(The following story by Lynne Jensen appeared on the Times Picayune website on June 19.)
NEW ORLEANS — With money from his own pocket, some raised by collecting aluminum cans, Gilbert Isaac treated a group of children to an afternoon train ride on the City of New Orleans last week. It is a practice that the Amtrak employee started about a half-dozen years ago.
A supervisor in the mechanical department, Isaac, 53, is a former baseball commissioner for the Dixie Youth Program and Little League in McComb, Miss., where he lives. He has enjoyed watching young boys he coached grow up “to be fine young men,” he said.
The idea of taking children for train rides began when he met with one of those young men, now a minister, who “was dealing with youth living in poverty,” Isaac said. He decided to sponsor them, and organized a train ride for about 60 children and 12 chaperones, including “some of the young men that I coached,” he said.
“I talked to them like I did in their youth and I told them I needed them,” Isaac said. The trip was a big success and word spread, he said.
Last week’s train trip included Amtrak worker Debra Reed, who is a server in the dining car. She is devoted to working with children at Holy Faith Temple Baptist Church on Gov. Nicholls Street. “Her pastor calls her ‘Mother Hubbard,’ ” Reed’s sister, Beverly Brittan, said.
Reed rounded up children from her church and several others, including Christian Baptist Church, Faith Temple Church of God and the Holy Ghost Center, for the train trip from Union Passenger Terminal to Hammond, where the group boarded a bus back to New Orleans. “We had the whole train car to ourselves,” Reed said. “It was lovely, and the kids had a wonderful time.”
Reed, 47, a longtime volunteer at Children’s Hospital, said she is one of 11 children raised in the 9th Ward by parents who could not afford to buy bikes and skates for all of them, but who loved them.
“We did everything together,” Reed said. She said she and her siblings all finished college.
When Isaac asked her to round up children for a train ride and that he would pay their fare, Reed jumped at the opportunity. “It’s a way to tell them that somebody loves them and cares about them,” she said.
“I don’t know half the children I sponsor,” Isaac said. “I’ve had some of them walk up to me and say ‘I know you. You sponsored me to ride on the train.’ ”
Isaac said he is grateful for the support of his family and puts his trust in God. “Everything that I do is the will of God,” he said.
He recalled a child with Down syndrome who “just came alive” during a train ride. “He had never said nothing or moved in the chair until he went on the train,” Isaac said.
Brandon Handy, 10, was among the children who enjoyed their first train ride last week. He sat by the window, eyeing the scenery. He said he saw swamps and snakes. “It’s like you are in the wild of the jungle,” he said.
Before the train pulled out of the station, Brandon flipped open a cell phone and captured the roar coming from under the passenger car he was about to board. “You hear that!” he said into the phone to his cousin Deja Lewis, 11.
“She said ‘You’re not going on a train,’ ” Brandon said. “And I said, ‘Yes I am!’ “