(The following column by Byron Crawford appeared on the Louisville Courier-Journal website on December 24.)
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Many Christmases before the screen adaptation of Chris Van Allsburg’s seasonal classic “The Polar Express,” Esther Jo Long lived her own small version of the magical children’s story as a 5-year-old.
During the late 1930s and early ’40s, she and her parents, James and Mabel Morris, her three sisters and one brother lived in a large old farmhouse beside the L&N Railroad tracks on the northern outskirts of Shelbyville. Her father was a tobacco farmer.
“I was the baby of the family,” she said. “We weren’t what I would consider poor, but I didn’t know at the time that we were kind of strapped for money.”
One day while her mother was hanging clothes on the line in the backyard and Esther Jo was playing nearby, an engineer waved to her as the big steam locomotive rumbled past, and Esther Jo waved back.
Soon, she was waving to other engineers and to conductors on the freights and passenger trains that passed every day.
“As things continued, they started throwing me off small items — a bag of candy, chewing gum, comic books or toys, nearly once a week,” she said. “Even when I wasn’t at home, we would sometimes come back home and there would be a little bundle of something out on the bank that they had thrown to me while I was away. To a small child it was just fantastic.”
Once when the train was stopped at the crossing nearby, an engineer with a long gray beard helped her into the engine and let her sit at the controls of the locomotive and wave to her mother. The engineer was J.J. Allen, who lived in Winchester, Ky.
C.L. Love of Danville, 88, who served more than 40 years as a conductor for the Norfolk Southern Railway, recalls that he and other trainmen often pitched treats and small gifts to children who waved to them along the Southern tracks. Grown-ups who lived near the railroad often looked forward to newspapers that the trainmen pitched from windows of the passing trains.
“We’d take stuff from home sometimes” to throw off, Love said.
The bookmark moment of Esther Jo’s friendship with the trainmen came on a snowy Christmas morning when she was about 5. She was upset that the snow was so deep that she could not go out in the yard to wave. But when she heard the train coming, her mother raised the window on the side of the house next to the tracks, and Esther Jo leaned out to wave through the snowflakes.
“We noticed that the train was slowing down and slowing down — and when it got right to our side yard, the conductor stepped down on the very last step and dropped this big box for me. Of course I just nearly had a fit when I saw him do that,” she remembered.
“My dad went out and waded through the snow and brought it in for me. It was a big doll with a long, white dress and a bonnet on — I would say it was probably 24 to 30 inches long — just a beautiful doll. The note said, ‘From your railroad friends.’ Of course I just cherished that doll.”
A few years later the doll and nearly all of the family’s other possessions were lost when their home beside the tracks was destroyed by fire. But Esther Jo Long’s vivid memories of that distant, snowy Christmas morning — and the kindness of the trainmen to a little girl who stood in the yard and waved — have never dimmed.
“It’s just something that has stuck with me all my life,” she reflected. “To this day, I just absolutely love trains … and if I have a chance I will still wave to a trainman wherever I am.”
(Byron Crawford’s column appears on Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays.)