(The following story by Richard Wronski appeared on the Chicago Tribune website on May 7.)
CHICAGO — Eugene Bowser recalls the time department store heir and publisher Marshall Field III gave him a $2 tip. For a railroad club car attendant making about $18 a month in salary around 1950, it was quite a bonus.
Bowser never made a lot of money, but at 93, he’s active and alert, one of a select brotherhood who forged a special chapter in American history.
On Saturday, Bowser will join five other surviving porters who will be feted by Amtrak during a special National Train Day celebration at Chicago’s Union Station.
Bowser and the others were among the thousands of black men who were proud members of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, working the Pullman cars during the nation’s great era of passenger railroads in the early to mid-20th Century.
The brotherhood, led by A. Philip Randolph, became the first African-American-led labor union to reach a collective bargaining agreement with a major American corporation.
Union membership conferred an elite status upon the porters at a time of widespread discrimination, and Randolph used the union’s power to seek important social advancement for blacks.
“I met him many times,” Bower recalled. “He was a very good man. . . . We had a hard time. He tried to make it easier for us.”
The Saturday event will give the public and current Amtrak employees an opportunity to recognize the legacy of dedication and service that the porters provided, said Amtrak spokeswoman Darlene Abubakar.
“The porters are a part of our history that often goes underreported,” Abubakar said. “These men are aging, and we want to celebrate their courageous journey, victorious struggle for equality, and contributions to passenger rail travel.”
Bowser is thought to be one of only two surviving members living in Chicago, and the only one who will attend Chicago’s National Train Day. He lives in a South Side apartment with his wife, Agnes.
Born in Memphis, Bowser began working for the Pullman Palace Car Co. in 1940, only three years after the brotherhood was recognized as the official union of Pullman porters.
Blacks had worked the passenger rails since after the Civil War. By the 1920s, more than 20,000 African-Americans were working as Pullman porters and train personnel, the largest category of black labor in the U.S., according to Chicagoan Lyn Hughes, author of “An Anthology of Respect: The Pullman Porters National Historic Registry.”
Hughes also is the founder of the A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum in the Pullman neighborhood on the Far South Side.
For most of the early 1900s, the porters had tried to organize for better wages and working conditions. It took Randolph 12 years to win recognition for the Brotherhood.
Even then, the hours were long and the menial labor needed to help passengers was unrelenting. At one time, porters were required to work 400 hours a month or travel 11,000 miles, whichever came first, to receive full pay.
“We spent more time on the train than we did at home,” said Bowser, who worked on the 20th Century Limited, the famed New York Central express operating between Chicago and New York City.
“I’d be lucky if I got three hours’ rest,” Bowser said. “Sometimes we’d go to New York with no rest and then return with no rest.”
Porters and other Pullman workers relied on tips, rather than their meager salary, to earn a living. In Bowser’s view, club car attendants on “crack” trains like himself were a step up from the sleeping car porters.
“All the big shots rode Pullman first-class,” Bowser recalled with pride.
It was common for the porters to run afoul of the white conductors, who ruled the trains, Bowser said. “Some were nice, some were mean, just to be mean,” he said.
Bowser was so well-regarded he managed to secure jobs as porters for two of his brothers. “I never got wrote up. Never got suspended. Perfect record.”
Leaving the railroad after 25 years in 1965, Bowser became a Cook County corrections officer.
The growth of the airlines and the consolidation of the passenger rail industry spelled the end of the Pullman era in the 1960s. The 20th Century Limited made its last run on Dec. 2, 1967.
But through her museum and book, Hughes has attempted to keep the legacy of the Pullman porters alive.
Randolph and porters were instrumental in the early days of the civil rights movement, Hughes said. They helped organize the 1963 march on Washington and collected money that financed the Montgomery bus boycott.
“Most people don’t know how important they were,” Hughes said. “We’re standing on the shoulders of these men.”