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He rode the steam trains Now that my parents and grandparents are gone, my 83-year-old Aunt Rae is a gold mine of family stories. Grampa had a stroke before I came along, hobbling from bed to chair with a cane. He couldn’t talk, so I never heard his story from him directly. Not long ago, Aunt Tae told me this one: Grampa was only 12 years old when he immigrated to America from Ungwar, Slovakia, alone, without parents or siblings. An aunt and uncle took him in when he wasn’t on the road. It seems that in the days of steam trains, the railroads used young boys to crawl into the engine boilers and fire boxes to clean them, much as they used boys as chimney sweeps in Victorian England. It was hard, dirty work for pennies an hour, but the job had one benefit – the boys got free rail passes, same as adult employees. Grampa bummed from state to state and saw much of America by the time he was through his teens and ready to settle down when he met Gramma. They married 90 years ago and had 10 kids. Linda Jenson |
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