in the last seat in the car — and after I thanked him, he looked as though he hadn’t finished saying what he wanted to, but was reluctant to continue talking, now that his job was done.

I urged him to go on, which he did; and soon the conversation progressed from things regional to things general. Several times during the conversation he stopped to ask whether he wasn’t keeping me from my work, but I assured him that I was deeply interested in what he had to say. Nor was I merely being polite; what interested me particularly was a philosophy of life — yes, I guess you might call it that — which had grown up out of twenty years of serving people on Pullmans, making their beds, bringing them things to eat and things to drink, setting up tables for them, whether for work or for games. He had had ample opportunity to observe people when they were relaxed and when they were agitated; when they were on their way to a vacation or a business deal; when they were going to greet friends or relatives or when they were trying to get away from them. And he had had plenty of time to think, and, judging from his observations, he had spent that time to good advantage.

After about a half-hour, he went off to answer a call. I put a sheet in the typewriter and wrote out the account of our conversation — using his own words as well as I could recall them: —

‘Too bad you Easterners are too busy when you ride the trains to look out and see what the country is like. Here you’ve really got a chance to see how people live. If you ride in a bus or a car, mostly you skip around the towns. ‘Specially in a car you take all the nice roads where you see a lot of pretty scenery, ‘ceptin’ the billboards, but you miss a lot more’n you see. And when you’re in a plane — ‘course I don’t really know, ‘cause I’ve never been in a plane, but that’s what people who’ve been in planes tell me — well, when you’re in a plane, everything ugly just fades right out and all you see is a lot of nice colors all rolled together like a big patchwork quilt.

‘But ride the trains, man, ride the trains. I’m not trying to drum up trade for the railroads. I’m just saying this because I know7 what I’m saying. Ride the trains if you want to poke around the insides of this country of ours.

‘Here’s where you can tell where the country’s strong and where the country’s weak. Ain’t an important industry or plant in America but what’s not right off some railroad line. You can just sit right here wdth a scorecard and tell whether we’re in a depression by counting the smokestacks that show some life.

‘Back in ‘33 and ‘34, there wasn’t a day but wthat you could tell that another plant had closed down. And you could always see new signs saying “No Help Wanted" go up every day. And sometimes you could see the breadlines.

‘Sometimes you can ride along for hours and see broken-down shacks or barns that were once pretty prosperous-lookin’. And people who haven’t seen this think they know America. You can pass through town after town that hasn’t had a new building or a new road built for fifteen years — sometimes you can see towns that shot up in a single year, maybe thirty or forty years ago, and haven’t built or torn down a buildin’ ever since.

‘Yessir, there’s plenty of work a waitin’ to be done in this country. Least, accordin’ to what I’ve seen. And the quicker we get to doin’ it, the better. As it is now, one year the chimneys are all smokin’ and the next year they’re all quited down. One year the farms are all pretty busy, the next year they look half dead.

‘No use in seeing America unless you’re going to see what it’s really like. ‘Course if all a body’s interested in is pretty scenery or tall buildings, I guess this isn’t the place for them.

‘Yessir, this isn’t the place for them. Even if they did see all those plants they’d say they were ugly without knowin’ why they were ugly. It wasn’t the plants and the machinery that was ugly; it was being closed down that made them ugly. But when they’re open and going, when the night just bunches right up with the afternoon in the winter, and you can see the smelters making fires in the sky — you wouldn’t want to see anything prettier. And in the morning when you ride past them and see more men than you thought ever lived park their cars outside the plant and walk in through the gates, a lot of them foolin’ around with each other, stealing hats and playing football with lunch boxes, yessir, that’s when this country’s got something you can’t see anywhere else in this world.

‘Been working on this railroad for twentythree years, long enough to get about everything out of riding a railroad anyone’d want. But when I retire, I’m going to take me and the missus and really see this country all over again. By railroad.’

NORMAN COUSINS