(The following column by Bonnie Henry appeared on the Arizona Daily Star website on March 19. W.F. Sayre was a member of BLET Division 28 in Tucson, Ariz.)
TUCSON, Ariz. — It was hot, dirty, dangerous work. But it was work that would feed his family. Work worth a whipping.
“He used to come home beat up,” says Edith Auslander, whose father, William Sayre, in 1942 became Tucson’s first Mexican-American to work as a fireman for the Southern Pacific Railroad.
Back then, Hispanic men could work in the roundhouse or on the tracks. Some even moved the engines around in the yard and roundhouse. But none had taken a locomotive on a main-line run, says railroad historian William Kalt.
That all changed when Sayre moved into his job as fireman. More than a decade later, in 1954, he became an engineer for SP, making the runs to Lordsburg, N.M. He retired in 1980 and died in 1992.
On Tuesday, Sayre will be honored for his time on the railroad as part of the 127th-anniversary celebration of the railroad’s coming to town.
“That job meant everything to him. It gave him a sense of his life, an assurance that he could provide for his family,” says Auslander, who is vice president and senior associate to the president of the University of Arizona.
To find out why security was so important to Sayre, you need only to look at his early life.
Born in Patagonia in 1914, he lost his mother when he was 5, and he and his father moved to Tucson.
“He had no grounding. He had no idea where his next meal was coming from,” Auslander says.
As a teenager, young Sayre carried the clubs at Randolph Golf Course and worked for Andrew Martin at Martin’s Drug, on the southeast corner of Congress Street and Church Avenue.
The job had its perks. While working as a soda jerk at the drugstore, he once waited on movie star Betty Grable and her one-time beau, band leader Artie Shaw.
Later on, as a married man with two children, Sayre worked for Baum and Adamson Tire Company.
But with the war bearing down and the likelihood of tire rationing, Sayre decided to apply for a job as a fireman with SP.
“He wanted to get on the train. That’s where the future was,” Auslander says.
Rebuffed, Sayre turned to his old boss, Andrew Martin, for help.
Martin’s great-nephew, Marty Ronstadt, was working at the drugstore at the time, unloading liquor onto the store’s second floor, near Martin’s office.
“I was taking booze into this little case with chicken wire. I couldn’t help but overhear,” says Ronstadt.
What he heard was Sayre asking Martin to help him get on the railroad. “My uncle was half-Irish, half-Hispanic. Through the American Legion, he helped Bill Sayre,” Ronstadt says.
Getting the job was one thing. Gaining acceptance of his peers was another — peers who left Sayre with bruises.
“Friends would walk him home from work,” says Auslander. “I asked my mom what happened to Dad. She said people did not want him there.
“He told us, ‘When they don’t want you there, you stick.’ It served me well. His kids translated it to their lives.”
Steady and well-paying though the job may have been, it was also dangerous.
Working at the end of the steam locomotive era, Sayre was tending the fire when a flame shot back at him.
“It exploded in his face and took his eyebrows, but they grew back,” says Auslander.
By the time Sayre retired in 1980, the locomotive had gone from steam to diesel.
Not that it probably mattered much to Sayre. After all, he was still on that train from Tucson — the first Mexican-American to climb aboard.