Oral History Program Jack Steele Interviewed by Quin Beckstead 19 August 1971 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Jack Steele Interviewed by Quin Beckstead 19 August 1971 Copyright © 2014 by Weber State University, Stewart Library ii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. Archival copies are placed in University Archives. The Stewart Library also houses the original recording so researchers can gain a sense of the interviewee's voice and intonations. Project Description The Weber State College/University Student Projects have been created by students working with several different professors on the Weber State campus. The topics are varied and based on the student's interest or task for a specific assignment. These oral history assignments were created to help Weber State students learn the value and importance of recording public history and to benefit the expansion of the Weber State oral history collections. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the Stewart Library of Weber State University. No part of the manuscript may be published without the written permission of the University Librarian. Requests for permission to publish should be addressed to the Administration Office, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, 84408. The request should include identification of the specific item and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Steele, Jack, an oral history by Quin Beckstead, 19 August 1971, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Jack Steele. The interview was conducted on August 19, 1971, by Quin Beckstead, in the interviewee’s office at Weber State College. Mr. Steele discusses his memories and experiences regarding his career in railroading, as well as his opinion on the decline of the railroad in Utah. QB: This is an interview with Jack Steele, by Quin Beckstead on August the 19, 1971 at 9:00 am, in Mr. Steele's office at Weber State College. This interview is for the California State Oral History Program. Mr. Steele would you like to tell us a little bit about your background, your early childhood. JS: Well one of the first things I can remember Quin is that while living here in Utah because of the winters that we had it seemed like I was always sick. I had croup and whooping cough and managed to squeeze in small pox, diphtheria and scarlet fever. Then when I was about four the doctor decided that another winter here might be my last so my family and I moved to California and we stayed there for about fifteen years and in 1939 we moved back to Utah. My mother had an operation for cancer, which incidentally later caused her death four to five years later. I went to Central Junior High School and went to Ogden High School for two years. Graduated in June of '42 then went to Weber College for a quarter or two and then when my mother passed away that year, I left college and went to work at the railroad. Then in 1961 I came back to school and graduated from Weber State College in 1965 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English language and literature. I guess that about sums up things of my childhood other than any incidents or particulars that you'd like to discuss. 1 QB: Some of your likes and dislikes, Jack. Some of your hobbies. JS: Well I don't have too many hobbies now Quin, but one thing that I really enjoy doing is listening to symphonic music of which I know very little, can't read a word of music myself. But I enjoy a great deal listening to it. I can recall the first day that I heard, that is really listened intently to any type of a classical offering. And that was in my friend Sam Fowler's home. I had gone there realizing that he had a lot of records and hoping that we could hear some popular pieces and when he began to play Rimskykorsikov’s Scherisade or Beethoven’s Fifth or Brahm’s Second I really wondered if I had come to the right spot. But that's a hobby that I enjoy and pursue quite a bit. I suppose my two major hobbies however are reading and eating or at least that's what my wife tells me. QB: Well I know from the experience of knowing you several years Jack you're a very avid reader and looking around here in the office I see a great number of books here. I can well imagine you've absorbed quite a bit of material in them. JS: I smile sometimes when a student comes into the office and looks at the books not realizing of course that I have read only a part of them. And then as the student sits down and says, "Professor Steele, have you read every one of these books?" Course I haven't read them all, but I have read parts of most of them. QB: I see. Talking about the railroad now Jack, would you like to give a little background there? When did you hire out and what were some of the circumstances involved when you hired out, so on and so forth? JS: I don't know the reason for my having gone down to the railroad, I don't recall who suggested that this would be a good job. But I know that on June 2, 1942, I and a friend 2 of mine and I guess several hundred others who had just graduated from high school went down to apply for work there. We stood in a long line and a very humorous incident happened to me when I was up to the window to hand in my application, being seventeen years of age I had to have a work permit from the school even though I had graduated. I had procured the work permit but it was dated incorrectly so the clerk who was handling my application very cordially said that she would be happy to call the school board to see if it could be changed there. So it couldn't be so I had to leave my spot in the line and run up to the school board which was about three or four blocks away. I walked in and the man who was in charge there took a pencil and changed the date from June 1st to June 2nd which was the date that I was hiring out, and I ran all the way back and during that time four or five men got ahead of me on the seniority roster. And you probably recall Ellis Fulmer. And I think no one bumped me any oftener than Ellis Fulmer did and originally I was ahead of him in the application line. QB: I bet that hurt didn't it? JS: It really did. Not so much at the time as it did later. I remember one time when we were working over on the crane gang when cars in gondolas or coal cars or flat cars came in with steel or any type of lumber that had to have a load adjusted because of the shifting of the load, we had to take it over on the crane and have the crane pull the sheets of steel or the lumber back into position. Four or five of us were standing up on the side of a gondola car, the man who was handling the crane had a sheet of iron, I guess weighing several tons, poised in the air ready to have the crane move and set the sheet down again. And very unfortunately one of the hooks on the crane broke, and that sheet came down and four or five of us who were on the edge of the car jumped off and 3 jumped out of the car and got back down onto the ground then. One of the fellows wasn’t quite so fortunate, and that sheet came by and just sheared his knee cap right off. And I think of this as being not a particularly dangerous job when you think of it normally, but I know of many incidents where men had their legs broken or had their toes cut off or their fingers cut off or had fingers broken during this period of time that I worked there. QB: Now you hired out as a clerk at the railroad, didn't you? JS: No, I hired out as a freight handler. I became a clerk a few months afterward. But my original assignment was to work on the freight dock. QB: You hired out at the OUR&D? JS: Right. QB: Specifically, what is the OUR&D? JS: Well it’s a company that no longer is in existence except for, oh, I guess, maybe thirty, forty, fifty employees, maybe not even that many. It is originally the Ogden Union Railway and Depot Company which was run jointly by the UP&S people, then about three years ago in March. I guess about three years ago the split was made so that the employees from both companies went either with the UP or SP and that only those that handled the yard forces themselves actually belonged to the OUR&D Company. QB: Jack, maybe you'd talk about the various positions that you held down there and also some of the details of that the job consists of. JS: Well the first position I had was the freight handler. And that in those days, almost thirty years ago, all of the freight was handled on a non-mechanized basis. Individual hand 4 trucks were loaded by men inside the box cars. And then those hand trucks were pulled out of the box cars along a ramp and over to the car that the freight was being transferred into. And in order to be able not to mix that particular hand truck load of freight up with others, there was a ticket that went with the truck so that this merchandise could be loaded into the proper car again. And then, as you would deposit one truck load of freight, you'd get another truck someplace and go back and have it loaded again and take it to another car. Not long after that I had a job on what is called the transfer gang, transferring loads of material, but the car had been damaged in some way and transferred the commodities into another car. I can recall one time when I went to work on the day before Christmas at six thirty in the morning and we worked up to about eight o'clock that night and we had to transfer a car load of coal from one coal car into another, simply by shoveling it out of one car into another. And I, on many occasions, have shoveled coal to fill the furnace or shoveled coal to get it out of a particular area. But that was one of the first times that I had to with some of my other workers, transfer a whole carload of several tons of coal from one car to another. QB: About how many were there transferring? JS: There were about five of us there. Ben Hensler was there and Bob Hensler, his brother, and Chris Cap was there, George Udink who is now dead, these others are still all alive. But George Udink who is now dead used to transfer for me. I think Ernie Taylor was there, too. There were about five of us. QB: How long did it take you to transfer it? JS: Well I don't know how many hours they had been working on it until I came, but Les Smith and I who were doing something else, came about eight o'clock and I can 5 remember that we punched out at three o'clock that morning so we worked from six thirty one morning past six thirty in the afternoon, past midnight and on to three o’clock in the morning and that was Christmas Day, three o'clock in the morning Christmas day. QB: It took that long until you got all that car transferred? JS: That’s right. QB: Imagine it was quite difficult when you got down into the car a ways and had to throw it way over the side. JS: Tremendously difficult for me, when I think of those other fellows, all of whom were grown men. All of whom were rather well built, I'm sure you remember some of them, how big Bob Hensler was, how husky he was, even though Chris Cap wasn't a tall man he was very thick in his chest. And I having just graduated from high school not very many months before, and being small at the time and was just seventeen, I think I weighed about a hundred and twenty pounds. So it was a sweaty job for me, Quin, I’ll tell you that. QB: Well working over there on the platform, you were dealing with less thin carload freight weren't you? JS: That's correct. These cars that we were transferring were carload freight cars. But when we worked on the freight platform these were LCL. QB: Well, what are some of the other positions you've had, Jack? JS: Well then after a while I worked as a check clerk. This was a man who was the boss of the crew that handled the freight and you had in your crew one person who designated the caller. It was his job to look at the package that was being transferred from one car 6 to another and to tell the name of the person to whom this commodity was going and the city that he lived in. And then all going to the same city, or in the same general area were put on the same hand truck to go into a certain car. And then, in addition to the caller, we had either two or three men in your gang called truckers, and these were the men that actually took the freight on the trucks from one car to the next. And then those men, and these were not members of your gang because they were under the direction of a chief stow boss. There were men called stowers and they worked in groups of two. And after the freight had been put on the truck and taken by the trucker to another car, then it was the job of the stowers to take that freight and pile it up into the other car. And I worked as a stower for some time and a caller before I became a check clerk. Then after a few months there a job opened up in the freight office. And I worked as a 922 clerk, typing out information from weigh bills. Weigh bill information, car number and initial and where the car had come from and where the commodities were going to. It was just a skeletal form that was sent to the district offices in order to be able to keep track of the freight itself as it was going across the country. QB: Jack, I figured I was one of the fastest typists down at the railroad, but I think you could type even faster than myself. There was yourself and a friend, Frank deleted . He could really type, couldn’t he? JS: You remember Frank only used two and a half fingers on each hand, didn’t he? QB: I believe so. He used a very unorthodox method but he could really type, couldn’t he? JS: Oh, he surely could. I can recall how frequently when you and I were typing, some of the other clerks would come over and just stand and watch… 7 QB: Yes, yes. JS: I can recall too, how frequently they used to come and look over our shoulders while we were typing to see how fast we could type and I remember sometimes we made bets concerning how fast we could get rid of a particular train by retyping it out. QB: Right, I remember the chief clerk down there, Tom O’Dell… JS: He’s dead now, did you know that? QB: Yes. On these 922 forms you were referring to, as you recall, we had stacks of weigh bills that we had to type from and transfer the information on these form 922’s and we’d divide them up, several of us clerks down there and I’d get through and of course the chief clerk didn’t like this because he figured that I should still keep on typing. And so after that I slowed down a little bit, Jack, so we’d come out even. JS: Something else that I remember Quin, is after we had typed out the 922 forms we had to mail them out. You recall that you had to sit up there at the desk with a rubber thumb and tear them down and then after you got through you had to stamp them with a numbering stamp. QB: Right! JS: And I can remember we got so fast at that, that we could with that numbering stamp and just go pounds on table just so fast that it was a steady noise. QB: That’s right. JS: On Saturday's when we were working a six day week, after we were through with our work, that specific assignment for that day, we could leave. It wasn’t that we were doing something we shouldn’t, it was just the policy of the railroad, having once completed 8 your work, you could leave. And I know I'd watch and go just at a moderate rate of speed until the boss stepped out the door. Boy, when the boss stepped out the door then I'd go just as fast as I could. Fifteen minutes later I'd follow him right out. QB: I know, I guess the railroad is the most unusual place to work there is. I’m thinking of a time, you remember the time cards we used to have to take out, we’d make one out every day, and then we'd drop it in the box and the time keeper would record it. Well, of course I’m supposed to be the interviewer and you’re the interviewee, but I think I’m going to have to interject a little something in here at this time… JS: Do so. QB: Anyway, there were two fellows working in the freight office. They got in the back room and got the stamp number that stamps the number of the time cards, in other words we all had a number assigned to us, and as you recall every day you had to sign, after the shift was over, after you were finished with your time card, you sign your time card. And so these two fellows got several time cards and stamped them up with the particular number of one of the employees and what they did was punched in and out and in and out on a time card. They took his time card and tore it up and threw it away, put the time card in the box, in the slot. And the next morning the time keeper told this employee, he said “Come on over and sign your time card.” He said, “Oh, I thought I did.” JS: And of course he had, hadn't he? QB: Yes, of course he had! And so he signed it, and the next day the same thing happened, and he swore up and down that he signed that time card. And of course you remember Lloyd Lawrence. 9 JS: Absolutely. QB: He was quite a stern individual, and he said, "Get over here and sign your time card." And the fellow said, "Well, I've signed it!" And he says, “Well you haven't.” And the fellow walked over there and he looked at that time card and he just couldn't figure it out. And then he couldn’t believe that that was true, he looked at the number and the next day the same thing happened. JS: I guess by that time Lloyd was getting a little upset. QB: A little upset. He took the time card up to the chief clerk and he said, “Well, you get this guy to sign his time card, tell him how he should sign it.” So it was Tom O'Dell who was the chief clerk at the time, so he told this— I can’t remember which employee it was— but anyway, he told this particular individual that he’s got to sign his time card. So that very day, and these two fellows that were pulling this gag… JS: You and who else, Quin? QB: No, it wasn’t me. JS: Oh, come on! QB: They anticipated this so when he came the next morning he recorded his time, you know, he punched in. So he got four individuals all together so when he’d come to punch-in in the morning somebody would stand right in back of him and punch a card in, a blank card so it would be exactly the same time. Then at noon when he punched out for lunch they’d have another individual come right in back of him and punch out with the same time and… JS: Those rotten rascals! 10 QB: So that he recorded the time down and then the next day the same thing happened. He looked at the time and the time on the time card was exactly the same… JS: Then what did he do? QB: Well after about a week the poor guy just couldn't figure out what was wrong. And so after this time the fellows thought they'd better drop it or they'd overdone a good thing. Well about, let’s see, about two or three months later they got up the courage to tell him what had happened. Course after that length of time he took it as a joke but he says one of these times I'm going to pull something on you. And as you well know, down at the railroad, employees stuck to business in many cases but, then there's a lot of times when there's a lot of horseplay going on down there. Well I look back right now myself there's a lot of humorous things that happened when I was there besides the incident I just talked to you about. JS: You know I think another incident, Quin, that was really comical maybe you remember Bill Nicholas? QB: Yes. JS: He used to have a chem lab in his basement. And often he and I would go up there at the time that I was going to college and mix up different types of concoctions. Then we hit upon something, I think that he read something about it in a book on chemistry that he had, that was a fulminate compound which in the liquid state was not explosive, but if this liquid were put on a sheet of paper or on a radiator or someplace where it would dry, then as soon as it dried to a certain consistency it would go off with a bang. Just like the snap of a finger, but a little bit louder. Just like a cap gun. And so one morning 11 he and I came in and painted all the papers, almost all the weigh bills, all of the freight bills, put some on the radiators, and all that day and all the next day, almost every time somebody picked up a paper, bang like this, bang like that. And I can remember that Tom came down and says "Jack do you know anything about what's going on?" And I said “Well Mr. Lydell, all I can tell you is that it seems that somebody is playing some kind of a trick on us and I don’t know who it is.” I didn’t say no, that I didn’t know what was going on. I just said somebody is playing a trick on us. And every time that mixture exploded it was all that Bill and I could do to keep from laughing. And Lydell probably knew that I was one of the culprits involved. Another time we came down early, we had mixed up some hydrogen sulfide gas, that rotten egg gas... QB: Yes. JS: And we put it in some plastic containers and we put those plastic containers up in the light receptacles so that as the heat from the light would melt the plastic container then the hydrogen sulfide would leak out. About ten o'clock in the morning one of us looked around at the other one and began to sniff the air and sniff the air and I think it was two or three days before all of the hydrogen sulfide gas evaporated to the point that we couldn't smell it any more. I believe I was asked about that too, but tried to remain noncommittal. QB: Well you remember Dave Balantine that used to work down there. JS: Absolutely, he's down in Provo right now, did you know that? Probably going to live down there. 12 QB: Well he was inclined to play quite a few jokes down there. One day at noon, he took some Limburger Cheese— remember Ruth Blakesly? JS: Absolutely. QB: She was Tom Lydell, the chief clerk’s stenographer. And he took some of this cheese and rubbed a thin coating on her type writer keys. Of course after lunch we're sitting back there and doing our work Ruth sat down to the type writer and began to type. And of course as she got her hand up by her nose she immediately could smell there was something wrong. JS: I guess she could! QB: And of course the expression of her face immediately went to the rest room to wash her hands off, but it was some time before the smell of limburger cheese got off the typewriter keys. So I had assumed that there were more jokes played down at the railroad than probably any other industry that was around the Ogden area. JS: I think so. One day when I was on the freight platform I can recall that a friend of mine and I were stowing some freight and we had picked up a large wooden crate that was relatively heavy, we wanted to throw it up into the corner of the car, then put some bands around it to hold it in. And as we did so his glove caught on the corner of the box and it projected a sliver of wood down into his hand. Well we thought it could easily be removed so we went into the office and Mr. CIinky who was the foreman of the freight platform, took a pair of pliers because it was a pretty good size sliver, and pulled the sliver out and then he took his knife and kinda probed around in there as Clinky used to do and see that everything was okay, and my friend doubled his hand up and seemed 13 alright. So the rest of that day because his hand was quite painful, all the rest of that day he stamped time cards, and tabulated them and put them in proper date sequence. Went home that night and when he got up the next morning his hand was all swollen, about two or three times the size and the sliver had gone down through the muscle in the thumb and gone clear down past his wrist. And the part that CIinky had pulled out was simply a part of the sliver, maybe only a third or a half of the entire sliver. So we had to take him up to the hospital and he had to have an operation on his hand and have the hand cut open and the rest of that wooden sliver removed. I also recall one time, just after I had become a check clerk, when the bridges between the freight car and the freight platform were put in so that you could run a truck from the platform across the rails and into the car, you had to put a large bolt in each side of the bridge to hold it from going either up on the freight platform or back down into the car to hold it steady. So one of the men that were working for me grabbed a hold of a truck and pulled it out and— at least tried to pull it out— and had some difficulty doing this. The truck was loaded with large cedar poles and it was heavy enough that this young man wasn't able to pull the truck out. So I got somewhat incensed because he couldn't do this, and I said, “Here, let me do that for you.” So I pulled the truck out and the bolts in the bridge slipped and the truck went down toward the ditch and all of these poles fell against my arm and jammed my hand right against the boxcar door. And when I got my hand back it was bleeding, and luckily none of the bones were broken, but it was all lacerated. Two or three of my fingers had been smashed and the blood had begun to collect under the fingernail. So I went into Clinky’s office and he said, “Oh, we can take care of that, Steele,” he said, “there’s no trouble there.” So he took out this little trusty 14 pocket knife that he had and said, “Well, the first thing we’d do is to bore a hole right in the top of the fingernail.” Well, that wasn’t too bad. He took the knife and twisted it around two or three times and bored the hold in the top of the fingernail. Then he said “To be sure that we let the blood, we just jam the knife down underneath the fingernail this way, and wiggle it around.” So after that I was glad that I had only two of those that had been smashed instead of all three. I remember, too, another time that one of my friends and I were in a boxcar that we had just emptied of old oil barrels. And it was an oil barrel car because the inside of the car was all splintered and greasy and it could be used for only that type of lading. And this friend that I worked with said, “Steele, for a long time I’ve been wanting to wrestle you. So why don’t we wrestle in this car now that it’s all empty?” So we took off our shirts and wrestled in that car. This was Dick Morrison, who you may remember, and we wrestled in that car for about fifteen minutes and I guess you’d call it a draw, but when both of us were finished we were just grease from end to the other and all of the splinters were all over our backs and our shoulders and our stomachs. We were really a mess. We had to go into Clinky’s office and get the plyers to pull some of these splinters out. Now these were not big ones, these were just small ones. I recall that incident very well. QB: What did Joe say about that? JS: Oh, he just laughed. I guess he knew he had a bunch of playboys working for him. This was something that, I guess was just a part of the daily life of the freight platform foreman. You know, I remember one too, this is when I had first gone down to work there. My mother said to me as I left the first day, she says, “Now, really be careful Jack where you go to the bathroom because you never know what disease these men down 15 there might have.” And she says, “Be sure that when you go to the bathroom that you wipe the toilet seat off and be very careful.” So about the second of the third day that I was down there I hadn’t in the meantime gone to the bathroom while I was there, but the second or third day I had to go. And I thought, “Well, if I play my cards right I’ll be able to make four or five trips going to the car and getting a truckload of freight and then coming back and dropping it off.” And usually after you’d made four or five trips it was permissible for you to sit down and rest someplace. So, I thought during that time “I’ll take ten minutes and run home.” Because I lived about six or seven blocks from the freight platform, go to the bathroom and then run back. But I cut the time too short, and when I was halfway home I just couldn’t hold it any longer. SO, I went home with a very sad story and then came back and my chief, my check clerk, wondered where I had been and of course I told him I was taking a break. Maybe I took one a little longer than I should have done, but I didn’t tell him what had happened. QB: Oh for heaven sakes! Well now you worked on a freight platform for quite a while as a freight handler and you’ve held other positions since then. Would you like to say something about those other positions? JS: I can remember that I was looking at the sheet that they call the bid bulletin that tells all the jobs that are vacant throughout the yard. Those on the freight platform, those on the freight office, the clerical work, those at the yard office, those at the superintendent’s office. And I believe that as a clerk in the freight office I was earning about five or six dollars a day. And I noticed this job that a bulletin down at the yard office for eight dollars and twenty-seven cents a day. I thought, “Oh boy, that’s marvelous!” The fact that I didn’t have any experience on the job or didn’t know anything about it didn’t deter 16 me from bidding on the job, realizing that not only was the pay good but I could probably work overtime almost any time I wanted to. So that would increase my salary not just by a dollar or two a day, but by ten or fifteen or twenty dollars, over an entire week’s period of time. So I bid on the job and went over there and worked as a manifest clerk before I ever worked out in the yard. And I had a heck of a time telling what end of the rail they were checking the cars on and I didn’t know the 28th street end from the 21st street end, I didn’t know UP3 from Ice House 9, I didn’t know anything about the yard. But, after a while I got onto the job and I was very thankful at that time that I could type as fast as I could because it hadn’t have been for that I probably would have been fired from the job. I can recall one time, too, Glen Hodson, who was the chief clerk at the yard office, came out one time and talked to me about a delay that I had made up. You may remember how they used to have what were called delay sheets. You’d put down the arrival time of the train in the yard, you’d put how long it took them to switch the train, how long it took them to inspect the train, if it were a refer train how long it took them to ice the train, and then how long it took for the train to come into the yard and leave the yard. And usually for an RV— a fruit train, this was maybe, oh what, two, two and a half hours. So I had made up a delay, indicating that the train was delayed for weigh bills about fifteen minutes. SO Hobson charged out of his office and he said, “Steele, why did you make this delay up this way?” He says, “Couldn’t you have rearranged these times a little bit so that it wouldn’t look as though there were a delay on weigh bills?” I said, “I suppose I could have done, but in order to do that I would have to lie about it.” And he put his hands on his hips and he said, “Well, Steele, don’t you understand that to be able to handle this job you’ve got to be able to lie a little bit?” 17 QB: That was Glen Hodson, all right. Now since you’ve been there, Jack, there’s been a lot of change at the railroad that’s affected the employment, hasn’t there? JS: Absolutely. QB: Can you reminisce a bit and recall some of these major changes that have taken place that have affected the railroad employment adversely? JS: I think probably the greatest change was the mechanization of the yard forces. Previously everything was done by hand, or almost by hand. Probably the only thing that we used that helped us to facilitate the work was the typewriter. I can't think of anything else that had really changed appreciable. Probably from about 1900 to maybe 1950. But then when IT procedures began to be used there, then instead of using essentially the weigh bill, the identification of a car on a big piece of paper folded lengthwise, then they began to use a card, a punched IBM card system. And from that time on, even though initially that caused an increase in the number of jobs, after a while this appreciably reduced the number of jobs there at the railroad. And over a period of time through this the number of jobs had decreased. And where men working on the road as conductors and engineers and brakemen, whereas those men have continued to have an increase in their wages, even though their work rules have remained essentially the same, the clerical forces had a reduction in the number of people working and also have had less an increase in their wages over a period of the last twenty years or so. Then all type of procedures through this have been streamlined. I'm sure you recall when a train came into town we had to take what is called a wheel report, and a man would go out and check the cars on the train from the caboose, and you always checked the train from the rear end to the head end, checked the cars from 18 the caboose up to the engine, turn the numbers and initials, the light weight of the car which is the weight of the car without any contents in, and check the seal numbers. These are the seals they use to secure the cars the doors after they have been locked to be sure that no one gets in and disturbs the lading inside the car. This all has been streamlined to the point that now the check clerk to begin with, the man who checks the cars, checks only the initial and the number. And he checks them instead of walking the rails as he used to do, he checks them by having the train pull by him coming into the yard, and as he does this the train goes by and he just notes the initial and the number from an advanced consist. So sometimes he doesn't even have to write anything other than just a check mark by each car as it rolls by him. Each boxcar or each gondola car. And then, formerly, when he used to phone all of the numbers and initials in, now he simply phones in and says everything is as it was planned to be on the inbound consist, on the advanced consist. And so it’s much easier to be able to handle the trains this way. The manifest clerk, he who did the clerical work inside by taking the weigh bills and lining them up in train order and then having to type out a wheeler, actually manually type it out, using the initial and the number and the contents of the car and the light weight whether it was a load or an empty box or a gondola or a refer. Now all he does is line up the cars ahead of time from the IBM cards and let a listing machine run his wheeler. Takes maybe at most a minute, where formerly even a good typist took fifteen or twenty minutes to type out a wheeler. So he lines the cars up, a listing machine does it in about a minute or a minute and a half, makes a perfect job of it from the cards, and the train is already to go. So they have streamlined the procedures through the use of the IBM card. Another thing that has facilitated the work is that, 19 formerly every car that came into the Ogden yard was in some way put down on a switch list. And from those switch lists which were just listings of cars, initials and numbers, from these switch lists men used to put the car numbers and initials into a big book called the jumbo, why? Because it was such a tremendous book. About four or five inches thick. And about ten inches wide and maybe about fifteen inches long. You recall the big jumbo books? QB: Yes. JS: This used to take four men eight hours all the way around the clock. So it would take twelve men for an eight hour shift during the twenty four hour period. To put all of these cars in jumbo. Then when you wanted to know whether a car had come into the yard or whether it had gone out of the yard or whether it had come through the yard during the last week, or month or year or two years, you looked this up in what is called the jumbo record. Now these are all put into a master computer in Omaha. And all that is necessary now is that you put an identification card into an IBM receiving machine and two or three seconds after that card has gone through. You get a full listing of where this car has been and where it is going. The only disadvantage here is that you get simply the current record. You don't get the old record, sometimes you may want this, but you get the current record in just about another few seconds. QB: And that certainly cut down on employment. How about the operating end of it, say for example the size of the train that comes in now as compared with years ago? The blocking of the train such as you used to do and some of these other things that really affected employment? 20 JS: One thing that has helped a great deal, that has helped the movement of the cars hut has reduced employment, especially in Ogden, is that in ether stations the cars have been blocked, which means simply that all of the cars going a particular way are put together in the train. So if a train comes in here from the 5P, from the west, that has commodities of lettuce and oranges, and all types of perishable fruit and vegetables, several years ago this train was made up in such a way that all the cars going north out of Ogden to Pocatello, to Downey, to Seattle, all these were spread throughout the train. In other words they were put into the train as they were switched, instead of blocked in a separate area and then all of these blocks united being put together, those cars that were going by way of the D&RG were sprinkled throughout the trains those going south were sprinkled throughout the train, now as I indicated, other yards I lock then. All the D&RG cars are put together in one part of the train all the south together in one part of the train, all the north together in one part of the train. All the east together in one part of the train. In fact they are now even blocking them so that all of those that go off of the UP at a particular spot, say Council Bluff, or Grand Island, or Kansas City, are put together in one part of the train. So this means that as the train comes into Ogden it doesn't have to be switched in an individual car by car basis. So on an operation, to an operational extent, all of the cars instead of being switched individually, now can be switched in blocks. So a switch engine can pull up against it, switch the blocks out, pick up ten fifteen thirty cars at a time and put them in the rails. In a matter of five to ten minutes have the entire train switched, where before it might have taken them an hour to do that. QB: So this has actually cut off a lot of help, hasn’t it? 21 JS: It certainly has, not only as the clerical help, but also the help out in the yard. The switchman’s help. QB: Some of the other interviews I’ve had, they’ve talked just a little bit about the difference in the tonage. Nowadays in comparison with several years ago, length of train and so on and so forth. JS: Used to be that very few of the trains that left here going east had more than sixty cars in them. Now some of them have maybe a hundred, maybe a hundred and twenty cars. Also because the cars have become larger, they have been able to put into a car many more tons of material than formerly was the case. The average car, in fact then you were trying to compute, or estimate the weight of a particular freight train, you used to multiply just as a rule of thumb, multiply to number of loads by fifty, because fifty tons was the average tonage in a car. Multiply the number of empties by half that, twenty five, then add the two together then you had the weight of the entire train. Now some of the cars, especially covered hoppers with wheat, covered hoppers of phosphate, sometimes go as high as a hundred and thirty tons per car where formerly one of the heavy cars might have been sixty or seventy tons, so they have doubled the weight. Not in all of the cars, but in some of the cars. So that where you may have had only sixty cars moving out, you now have sometimes double that. Where some of the cars had weight of fifty tons, now you have sometimes double that. So the trains are pulling more cars and many of the cars though not all, have half again or twice as much weight in them as they formerly had. Another thing that has facilitated train movement, in the past when cars coming from the west, and these primarily during the summer time are either cars of lumber from the northwest, or cars of perishables from the areas in the 22 Sacramento Valley. When these have come in, these refrigerator cars, the perishable cars, have come in they used to have to be loaded along an ice dock and then they had to be replenished, the ice in the bunkers had to be replenished and sometimes this took a half an hour, an hour’s time to have the ice come along a conveyor belt and then be moved over into the bunkers. And if it had to be crushed ice then it had to be crushed. If it were block ice had to be just put in as blocks. So now because most of the cars are mechanical refrigerated cars, just as our refrigerator is at home, these need not be replenished with ice simply because they do not use ice. So in the past when a train had to come in and be re-iced, now a train comes through and never or hardly ever has to have anything done in relationship to the mechanical icing or the mechanical refrigeration of the car. QB: Well that's certainly had its effect on employment. Do you recall several years ago they used to hire out several hundred ice men in the summer didn't they, every summer? JS: You bet. You could get a job as an iceman in the summer and work for probably eight to sixteen hours all most every day from about May until maybe the first of October. Now I'm sure that they didn't have a full crew every year, every day, every month during this period of time. But they certainly had a great many men working during that time. QB: And then of course, you say the mechanical icer took over this job. JS: That was the first step, the mechanical icer instead of having the men do it. And the second step was that the cars themselves being mechanical refrigerators required no ice at all. So now instead of using during the summertime maybe a hundred and fifty to two hundred men, I don't recall exactly how many, now probably four or five men do 23 exactly the same thing. Or handle the same number of cars. Certainly don't do the same thing, but handle the same number of cars. QB: The only thing I've seen the last few years Jack is the, that really is a significant change, is the power of the foreign road pulling a train. For example, the UP rails going east, many times you'll see a Southern Pacific, you'll see southern Pacific power on there, a Southern Pacific caboose. And the trains going west, which belongs to the SP with the UP power and UP caboose on there. Just what took place here, maybe you could... JS: Originally, and I suppose a long time ago the freight cars moved only on their own lines so that a Southern car, a car that had stenciled on its side Southern, moved only on the Southern lines. I suppose that didn't last too long because that meant that only freight going from one place on the same railroad to another place on the same railroad could be loaded in a box car belonging to that railroad. So the first step was to allow the cars themselves to go from one railroad interchange to another, so that if you loaded some lumber on a flat car, 6ome lumber poles on a flat car in Oregon, on the SP on an SP flat car, that if you wanted to take those to Georgia you could move clear across the United States and go by way of the SP and the UP and the Kansas City and the Norfolk, Western and the Southern, down into Georgia. Then recently, the next step was to have the engines, the power that pulled the trains stop not just at the end of their road, but continue with that same power from one end of the country to another. Also, you may recall that several years ago each crew that went out, conductor and two or three brakemen, had its own boxcar had its own caboose. Now this is not so. The cabooses all go into a pool, so that not only do the crews not have their own caboose, but a southern pacific caboose may go on two or three railroads if necessary. So that it is not 24 necessary now to have the cabooses stop at the end of their line, even as the power used to stop at the end of their line. So there is not a complete, but an almost complete interchange of both boxcars and refrigerator cars from one line to the next. I'm sure that this alone really helps to facilitate the traffic. QB: So this has cut down on a lot of employment. Now as far as the power and the caboose is concerned they apparently try and keep the same power and the same caboose on from origin to destination, is this right? JS: I don't think they keep it on that much, Quin. What they try to do is have a pool of both power and cabooses that work out of the terminal. If it happens that they either run out of SP cabooses moving west out of Ogden or UP cabooses moving east out of Ogden then they can use CN&W cabooses so they can use Rock Island Cabooses. They try not to get them to far afield. They're not in as big a nationwide pool as the box cars, the refrigerator cars. But they are on a divisional basis. From here maybe to Portland an SP caboose may go. QB: Maybe we'll continue this on the other side then Jack. JS: Okay. Another thing that has made difference, Quin, too, is the use of “piggy backs”. These are containers and trailers that are loaded at Oregon into trucks and then that semi unit is put onto a flat car. Sometimes two in the case of trailers, sometimes four in the case of containers. And then that flat car with the load inside the semi moves throughout the country. And they are brought up to a dock and then those semis are removed and then the cab, the UP cab is put onto the semi-truck and then taken from there to the point of destination, to wherever it has to go. In the city or short haul out of the city. This has helped a great deal to cut down the actual handling of the freight. 25 Previously a box car had to be loaded then that same box car had to be unloaded and put into some type of a conveyance. A truck or a pick-up or something to go from area to another. And how this is simply done by loading it once and then taking that loaded unit off of the flat car and taking it where it needs to go. QB: Did the railroads do this Jack to help compete with the trucking business? JS: I think that's probably one of the reasons Quin, I think, too, that it speeds up the service to the customer. It might take, and there are many other variables involved here, but it may in the past have taken four or five days to get a car load of canned goods from one place to another simply because it had to be loaded and reloaded, sometimes two or three times now they load it once, they're unloaded once and taken right to the warehouse and then unloaded from that container or that trailer. This really speeds up not only the time involved but it costs a lot less money to do this. QB: This has cut down a lot of employment hasn't it? JS: It certainly has. QB: Now in the beginning you talked about your position as a freight handler, which was handling LCL, less than car load freight, and they had many, many employees working over there on the docks which they don't have anymore. What happened? JS: Speaking of many, many employees, when I first started to work there in 1942, I don't remember exactly how many gangs of men, how many crews of men were there but I would suppose it was in the nature of ten or fifteen or twenty maybe. This meant twenty times five so that would be a hundred. And then during the war years, '42, '43, '44, '45, and '46. Many extra men worked in gangs just made up of extra men. So often times 26 during these years maybe another twenty five or thirty men who did not have regular positions would report for work at six thirty or eight thirty in the morning and then from the men that they had make up the crews that work. This was all the use of, this was all to facilitate the transferring of LCL freight. And now since the railroad has determined that they can't make a great deal of money on this, as has been the case with the passenger business, you know which is now Amtracks, they began to discontinue even though they mechanized first a little bit, they began to dis continue the use of the LCL freight. QB: And also the stockyards, that's completely out of the picture, maybe you could say something about the decline of the stock yards because of the lack of use of bringing stock by railcars and such. JS: I'm sure that one of the reasons is that the stock business has declined is the increased use of trucks. Large trucks, large double decker trucks that can handle fifty, sixty maybe even more individual head of cattle or maybe a hundred head of sheep. I think another thing that has caused the decline is that as the freight trains are able to move from one station to another, the stock does not require the attention at teach individual station that formerly was the case. QB: You used to have to load and unload at several points didn't they? JS: That's correct! QB: For watering and feeding. JS: There's a stipulation in the ICC rules that indicates that stock must be tended to in some way sometime during a 36 hour period. This means that if you leave one point and get 27 to another point in twenty four hours and then from that second point if you can't get to the third point where stock can be handled in the remaining twelve hours, then it must be handled at the intermediate point, point two. You can't go over thirty six hours without in some way feeding watering resting the stock, in some way handling the individual head of stock. So as the trains were able to go faster and move from one junction to another faster, then if they could bypass two or three of these intermediate junctions where stock was handled then there was no reason to handle any livestock at these intermediate junctions. So when formerly they may have been able to go from point "A" to point "B" in twenty hours they can now do in ten hours, then they can just bypass the treatment of the stock in that, at that intermediate station. QB: You know in the past, as well as now, there's been a constant complaint by the railroad employee against management saying that all these cut backs in employment were unnecessary, or maybe part of them in that they actually need more people clown there than they really have. But how do you feel about this? JS: I think there are probably two or three ways to view this. First the railroad being under a seniority system, it is assumed that if you're allowed to hire at the railroad that you will continue to have your, you will continue to have a job under the seniority system from the time you hire out until the time you die or retire. This I think has not been properly explained to those who were hiring out. And now under the five year guarantee which expired I believe somewhere in March of 1973, there are men who are working for the railroad who do not have a regular position and hence simply stay home and earn money. Because their job has been guaranteed them. If this were not so, and this is one of the adverse effects of this, if this were not so then it would mean that the conditions 28 under which you hired out precluded having to move from one station to another. But if they were to allow the railroad companies to do this now, they could displace I guess, several hundred thousand workers. As was the case when the Pennsylvania and the NYC merged. Which by the way did not apparently help the nation. It seems to me helped more the executives of the company rather than the nation itself. Because, now you know, the bankruptcy procedures that the Penn. Central has gone through, has had to be helped by a loan from the government. QB: And of course the last little while we've seen passenger train service cut entirely out of the picture in Ogden as well as the other parts of the country. And very often I would hear railroad employees saying that the railroad really didn't want passenger service. If they would really try and do a good job they could really make money on the passenger service and there'd be many, many patrons who'd want to use the railroad. What's your feelings on this? JS: I can remember one time in 1946, when I went down to phoenix, Arizona, and I went out of here on the UP to either San Bernardino or Colton, I guess it was Colton that was the junction. And then from Colton I took the Southern Pacific down to Phoenix. I recall that the UP coach was very well attended, was very clean was very neat, but when I got onto the SP they had used a coach that probably was vintage Teddy Roosevelt, had plush seats and I was really amazed that they didn't have gas lamps on it. They had... QB: It was really that old, huh? JS: Yeah, at least it seemed so at that time. I believe that the railroad has simply taken the path of where the gold was. And that they could make more money through their freight service than they could through their passenger service. And hence didn't really care 29 about updating their coaches. Didn't really care about increasing their passenger business by making it attractive. And then probably gave up when the airlines began to reduce their fares. And maybe these were not deleted but began to reduce their fares so that it was almost as cheap or as inexpensive to go by air as it was by rail. Much nicer, and of course infinitely quicker. QB: When, it would appear to me that the railroad, even though say they perhaps would have tried to do everything in their power to capture the passenger service, the passenger business, it would appear to me that it was a losing battle because of the airplane as you mentioned just a few minutes ago. When you said the price of the airplane fair for example, from here to San Francisco would be comparable with the railroad fare and where it would take a train probably sixteen eighteen hours to get from here to San Francisco, take an airplane about an hour and of course you have sixteen or eighteen hours you have to figure over and above that for your meals, the inconvenience of your time loss. JS: I would suppose however, to Quin, though I don't know of any facts that bear this out, but there were at one time, maybe still are, hundreds of thousands of people who would much rather travel on the ground than travel in the air. But it becomes so time consuming and becomes so inconvenient and becomes almost so undignified simply because of the lack of convenience on the railroad that those who at one time could and would become the bulk of the rail traveling passengers have been lost to the airlines and maybe even to their cars. I know in my own family that most of my family would much rather travel by railroad than even in a passenger car. And much more by railroad than by air. And yet because of the fact that it’s both inconvenient and unenjoyable to 30 travel by railroad we either travel by car or by air. So I think the rails themselves have made the bed of roses with the thorns that they are now lying in. QB: Considering the cost of the upkeep of a passenger car in comparison to a freight car, it would be significantly higher for the passenger car and then the amount of revenue I assume that is received from the passengers wouldn't be nearly as much as from freight. And also the liability would be much, much greater if anything happened to a passenger than it would to a bunch of freight. JS: I'm sure it’s true, Quin, that you simply cannot pack passengers in a car lengthwise and edgewise and one on top of the other as you can freight. QB: This is true. JS: It seems to me however that even on some of the commuter roads, Central of New Jersey and the Erie, and the Pennsylvania have in the east that from certain studies that have been made that these commuter routes, which are essentially passenger routes, could very much more economically be operated than they are and have been operated. It seems that the railroads have had a total disregard for the comfort and the convenience of the passenger trains. QB: Well I heard that on several occasions, especially during winter that some of the equipment, some of the heading units would break down on the cars and they wouldn't make too much of an attempt to fix them in such a manner that would really make the passengers comfortable. JS: It’s probably a very easy thing to say we certainly are sorry because the air conditioning isn't working, or we certainly are sorry because the heating isn't working, but there's 31 absolutely nothing that we can do, when with proper maintenance and upgrading of the cars and putting new rolling stock on, they can in effect do this. Probably no industry in the United States, I guess because of its having grown to be the back bone of the transportation, the national transportation system, I know of no industry who has, which has more reluctantly accepted some of the innovations that have taken place within the last twenty or thirty years concerning computerization, concerning good business practices than have the railroads. They have long been considered by many and I think rightfully so, to be very old fashioned in their business approach. QB: Well also I understand, too, in many occasions that passengers, people that wanted to ride the train would go down and there was a lot of red tape in even getting a seat. JS: That's probably true unless you knew who the ticket agent was, I would suppose. QB: And then maybe you could get a reservation quite readily, huh? JS: I would say. And this is certainly a poor example for me to use myself because I have so infrequently used the railroads as a passenger. But I can truthfully say that I have never been on what I would consider a good modern convenient up to date passenger train. QB: I see. Well the rails are also used to transport a lot of mail have you ever worked over the baggage room? JS: Never did. QB: Never worked over the baggage room. JS: I know some of the men who did and one thing I think both of us can recall, the increase in the number of jobs during the Christmas season and the increase in the number of 32 jobs at least during the times when mail, bulk mail was being moved not necessarily rapidly, but being moved to a great extent. Many of the men that worked there worked what, sometimes two or three hours overtime a day in order to be able to get the mail out. To get the circulars. You also know that they used to have railway baggage men, a man who went with the train in a mail baggage car and sorted the mail and in effect did other things incident to that which would be done in a regular post office. But of course those jobs have been discontinued for I guess what, five, six, seven years now. QB: The airplanes have taken over much of the mail service. JS: Almost all of it, haven't they? QB: Right, and going back to the LCL, that's been, I guess entirely eliminated from the railroad hasn't it, ninety nine percent of it. JS: I would suppose almost that much. QB: So about all your railroad is engaged in now is the long haul. JS: The bulk carload freight service. QB: We've talked about the cars they used to have to ice, save a hundred employees there every summer, LCL where you stated here a while ago that maybe a hundred and fifty employees, passenger service, the baggage room, where they handled all the mail, this has been practically eliminated, so it’s really had its toll on the employment. But still maybe employees blame the railroad for not trying to do something to maybe give better service and some -of these other things they maintain that it wasn't necessary to cut down like they have done, or cut down very little to me I can't quite agree with that, can you? 33 JS: I think there are probably some debilitating circumstances, circumstances that have militated against this. I think probably the policy that many men decry is that during the years that a man was hired at the railroad he was hired if not vocally under these conditions, at least ostensibly under the conditions that having once established a seniority rate that he would have a railroad job all the rest of his life. And I believe that the hiring practices of the railroad would bear this out, that once having established your seniority date, that you moved up on this basis and hence continued to work unless you were fired or unless you retired. I would suppose that in other industries here a seniority system is not used that each man is allowed to under certain conditions, allowed to move at his own rate of excellence, that this is not necessarily so I would think that part of the difficulty was in the hiring practice. QB: Well I can understand this, about how many employees were there at the railroad when you hired out, you know, on the seniority roster. I'm sure it was well over five hundred. JS: Oh I think that at one time my number was nine hundred. QB: Nine hundred, now of course they split the OUR&DF, maybe you could say something about that in a few moments, but approximately how many employees would you say work at the railroad at this time in comparison to the nine hundred a few years ago. JS: I would guess maybe a third. QB: A third, three hundred. Of course this same thing we are just talking about the nonoperating railroad employees now, JS: That's right, I don't know of any figures QB: But I'm sure that the operating employees would have the same effect on them. 34 JS: One thing that we haven't talked about that you might want to interject here, Quin, concerning employment practices, that is that Ogden at one time not only had a large clerical force, and a large operating force, not only ice trains, not only serviced livestock that is not done now, but also serviced the engines themselves in a round house. And now these facilities are no longer there. They don't service engines here Mf any more. They used to have a large operating force handling car repairs, and this has been reduced to a minimum now. QB: They make better cars now than they used to, I guess there's not as much need for repair as in the past, is this right? JS: I think that's one reason, another is that where they are able to go from one terminalto another in less time, where they are able to consolidate some of their service points, where Ogden itself has been hurt, I'm not talking about the UP or the industry as a whole, but where Ogden itself is concerned, is that in the consolidation of these services someplace else they have uprooted the services here at Ogden. Also payroll services where for the OUR&D... have gone from here to Pocatello so that all the UP employees are now paid on checks that are made in Pocatello, where formerly they had been made here at Ogden. QB: So that's eliminated some employment to, hasn't it? JS: Absolutely. Now that hasn't been as large a number of men as some of the other things we discussed. QB: Well listen, tell me something about the change, the phasing out of the OUR&D, Ogden Union Railway and Depot Company, the phasing out of that, and bring forth a new type 35 of system whereby part of the employees are working for the SP and part of them are working for the UP. Maybe you could comment on that Jack. Say something about it. JS: Around three years ago it was decided that those who worked for the OUR&D, the parent companies being the UP and the SP would now work specifically for the UP or specifically for the SP in the past I’m sure that there have been some disagreements concerning how much work was actually done by an OUR&D employee for the SP, how much work was done for an OUR&D for the UP. On an approximate basis it was established that for employees who were doing both UP and SP work at some time during their shift and at different times during their shift and at alternating times during their shift that the SP would be paid on the basis of one third of that man's time and the UP would be paid on the basis of two thirds of the man's tame. Or in fact the reverse was true as the SP would pay the man a third of his wages and the UP would pay the man two thirds of his wages. I can recall many times while working at the freight office that there were certain discrepancies in the accounts, the SP indicating that the employee did much more work for the UP than the SP and hence that particular employee or that particular type of work should be allocated on the basis of one to seven instead of one to two or sometimes one to three, I believe that the predominate cause for the separation of the two railroads was, and this seems to be one of the ills of the United States today, the fact that no two systems can seem to become standardized. Was that there was a separate IBM system in use for the UP and a separate and different and sometimes diametrically different system in use for the SP. On the IBM cards there are eighty different places where a punch can be put, at the beginning of the card normally some type of a code punch is put into the card and then 36 from that point on to the end of the card different things such as the initial and the number and the load or empty and the type of a car and the weight of the car and the weight of the contents and the station it’s going to and the consignee who's going to receive it and the state that the station is in and at one time there was a manifest code that indicated in brief, in numbers and letters, part of this information. Then at the end of the card, or near the end the arrival of the train into town in which this particular car is, and% the departure of the car in the train, out of Ogden. And I suppose that almost without fail, two or three or four times a year each of the two railroads, the UP and the So would make some kind of a change, and at least it seemed to me that normally the change was toward disparity and not towards standardization. So sometimes when the UP would decide to have a particular punch put in a card in column one, the SP would decide that they'd have that punch put in number one but they'd have a different type of a punch. So I think the essential reason for the split was so the they could standardize within their system, their own particular, their own unique, their own peculiar way of handling the IBM card, because the two railroads, SP and UP, simply could not get together on what should appear where on the card. And as you know, unless each field has the same type of information, unless each field is arranged so that the cards can become more standardized, you might just as well be using two different systems in addition to using two different cards. As an example because Ogden is a junction for all types of freight moving to the east, there are several hundred different railroads that can eventually get the freight that comes through Ogden, but because we are so close to the east coast, possible ninety maybe that's too high, maybe seventy percent of the freight that comes through Ogden going t into California and Oregon and Washington 37 goes to the SP, unless of course it goes south out of here, and then if it does it goes UP. So that means that what the, in effect what the SP company did was in order to be able to pinpoint where the freight was going on the SP, each station had a number, 8901 was Oakland, 0 was San Francisco, 25 was Redwood city, the UP instead of having a particular station number for each destination station, because it couldn't have because ninety percent of the freight that went through here going UP went where-beyond the UP. So that would mean several hundred thousand numbers instead of as the SP had maybe a few hundred numbers. So they never could get together even on this, instead of being able to write down Oakland, or Council Bluff, or New York City or Pittsburg or Philadelphia, the SP, and I'm sure they had their reasons, stuck to numbers, the UP for their reasons stuck to the names of the cities. So this is I'm sure the predominate fact cause the railroads to split so that approximately, and this is not exact, approximately a third of the employee chose to go with the SP and two thirds opted to go with the UP. QB: Which system did you think was the best, the SP or the UP as regards to numbers or names? JS: Well it seemed to me that the UP was a better system to work for probably for several different reasons, some of which I'm sure were... QB: They had names? UP had names or did they have numbers? JS: Oh I'm sorry, you’re talking not about the individual, the individual reasons involved in somebody choosing UP or SP, you're talking about the system itself. QB: The system itself, which do you feel was the best. 38 JS: I don't think that on the basis of choice we can say that the UP is better than the SP. I think by virtue of the fact that Ogden was so near to the west coast that all those cities on the SP could and should have some number designation and because the UP at Ogden was so far from the east coast t and that the UP hardly ever had a city that it went to directly other than maybe Kansas City or Norfolk or Denver. All of them went past the UP on into the west coast and hence probably could not have under these conditions, a number. I think the system is easier to learn if you don't have to learn a number, it’s much easier for you to remember Redwood City than 25 or San Francisco and 0, almost all people can read a weigh bill and punch in San Fran, but your mind has to make an extra jog if the minute you see San Fran, you type down 0. If when you see Redwood City you type down 25. If you see Plainhaven you punch in 118 09. QB: Myself being oriented to numbers, it would be a lot easier for me to remember the numbers than it would the names I believe. JS: But initially it’s easier, in other words until you know the numbers it’s still easier for you to... QB: Right, right, well okay. Now the segregation of the employees in regards to the SP and UP, now they had their choice didn't they, the OUR&D had their choice... JS: They had only part of a choice. QB: Part of a choice? JS: I thought the division could have been made better if all of the jobs available to an employee on the UP system were listed, all of the jobs available to an employee on the SP system were listed. And then each man according to his seniority rank, look at the 39 entire list and then wrote his name down opposite the job that he wanted. That meant that employee number 25 or employee number 65 could see how many men had gone to the UP and how many men had gone to the SP and then at that point could make his choice according to how many men were ahead of him on the seniority roster. Now when you're talking on the basis of seniority, its imminently important to know how many men have more seniority than you because no matter what your qualifications may be on a job, if a man has more seniority he gets the job regardless... QB: Seniority is your livelihood. JS: That's right! So it may be that employee 65 could well see that his chances for a good job for the type of a job that he wanted for the shift that he wanted to work would be better with the SP at that point. At point 65, but maybe if ten or fifteen men filled up the SP roster from 65 to 80, then employee number 81 could see that his chances would be better under the UP system, but they weren't allowed that choice. The jobs were just listed and you bid on them, you put your application in without knowing who else was going where and you had to choose between the two railroads to begin with. You did not have, you could not say I'd like position number 1 on the UP first and then the next thing I'd like position number 1 on the SP. QB: You had to go either SP or UP. JS: Your application had to be either on all SP jobs or on all UP jobs. And I think that was imminently unfair to the men. There were many men who would have had a better job had they gone SP than by retaining their UP seniority. Many men with a very minimal amount of seniority received fairly good paying jobs on the SP when men with more seniority who chose to remain with the UP had poorer paying jobs, remaining with the 40 UP, but they didn't know that to begin with. See there was no way to tell who was going where except by word of mouth. This, Quin what railroad are you going with, I'm going with the UP. But you weren't sure that Quin was going to do that, in fact many of them who said I'm going to go UP or I'm going to go SP in fact did just the opposite. QB: Than what they said they were going to do? JS: Yeah, that's right. QB: Now you're working UP right? JS: Right. QB: If you could make the change now... JS: No, I'd still stay where I am. QB: You'd still stay where you are. Right. Well I see. Well then what did you say as far as divisions concerned approximately one third went with the SP and two thirds with the UP? JS: Correct. QB: And so therefore, being there's approximately the same amount of work involved by both railroads and so with that amount going over to the SP it would appear to me then that someone with less seniority would be a lot better off with the SP. JS: That's right, that's usually the way it worked out. Only on for individual preferences, would the man who stayed with the UP have the better job. QB: Now how about the pay, is that... 41 JS: Pay is comparable, it is different. Here is another thing that's an anomaly, why different pay? You work in the same building, you can't say that you do exactly the same thing because the two systems are different, but they are not different enough. You could not say that you’re doing essentially the same type of work and hence the pay should be, in my estimation, exactly the same. But one thing that they had to do, and again, this seems to be one of the, the same type of a difficulty that Britain is experiencing in trying to get into the European common market, that Britain has a unique position in the European common market, of having to satisfy both Germany and Italy and Luxemburg and Belgium and Holland in the European market, and their own commonwealth nations. So when the people moved over into the SP, though they're working in the same office they had to satisfy what the wage scale was all along the SP line. So some of them had an increase in pay, some of them had decrease in pay. Simply because the SP said well we're paying yard checkers at Roseville, where they are really easy to get, 20 cents less than we are paying them here, so we are going to have to make some adjustment there. Even though the yard checker at Ogden on the SP is doing almost exactly the same thing as the yard checker on the UP at Ogden. Again a problem of economics. QB: I see. Now there are many employees in the baggage room and when the jobs were all cut off over there came over, came over to the yard office and worked for either UP or SP, right? JS: Right. QB: And also here a short time ago they cut out the commissary because there was no passenger service, and the laundry, now what is the status of these employees, 42 especially the laundry? They weren't under the same seniority system as you were. Now they are over there working in the yard office, what's the situation on that? JS: It’s quite comical, to remember that within a few weeks of the termination of the laundry and there'd be employees coming over to the yard office to work or where ever in Ogden there was an opening that they had the qualifications to fulfill. That in the paper, under the listing twenty years ago, it said twenty years ago today, February the 2nd, 1951, whatever it happened to be, the new UP laundry opened and will service all of the UP trains especially will it do the bulk of work that's being handled at Sun Valley. This was one of the, one of the reasons that the laundry came here. In answer directly to your question, the men who have lost their jobs at the baggage room and at the laundry have been able to take job that their seniority entitled them to, but their seniority has been reduced to the time that the --byt the number of years. Let me start over again, their seniority, with the company continues from the time that they hired out, but their bumping seniority begins only at the point where the laundry was discontinued. So someone who has hired out for the railroad within the last three years and who has three years seniority and is protected in his job, cannot be displaced by a laundry employee who has worked for the laundry for forty years, but whose seniority on bumping privileges at the at the yard office begins January 1, 1971. QB: So his vacation rights and everything, fringe benefits, that— JS: Retirement, he still retains the same seniority, but he simply cannot take a job now this in a sense is partly to his advantage, because those men are, if they do not work or if they do not have a regular job or cannot go on the extra board or are not qualified for certain jobs, such as men with hearing difficulties or visual difficulties cannot work out in 43 the yard. Men who have any type of an appliance in walking, a man who's lame or a man who has an artificial limb cannot work out in the yard. So because of this there are certain things that he cannot do. Now they don't allow women to work out in the yard where at one time you recall they used to. Remember Skip who worked out in the yard. QB: Women can no longer work out in the yard huh? JS: Whether they cannot or they simply do not let them, I don't know, but the fact remains that they do not work out in the yard. No women now work out in the yard. Hence these men who have the seniority on the railroad, thirty or forty years, who cannot bump on a regular position, and who are not being called because of lack of qualification on other jobs on an extra basis or a hold down basis, now just stay home and because they are guaranteed a rate of pay, stay home and draw their money, even though the railroad is continuing to cut off the jobs, the railroad cuts off jobs, puts more men on the extra board and then more men stay home and draw money while somebody else does the work that had to be done by the man whose job was cut off. QB: Are they guaranteed this indefinitely or is there a certain length of years or number of years that they'll be guaranteed this? JS: I don't know what the exact arrangement is, but in March of 1973 there will be some evaluation or reevaluation of this. What they'll have to do up to that time is retain these men. After that time I envision that they won't have to. QB: I see. Now about somebody that hires out at the UP or SP yard office at this time. Are they guaranteed forty hours a week or is it just the employees that were working for the laundry? 44 JS: No one is being hired by the UP, not working for the SP I can't tell you exactly what their arrangements are, and they are different. QB: But say somebody was hired by the UP do they have a guaranteed forty hours a week or don't you know? JS: I don't think that they would, and I don't know the conditions under which they would be hired when men that they are already using, when men that are already on the seniority list are not being used. I can't envision the reason for hiring anybody. QB: I see. JS: And maybe one stipulation precludes the other. Maybe the fact that they are not being hired means that they would not automatically go on under the guarantee. QB: Maybe we could talk just a minute, a while about the wages and fringe benefits that you receive at the railroad Jack, over the years I've heard much discussion on, by employees of the railroad comparing their wages and their fringe benefits with other industries. Could you talk for, maybe say something about that? JS: I think one of the greatest fringe benefits that the railroad had at one time, which no longer is in existence is that working for the OUR&D company with parent companies UP and SP you were allowed a pass, a trip pass on either of the two parent companies free. And though I used a trip pass I think only two or three times during the thirty years of employment that I have had there, I believe there is, yes, I guess only two or three times that I have used the pass. This was considered a great fringe benefit because many of the men used these trip passes to go fishing. Up to Montana, up to Wyoming. Many of them used passes to &o on trip during the summer time down to California. In 45 fact many of them were able to go to places across the United States because not only would they be able to go 011 the parent line from here to Omaha on the UP, or from here to almost any place on the west coast other than the southern part of the state of California on the SP, they also were allowed half fare on any of the connecting lines. So they were allowed to go from here to Omaha on the UP and half fare from Omaha or Council Bluffs on the C&NW, half fare on the New York Central or the Penn. into New York or Washington or Baltimore on the B&0. So it meant that they could go half way free and the other half way for half fare. Then after you had been at the railroad for wither ten or fifteen years, again I don't remember the stipulation you were allowed a pass on one of the parent roads so that you could go any place on that parent road free at any time with all members of your family including children 18 years of age or under. Now as the passenger business decreased and as the number of trains passenger trains decreased, then there began to be stipulations concerning which trains you could ride and when you could ride. So that now most of the pass rides have been abrogated. You're able to travel some places on Amtracks for half fare. But I don't know of any place on any parent line that you can go for nothing. QB: Really the pass isn't too much value any more, is it? JS: No, it really isn't. QB: Well some of the other fringe benefits, medical for example, the medical benefit down there. Maybe you could say something about that. JS: I think the medical benefit is certainly very munificent as far as it goes. This extends only to medical doctor expenses, I notice in the paper and I've talked to a teamster too, I know this to be true. That the expenses in their insurance policy, their medical policies 46 now extend both to optometrists and opthamologists and dentists. So this means simply that where ours, though good extends to medical doctors, theirs includes the other two. And I know in my own particular family, my dental expenses are greater than my medical doctor expenses. My wife has teeth like sand and X eyes like an eagle. And I have eyes like a mole and teeth like granite. What do you suppose my children have? Teeth like sand and eyes like a mole. So I have to spend a lot of money on expenses for a dentist and expenses for an optometrist. So here, very good, but many industries exceed this. Several years ago the steel industry received a sabbatical leave vacation. Where after every five years an employee could get thirteen weeks in addition to his regular vacation. I believe most industries, now I'm not talking about business, I'm not talking about banking or the clothing industries or men who work as clerks in the stores. Most industry, such as the automotive industry the steel industry, coal industry, have a better vacation schedule than we. Certainly the government has a better vacation schedule than we do. One thing that makes their schedule imminently more flexible than ours is that they are able to take a single day off, usually with only maybe a few hours’ notice. Or two or three days off where we must decide on our vacation on the basis of our seniority a year ahead of time and then more often than not are locked into that particular time. Now I admit that sometimes you can make some rearrangement on that. But more often than not you are locked into that particular time. QB: It’s really quite difficult if you do make prearrangements, isn't it? JS: Not only difficult but oft times you may have to give up a prime position for one that is not so good a position simply because an emergency arises where you need the time off. Under a government vacation you could take two days off when that's all you 47 needed. But under our system if you need two days off you must take five to cover that whole period of time. QB: Can’t take less than a week off at a time can you? JS: Not very well, not that I know of. QB: As far as hospitalization is concerned, maybe you'd tell us something about that. In comparison with other hospitalized programs. JS: I would think that the hospitalization program, especially for the employee is, I would guess as good as many. However again you are required to go to the men, the doctors under the--who are employed under the system. In some of the other hospital plans in the different industries you are able to go to the doctor of your choice and then have the policy pay for that. QB: I know, however, under most policy systems they don't pay a hundred percent, whereas the railroad, no matter what the medical expenses are they'll pay a hundred percent right? JS: Not so. QB: Isn't this right? JS: No. They pay a good amount, but there are very few things for which they pay a hundred percent. It looks as though they will, but as it works out it is not so in fact. My son broke his jaw, was in the hospital less than twenty four hours, total hospital bill $220.00, the railroad won't pay for all of that, but they pay most of it, but not all of it. A good plan, but those who think it pays a hundred percent are mistaken. 48 QB: Well I'm sorry Jack. Now in regards to your family I know it doesn't pay a hundred percent, but in regards to the employee themselves... JS: Absolutely, the employee himself, we'll pay everything for the employee, but you must use the doctors that are available... QB: As designated. JS: Yes. QB: And so this is one of the very few that plans that does this. JS: Now one other thing too is that we must pay for this plan and some other industries have their plan fully paid for. QB: Would you advise a young man to hire out at the railroad? JS: I should say not Quin. QB: For what reason, Jack? JS: I think for all of the reasons that we talked about in the last couple of hours Quin. QB: They would probably have to work there for maybe thirty years in order to get a day job wouldn't they? JS: I think what he'd probably have to do Quin is work on a very onerous objectionable job for thirty years, midnight to eight, hoping that just a month or two before his retirement he might be able to graduate to some type of a decent job on the QB: Well that's just about the way it goes, well listen I appreciate this interview Jack and we'll take this and make good use of it and put it in the historical section of the library at some of the universities. Alright? 49 JS: Fine Quin. QB: Okay, thank you very much. JS: You bet. 50