(The following article by Sam Matthews was posted on the Tracy Press website on April 1. Gerald Womack is a member of BLET Division 692 in Tracy, Calif. He joined the BLE on September 20, 1948.)
TRACY, Calif. — Gerald Womack started his working life on his family’s dairy in Fairgrove, Mo.
“We milked more than 30 cows twice a day — by hand,” he said. “The day after I left for California in 1936, my dad went out and bought a milking machine!”
Now at 90 — he just celebrated his birthday Sunday — he has other animals to tend at his small acreage on the section of Bird Road once known as Highway 33.
“I’m raising goats nowadays,” he said. “I had cataract surgery on my eyes a month ago, and I’m beginning to see better. And I can still get around, so working with the goats keeps me involved.”
What started out as a hobby with a couple of goats has turned into a 10-goat operation that includes several generations. He hopes to sell goats in the near future.
Womack came out West in search of work in the middle of the 1930s economic depression.
“It wasn’t much better in California, but I did land a job working on a dairy near Visalia,” he noted.
A 1938 visit to his father’s cousin, who worked for a reclamation district north of Banta, brought Womack to the Tracy area. He stayed to work at the reclamation district for four years, living in a small house in Banta. His childhood sweetheart, Glendon Green, came West in 1939 and they were married.
In 1942, a friend suggested he apply for a job with the Southern Pacific Railroad, and he went to work for the SP in Tracy as a fireman. The U.S. had entered World War II, and the railroad operations were straining capacity to move military supplies and troops.
“I was drafted into the Army about then, but I flunked the physical because of curvature of the spine,” he said. “The SP was really hopping during the war, and I spent a lot of time on road.”
Later, as he became an engineer and acquired seniority, he worked both on the road in the three-way division between Tracy, Roseville and Fresno, and also in the Tracy yard.
“The old steam engines had their own personality, but after the diesels took over in the mid-1950s, a lot of the challenge and enjoyment of being a locomotive engineer were gone. Besides, those closed diesel cabs had a lot of exhaust fumes in them.”
Womack was seriously injured in the late 1940s when he slipped off an icy step on a water tower in Lodi and fell 18 feet. Time in the SP hospital in San Francisco finally got him back on the job.
He retired from the SP in 1976, but even before then, he had operated his own backhoe business on his days off, digging ditches for farm irrigation and drainage systems, pipelines and construction projects.
“Over the years, I developed regular customers,” he said. “They knew I could do the job in the right way. I did a lot of work for the Plain View Water District.”
The backhoe business continues to be operated by members of the family.
Before moving to his home on Bird Road in 1991, Womack lived on South C Street until major development occurred in that area. He had one of the first wind turbines in the Tracy area, generating power when the winds blew.
“The winds didn’t blow all the time, but when they did, it was great getting money from PG&E instead of paying for power,” he said.
When not working on the railroad or operating his backhoe, Womack went fishing for steelhead on the Klamath River in Northern California.
His wife died in 1996. So, in recent years, he has lived with his son, Matthew, and family. He has three other sons, Jim of Lodi, Jerry of Marysville and Ralton “RC” of Tracy. A daughter, Lou Ann Eggers, and a sister, Jane Bassi, also live in Tracy. There are 18 grandchildren and 20 great-grandchildren.
Many members of the family were at Sunday’s 90th birthday party at the Bird Road home.
“Heck, if I had known I would live this long, I wouldn’t have worked so hard,” Womack said with a laugh. “But I’ve enjoyed keeping busy. I’ll tell you, being a railroad engineer and backhoe operator sure beats milking cows by hand.”