(The following column by Mary Swift appeared on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer website on February 8, 2009.)
SEATTLE — Seattle’s Troy Walker figures he logged a million miles on trains.
This week, the 90-year-old Walker is adding more.
He and 71-year-old Tom Gray of Seattle are among a contingent of five former railroad workers invited by Amtrak to Oakland, Calif., to be recognized during national Black History Month.
The observance honors the contributions of Pullman porters — those who worked in the sleeping cars where seats transformed into bunks — and other African-Americans who served on America’s railroads.
Walker was living in Kansas City, Mo., when he landed a job as a dining car waiter on the Santa Fe Railway in 1944.
“I’d never been a waiter,” he said. “I learned from the older fellows, and they taught me quite a bit.”
The job proved a good fit. He liked traveling and meeting people, including Elizabeth Taylor and Orson Welles.
Both were good tippers, he recalled.
If the job brought opportunity to meet celebrities, it also brought discrimination.
“There was prejudice on the railroad,” he said.
Engineers and conductors were white. Blacks held the more menial positions.
“When we got to L.A., the white employees stayed one place and the black employees stayed another. The supervisors we worked under made us feel like we were nothing.”
Walker would prove otherwise.
In 1971, Amtrak took over the railroad. By the time he retired from Amtrak in 1982, Walker had been elevated to supervisor in charge of dining and lounge cars, sleeping cars and coaches.
Retirement proved a challenge.
“I missed it for a little while,” he said. “I used to go down to the station and talk to the fellows.”
Of all the memories of his years on the railroad, Walker said one bad memory is unforgettable: The day in 1956 that the Santa Fe Chief, a passenger train, collided with a mail train in northern New Mexico, killing all but three of the dining car crew in their dormitory car.
Tom Gray was a young college student working summers as a chair car attendant the year the accident happened.
“It was a dramatic introduction to railroading,” said Gray, who comes from a long line of railroad workers.
His grandfather, Henry Jones, was a porter/brakeman.
His uncle was a porter. So was his father, Thomas Jefferson Gray.
“I grew up in my grandfather’s house in Albuquerque, New Mexico,” said Gray, whose parents were divorced. “My grandfather would go off every three days and stay away one night and come back. He kept his shoes immaculately polished. He had this uniform and a little gold chain for his train watch. Of course, I idolized him.”
His father’s run — from Chicago to Los Angeles and back — brought him through Albuquerque regularly.
“The train would stop for 15 minutes,” Gray recalled. “I’d run down to see him. I wish I had a log of all the people he met.”
Gray’s own time on the railroad, albeit brief, was an awakening. On his first trip to Kansas, a cafe refused to serve him, offering to hand a sandwich out the back door instead. Gray refused.
“I had just a little money. I wasn’t going to spend it eating a sandwich handed out the back door of a cafe,” he said.
Like Walker, the 1956 wreck of the Santa Fe Chief stands out in memory.
“A fireman inadvertently turned a switch and wound up putting the Santa Fe Chief down onto a siding where a mail train was sitting. Normally, I would have been on the Chief and my grandfather would have been on the mail train,” he said. “But we were off that day.
“A lot of people can make a human error, and it doesn’t change anything. In this case, it did.”
Gray, who finished a degree in electrical engineering and went on to a career at Boeing, calls himself “a reluctant honoree” at this week’s events.
“I was never a Pullman porter per se,” he said last week. “You had to have a special breed to deal with the public. Pullman porters were with the people full time. Attendants were only there eight hours a day.
“I think I’m going as a representative of the many generations of African-Americans who worked for the railroad.”