Episode 11: MRSR History and Legends. Tea Edition.

In this week’s episode of Off the Rails with Rowdy and Bethan, Rowdy and Bethan do what they do best - talk - a lot....while "sipping tea."

Both self-proclaimed history nerds, they dig into their ongoing effort to broaden the story told at the museum by shifting the focus to include the people who lived along, worked on, and were impacted by the railroad and logging industries in the Pacific Northwest. They touch on topics they could easily spend hours on, including Japanese loggers, millworkers, and railroaders prior to 1942, the railroads' roles in internment, and the lasting impacts that followed.

They also wander (enthusiastically) into stories about some of the larger-than-life personalities who helped shape the Mt. Rainier Scenic Railroad - Blackie Mosier and Tiny Freeman. Think today’s crew has personality? Turns out, we’re just carrying on a long-standing tradition.

Listener questions and an “In the News” segment round things out—so climb aboard.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

David Sakura Interview – Densho Archive (Eatonville resident)
https://ddr.densho.org/interviews/ddr-densho-1000-498-1/

Photo of Japanese Americans relocating camps to Tule Lake, CA
https://ddr.densho.org/ddr-densho-37-288/

Tiny Freeman – Seattle PI Article
https://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/maybe-big-living-tiny-can-bring-character-back-1241413.php

Tiny Freeman – Bio/Blog
http://zelsj.mlblogs.com/2013/09/16/j-j-tiny-freeman-larger-than-life/

Blackie Mosier Article
http://www.bigbendrailroadhistory.com/2023/01/fred-blackie-moser-obit.html

Got a question or topic you want us to cover? Send it our way- we’d love to hear from you.

So grab your coffee, crank up the phonograph, and let’s go Off the Rails.

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Thanks to Huffman Machining Solutions is proud to sponsor this Off the Rails podcast.  See how we can help with your next challenge at huggmanmachining.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to Off the Rails, the podcast where steam locomotives meet modern matters. Joint executive director of the Mount Rainier Sonic Railroad, Bethon Mahr, and Rowdy Pearce, Superintendent, Professional Cat herder, and occasional PowerGo tour. Together they pull back the curtain on the wild, weird, and often hilarious world of tourist steam railroads. You'll get a front row seat to the ins and outs of this truly unique business. So grab your ticket, hold on to your sense of humor, and join us for a ride into the unpredictable world of steam. This is Off the Rail.

SPEAKER_01 0:37

Welcome to Off the Rails with Rowdy!

SPEAKER_03 0:42

Tom is naked.

SPEAKER_01 0:43

No, his garland is strategically Oh, it was. There you go, bud. It's all about the hammering. Welcome to Off the Rails with Rowdy and Bethon. Uh it's been two weeks since you last heard from us, but we just finished recording our last episode three minutes ago. Uh-huh. How have you been since three minutes ago?

SPEAKER_03 1:01

I went and brewed some more tea. We're both drinking tea. We're both we're both sick as fk, and we're both drinking tea.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

Yep. Um it's Rowdy's family. Sorry, Calvin, you have to go find that one. Uh it's Rowdy's family's um medicinal tea recipe. From Dr. Dickle. Yes.

unknown 1:20

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:22

Um, so today's episode. So for the folks at home, up until this point, we've been recording an episode and then it gets posted the Tuesday after we record it. So there's about a week delay. We need what we uh professionally refer to as an oh shit episode. One in the can. One in the can. Um, so that when things go south, like there is an unexpected business trip, uh, something breaks on the railroad, it's not an emergency in order for us to meet our production schedule. So we needed an episode that we could do without a whole lot of research. So I don't know if the folks at home know this about us, Rowdy. But we're both a little nerdy.

SPEAKER_03 2:09

You can't get that way. I mean, we've been well, my oh shit about two weeks ago sent you down this freaking rabble to where we've actually at this point been able to figure out certain logistical things during 1941.

SPEAKER_01 2:25

One of the things about so Rowdy and I have worked together for it's almost ten years. It's a it's a long time.

SPEAKER_03 2:33

It's it's almost ten years. Uh I did the math the other day.

SPEAKER_01 2:36

Are we are we likely friends? Very really mostly because we're really nerdy about history.

SPEAKER_03 2:44

Well, let's just put it this way. We're friends enough, we're all answer the phone and I'm taking a shit. So Yeah, and then you'll tell me about it. Uh-huh. And you'll hear about it in the background.

SPEAKER_01 2:53

Yep. Anyway. Um, this is not what I thought I was getting into when I showed up for my first day of work at Mount Rainier, however, but you know.

SPEAKER_03 3:03

When you showed up for your interview, I was actually burning all the shops trash in the 70s.

SPEAKER_01 3:09

And I didn't know anything about steam, so I thought that steam engines just smelled that way.

SPEAKER_03 3:13

Yeah, I mean that black smoke was a regular thing. I didn't know. And we're sitting there throwing all the nasty black crap in the 70s.

SPEAKER_01 3:21

Yeah, so anyway, this isn't where we thought we were gonna go. Uh, we call mom. Uh yeah, we share a mother. Rowdy's mom. Um, I got her a mug that says my favorite child with my face on it. Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_03 3:34

And all the guys actually laugh their asses off because I walk into my room, I turn it around so your face isn't pointed at everybody. Anyway.

SPEAKER_01 3:40

But anyway, I would say that uh the strong evidence of our sibling relationship is that we both inherited a strong love of history from our only not shared mother. Well, but my father loved history. My dad was a history teacher.

SPEAKER_03 4:02

Yeah, so my my dad actually was was like he he loved history. And I think he was a history. Now he could have he could have actually probably been a professor in history.

SPEAKER_01 4:11

We both had parents that had us later in life.

SPEAKER_03 4:14

Yep. Um my dad was heavy in was when I grew up, my dad was heavy in World War II.

SPEAKER_01 4:20

Well, my grandfather died in World War II. Well, he was went missing missing in action, right?

SPEAKER_03 4:25

Navigator and all the costumes for saving Ryan.

SPEAKER_01 4:28

And you were an only child, my sister died died when I was a kid, so I think we both also got cartered around with our parents to all of the stuff they did. Yes. And we both had a lot of older folks in our lives. Yes.

SPEAKER_03 4:41

Um, so there's a lot of souls is what they would call that.

SPEAKER_01 4:44

Yeah, I mean, but like I spent a huge amount of time with my grandma, right? I mean I was thinking like a 30-year-old when I was in my teens. Yeah, it just it's I was around folks that were a lot older than me. And my grandma and group peers. That was definitely me here. Oh yeah, all the time, and you were here.

SPEAKER_03 5:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:02

So I think that we both um share a similar love of history, and I think one of the things is that while we both say that we hate people, um the stories of people and their lives and what they overcame and how people lived and you know, how things happened, right? Just by human perseverance and will and circumstance. It's about people, not about the objects.

SPEAKER_03 5:33

Not about the objects, but the objects have their parts too. I mean, it's like, for example, the book I'm writing. That everybody hears about this freaking novel that I'm writing, and and no one's ever seen it yet, but I am writing it. I I know it exists. You know it exists. Um, there's a whole part of it, you know the you know basically what the book is about. There's a whole part of it that got really got changed because I said this doesn't do the history justice.

SPEAKER_01 5:55

Yeah. And um so I think that so much of what we care about with Mount Rainier Scenic Railroad, I don't know what version of Choo Choo Land this is, but a few VX. Yeah. Um the the rebirth of Mount Rainier Scenic Railroad and reopening again and reopening the museum is making sure that the stories we're telling are about people.

SPEAKER_02 6:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:21

Um, and that it's centered about people, that it's not just this locomotive was built in 1929 and it was.

SPEAKER_03 6:28

I'm looking at some of the people you got on this thing, and Calvin is just gonna have to start timestamping beeps.

SPEAKER_01 6:34

It's it's gonna There's gonna be a lot of them. So I didn't, so caveat. I didn't grow up with any of these people, right? I'm from upstate New York. Um I moved out here, you know, whenever we started working there. I moved out here for the railroad back in the day. Um, and I have heard stories about these people for a long time.

SPEAKER_03 6:57

Next year it's a decade.

SPEAKER_01 7:00

Are we gonna celebrate?

SPEAKER_03 7:01

What are we gonna do? I know. And next year it's a decade.

SPEAKER_01 7:06

I looked at my uh my husband the other day and was like, What have we been together? Like eight years and he goes, That hasn't been that long. And I was like, he's like, Yeah, it feels like it, never mind. But yeah, you guys are coming up on eight years. Yeah. Because we've known each we've known each other longer than you and your husband have been together. Yeah, because I started dating Tony mostly because he had a cute dog. Yeah. Anyway, anyway. Um, so what we're gonna do today, we're gonna talk about some of the people and some of the stories and some of my hyper focus.

SPEAKER_03 7:37

Um, which is that was probably spawned by me.

SPEAKER_01 7:40

Which was absolutely spawned by you. And um we've had some tea.

SPEAKER_02 7:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:48

What just came up on your phone? That was Instagram. That was a very attractive man without any clothes on.

SPEAKER_03 7:57

That was a very attractive woman without any clothes on. No, that was there was a dude.

SPEAKER_01 8:00

That was right now, that's a anyway.

SPEAKER_03 8:03

That was Honey Nut C. She's a bikini barista down on River Road for Ladybug.

SPEAKER_01 8:08

So talking about my first day of work here. So do you want to tell that story? You might as well. Which one? So I show up I didn't drink coffee at the point when I came down.

SPEAKER_03 8:25

And I was there's actually a YouTube video where we're talking about this.

SPEAKER_01 8:29

There is. I stopped for tea on my way down.

SPEAKER_03 8:32

And you went to the you went to the little stand that's all decorated up like a ladybug. And I and the girl opened the window and she wasn't wearing any clothes, and you about fainted. Meanwhile, all of us were standing there with our ladybug cups going, oh, okay.

SPEAKER_01 8:45

Yeah, because you have contractors working here, and I show up for work the first day, like totally traumatized. I tried to give the contractors donuts, and Sean Slack's like, nope, nope, nope, not them. And I'm there, and I'm like, Where did I just stop for tea? And you're like, and you're all like, oh, Ashley, she's great.

SPEAKER_03 9:03

I'm gonna set this up because the bikini barista thing is something that is like only Pacific Northwest, and particularly only Washington. Folks, I did not there is one of these stands on damn near every corner. And there's a coffee stand with a stripper inside. I didn't know Beth and found one day one.

SPEAKER_01 9:23

I didn't know, and but anyway, and I think you were all probably apprehensive about me showing up. Um we weren't after that. Anyway, and uh anyway. So um about two weeks ago, what happened?

SPEAKER_03 10:18

There's been a lot. What are we talking about? You were watching a movie. Oh, I was watching Come See the Paradise. Which is so Come See the Paradise is this movie with Dennis Quaid and uh Tamila, I'm gonna butcher her last name, Topa Herman or something like that. Anyway, she's really nailed it. She's freaking hot as hell. And um, so in this movie, not only is the 44-49 in it, but our passenger coaches and the five are in it. And I was there's it's about uh basically Japanese internment. He the Dennis Quaid's character falls in love with a Japanese woman, Pearl Harbor happens, they get sent off to the camps, blah blah blah blah blah blah. Well, the scene which they are loading everybody up on the train to go off to the camps, the coaches that they're using for that particular scene are the 901 and the 902. And so, because my book kind of focuses on the same time period, I was sitting there and I was watching, I was typing away, and then I just had this like lightning struck the brain moment of holy shit, there is a really damn good chance that our coaches were used in the real thing. And so I sent that to you, and I posted on Facebook, of course. You just gotta post that kind of shit on Facebook. Anyway, and for anybody that wonders, if you're gonna send me a friend's request on Facebook, screw you, I'm not gonna freaking answer people I don't know. Follow me on Instagram. Anyway, so I uh I send you this thing saying, you know, I'm watching Come See the Paradise. We're at the scene where everybody's getting on the train to head off to the internment camps. There is a really damn good chance that our coaches really did the deed. Yeah. And for the last two weeks has been a spiral down. I mean, I I think we're at the point where we have figured out that our coaches were definitely using some form of the logistics.

SPEAKER_01 12:12

We don't know, so yeah. So what this has done is I have gone on a spiral.

SPEAKER_03 12:20

Um very, very spiral is an understatement. Yeah. Um to be fair, the the when I went down the rabbit hole the other night with Google Maps and where the where the camps were at, and right down to the point of figuring out where the San Bruno racetrack was right next to the SP line in the Bay Area, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think I might have spiraled a little bit harder on that one than you did.

SPEAKER_01 12:48

We spiraled in different ways. So the first several years of being here, I didn't really connect with the history of it. It just, in the way it was presented, right? The way it, the way it's been presented is, well, there were there were no first-person stories.

SPEAKER_02 13:05

Right.

SPEAKER_01 13:05

Right? Tom Murray Jr.'s were were the only first person stories, and they were very sanitized. Um and it wasn't really until probably COVID, um, when I was done with the railroad. I think we both were, um, that I started just sort of like reading more about some of the local history and logging, and I started researching the the property that we bought on Vashon and when it was logged. And started getting into it. And what I what I've realized is that the history is fascinating. So much of the history of logging in the Pacific Northwest was overshadowed by World War II. Um, because the development happened very in the three decades really before the war.

SPEAKER_03 13:48

It was it was it was overshadowed by uh World War II and the Great Depression. Being the Great Depression being the dust bowl.

SPEAKER_01 13:55

So, I mean, it was twenty it was two decades, really, two, three decades, and that was that was it. But it's a fascinating sort of blip in history. And for me, you know, my background's in archaeology. Um, one of the reasons my, you know, I was interested in archaeology is because it's not telling the stories of the kings, it's not telling the stories of the people who wrote history, it's telling the stories of your blue-collar workers, so to speak, that didn't necessarily had a voice. What made the average person tick. And that's so much of what the history of this area and this railroad is, is if you were working in a logging camp, there's a good chance you didn't speak English or you couldn't read or you were running from the law. Um, but there were a lot of marginalized, what we would now call marginalized populations working in the logging camps, and there's so there's not a lot of written history.

SPEAKER_03 14:50

And then to a certain extent, because I'm I'm gonna back you up there because a lot of what you just said is what what a lot of people have interpreted the logging camps were like. And some of those logging camps were not like that. No. People don't realize you weren't allowed to gamble, you weren't allowed to drink. Depending on the camp, yeah. Depending on the cook. Because the cook's job was to make sure everybody was fed and getting the work. So if you were in the chow hall eating and trying to have a conversation, he was supposed to come over and tell you to shut the F up and get out so that you could get you're supposed to eat in 20 minutes and get your ass on the train. Eat like 10,000 calories a day. Yeah, and and then get out. You know, so there's the so there's there's what people have thought about the thing, and then there's what the thing really is.

SPEAKER_01 15:30

Yeah, and you know, it's the story of immigration in the West. Um, very much so. What I didn't realize, I think when I had first moved out here, is how many and this is where my segue is going. I didn't realize what a large Japanese population worked in the logging camps and railroading in this area in particular. And what had happened, so I've been doing research on Japanese.

SPEAKER_03 15:56

Um, Japan camps where we are at where we are at was where the Japanese are at. But the Japanese weren't near the coast. That was Finns and Swedes and Scandinavian. Scandinavian. And they were all doing what? Running build from the Velvet chicks.

SPEAKER_01 16:14

Yep. Yep, yep, yep. Um read the book Deep River if you haven't.

SPEAKER_03 16:17

No, with Deep River, but Deep River is a very, very I mean, it's a slog to get through it. Read it.

SPEAKER_01 16:23

But if you like history, read it. Read it. So, anyway, so for a few years now, and I'm sort of explaining my spiral. Um for a few years now, I've been researching um like Japanese logging railroad populations in this area. I've gone to the Wing Luke Museum, we found a Stanford race relations survey from 1925 and 1926 that has some interviews. And we um I've made ample use of um Densho. It's a huge archive that was basically done collecting stories um of folks of Japanese descent um before, after, during the war. Um, and there's a huge number of oral interviews. Um so for me, you know, there's there's um a lot of interviews with David Sakura, who was born um in 1936, and his family lived in Etonville, and he has a lot of early memories um of life in Etonville and um, you know, life in a mill town. One of the interesting things, and this is a few years ago, that that I didn't know, um, is they used a steam donkey to heat the bathhouse in the Japanese section of town in Etonville. Um so I've been doing research here. Um I'm gonna drop some links and some pictures, Calvin. Um that you get to remember we need that big ass TV right here going, hey. I know, so I can um pull it up. But you know, the the mill in Etonville employed a ton of Japanese workers. Um and most of these camps were integrated.

SPEAKER_03 18:21

Um, because I did a I I went down a big spiral myself in this in this industry or this area. You know why they went after the Japanese? It wasn't because they got 30% more for 10% less. 1919.

SPEAKER_01 18:39

Well, the noise of Red Rising. You had the yeah, you had the so there are a few reasons. You had the Chinese Exclusion Act, right? So a lot of early like transcontinental railroad labor was a lot of the Chinese. So when the Chinese laboria massacre and dried up, right? A lot of Asian populations, it was supposed to be the Chinese that were driven out of Seattle and Tacoma. In a lot of cases, the Japanese and other folks of you know Asian origin were also driven out. Um, they wound up in rural communities.

SPEAKER_03 19:08

Um you know what they wouldn't do? Strike. The big thing was in this area, and the the deep river. The IWW was exactly. Deep river sent me down this, sent me down this. And I I consulted with the enterprising Mr. Murray because Tom Murray Jr.'s dad started West Fort Timber in 1917, right out over here. And one of the first things he had to deal with was not only the IWW but also the lumbermen's union, where they tried to strike on everybody in the Pacific Northwest at that time. And so the reason why they started bringing in a lot of the Japanese and Chinese wasn't just because of the Exclusionary Act, but because they wouldn't strike.

SPEAKER_01 19:47

Well, and there was you literally, um, you know, the the Wing Luke Museum has receipts where you would place a mail order for Japanese workers and they would be delivered by by rail um and they'd come in. Um in certain cases, when the Stanford race relations survey, something that surprised us is we found that the Japanese workers were paid a buck more a week than some of the white workers, but they would hire three Japanese workers for every four white workers. They would. Um so yeah, I mean the IWW was just starting up, unionizing was starting up. It was fairly popular, particularly with the Scandinavian immigrants, right?

SPEAKER_03 20:27

Because they were they were they were running from a certain thing in Europe, and then they didn't know how to get away from that certain thing. The Russian Revolution. So they wanted, they were trying to bring a certain thing along with them. And it ended up being a, you know, why go to the home country when all the opportunity you need is right here.

SPEAKER_01 20:43

So I mean, just fascinating, fascinating stuff.

SPEAKER_03 20:47

It is because you really start diving into the teens and the twenties in the Pacific Northwest, and it's just like, oh my god, you not only got the Americans coming into the equation, but you got the Chinese, the Japanese, the Scandinavians, you got all these people hitting the ground at the same time.

SPEAKER_01 21:00

So, yeah, and so David Sakura in in particular, we're gonna I'm gonna link to his interview with Densho. Um he's come back to Eatonville since, but he talks about being four years old, there being a large Japanese community, there being a baseball team. The Etonville Lumber Company had a baseball team that was almost entirely comprised of Japan, if not entirely comprised of Japanese. Baseball.

SPEAKER_03 21:24

Japanese love baseball.

SPEAKER_01 21:26

I mean, so uh it's a thing. And talks about um, you know, going to a real bath Japanese bathhouse where the men, you know, there was no running water in the men's dor dormitory, so the men would go to the bathhouse to bathe. Um I can remember sitting in a hot, hot tub soaking with my father with all the men, and it was like being back in Japan. Um the heat from the bathhouse came from the boilers of the sawmill. Um there was an assembly hall where suma wrestlers would perform, there were dances. So this, I mean, this is in Etonville. Yeah. Um, that there was an extended Caucasian community outside the grounds of her Japanese village, and that the people from Eatonville, the town, would come to have the radios fixed at his dad's house. Um, you know, so in Christmas 1939, we'd go shopping in downtown Etonville. Um, you know, they were in kindergarten. If you look at his kindergarten class picture, there's two Asian boys, um, him and his friend Tommy, and the rest were sort of Scandinavian looking. Which, I mean, when you know the history of the mills and the logging camps, it all makes sense. Um you know, the it's this interview is is fascinating and I really would love for folks to go check it out. But just the whole dynamic of it is interesting. I had a moment, I think this was probably two years ago, and I'm not going to say which group in Eatonville or who, but I gave a presentation in Eatonville. Now, when I started doing some research here, there's a local historical society that has exhibits on early immigrants to the area, and I had contacted them and I said, Do you have any, you know, this is what we're trying to do. I'm trying to get some more information together. This is a story that's not told in our museum right now, is of the Japanese logged.

SPEAKER_03 23:15

The museum is focused on anything that makes steam.

SPEAKER_01 23:18

Yeah, the you know, the I mean, we have lots about you know, I mean, for example, the spruce unions and the space.

SPEAKER_03 23:25

The problem is, is, and this is this is not at all a drag, because I just in case anybody that was involved with this place ever does listen to this is not a ding towards them. What we have here is entirely whitewashed.

unknown 23:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 23:39

That's coming from me, a guy that votes on the red side of almost anything. Everything we have going on here is whitewashed, and it's that whitewashed propaganda that came off of World War II.

SPEAKER_01 23:47

Yeah, so I'm I'm being a problematic, woke white woman who has no background in the Pacific Northwest coming in and saying, Hey, I want to tell the story about these Japanese folks. We do damage, sorry, I'm not trying to anyway. Um, and we did hire folks of Japanese descent to help do us some of the research and cultural advisors, all of those things. Well, the Japanese built on the railroad. I went to a local historical society and I was told that they were only going to provide me with information if um actually this happened twice, if I made sure that I told the story about the national security concerns.

SPEAKER_02 24:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:24

Now, there were German POWs working logging during the war that were sheltered, that were put up in houses in Etonville.

SPEAKER_03 24:33

Do you know what the difference was in that? That the Germans didn't bomb us at Pearl Harbor.

SPEAKER_01 24:37

Sure. But the Germans got to do a lot more shit than Germany. What I'm saying is the reception I got locally was not favorable. So about two years ago, I was meeting with a local club in Etonville talking about sort of what we were doing and the history of some of it. And I talked about this exhibit on the Japanese, and I said, you know, and ultimately that ends in 1941. The Japanese involvement in Etonville and in this area ends in 1941 and 1942. And a guy who had white hair sort of leaned back and he went, Well, you're gonna tell the rest of that story, right? And then I went. Because I had gotten the reception I had elsewhere. And he said, Well, my dad was uh when those folks tried to come back, he goes, My dad was one of the guys that stood at the edge of town with a pitchfork and a rifle and drove him off. My grandpa was. Um, and his response was, you need to tell the story of why they're not here.

SPEAKER_03 25:35

Well, and the thing why there is no history.

SPEAKER_01 25:37

So that's when it comes down, I don't know. And he was being very respectful about it.

SPEAKER_03 25:40

I keep saying the whole entire I'm writing this book. And in the book I'm writing, one of our main characters is Japanese. She's a female Japanese, she's Nancy Japanese. You know she's born in Tacoma, all that other kind of shit. And originally I was thinking, okay, I'm gonna write her out after World War II and and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then, you know, he was supposed to go off and get with this woman.

SPEAKER_01 26:00

How does it feel to be the hand of God just writing?

SPEAKER_03 26:03

It's great. But then something I was sitting there one day going, well, that doesn't, the whole way that that part of the book was going together didn't do the history justice. And so she actually stays in the entire book. And the reason why she stays in the entire book is because it's about the the guy in the steam locomotive, right? The steam locomotive is a character, he is a character, but then I looked at it going, that doesn't do the history justice because that's exactly what the whitewash version of the history is. After World War II, the Japanese disappear. And I started reading my grandpa's book that he wrote after World War II on both growing up in this area as well as he fought in the Pacific. He fought in the Pacific. He watched his brother die at the hand of the Japanese. And he talks about, you know, all the hatred and all that other kind of stuff, canceling the whole entire his paper because the guy was Japanese. Yeah. And so I ended up changing the entirety of that part of the book after World War II so she stays in it. And she comes back to him after the internment camps, and she has to live through the hatred that was felt towards her, yeah, and all that. But she is an American citizen because she was born in the city of Tacoma.

SPEAKER_01 27:17

Yeah, I mean, I I we could both go on our long tangent. We won't. Uh that's not the point of the podcast. Damn it. But anyway. Um, check out Dencho. Um so last night while I was fighting with Sam.gov, I was sort of saying, you know what, we really didn't when we were doing this research, figuring out how we were gonna present it, part of the museum, we had not considered that our passenger cars may have been used to haul the Japanese. To forcibly remove people from their homes and intern them. Right? And then, you know, I reached out to a few people and said, um, in the industry, and I said, Hey, what do you do with this? And they went, well, there's Jim Crow cars for you, so tourist railroads all over the south. So Jim Crow is not the same thing. No, but it, you know, and it sort of, so we we we've we've spiraled, right? We've looked at where the car is.

SPEAKER_03 28:10

And we don't know for sure. We said so. This is this is where I went the other night was okay, the 901, the 902. The 901, especially, was built in 1924. It's of the first batch of Pullman cars that were built for, you know, the commuting thing and the Bay Area. They never left the Bay Area, they were just used in commuter service all around the Bay Area. But San Bruno was the racetrack that was under the temporary relocation. It was a temporary relocation thing. What they did at the very first is that they took him to the racetracks and they converted the stalls. Now, by racetracks, I mean back in this day, we're not car racing, we're horse racing. So they put him in stalls at the horse racetracks until they could get the damn camps built. San Bruno is where San Francisco International Airport currently sits, which is right next to one of the branch, one of the commuter lines for SP. Our cars were SP commuter. So when you sit down to talk about logistics, what are you gonna use when you want to move a lot of people?

SPEAKER_01 29:12

Yeah, like and we we know that Greyhounds were used. So I have not done the full research in Denho yet. Last night when I was spiraling, I did look at a lot of passenger cars and I started to do that.

SPEAKER_03 29:22

But the problem is that a lot of that record is still in existence at the California State Railroad Museum because they have all the records off of the Southern Pacific.

SPEAKER_01 29:30

So if you dug into that, you would probably start a lot of the railroads were banned from taking photos, too. They were. Yeah. And one of the things I was looking at last night is a lot of the car numbers were actually covered by the group numbers is they they sorted folks into groups when they removed them. So it'll it'll have a big B at the side. So I went on a big, you know, there were some cars like in Utah, there were some in Arkansas, that I was like looking at the cars and looking at rivet patterns, and then going, oh, I think that these cars are used at this railroad. And then I started texting you all a bunch of pictures, and I went on a big like trying to match.

SPEAKER_03 30:10

My spiral went as I started looking at where the camps were physically.

SPEAKER_01 30:14

Yeah, and you were actually tracing like rail lines and what we're gonna do.

SPEAKER_03 30:17

And then I said, okay, so this so Thule Lake was within 10 miles of an SP br of an SP line. Yeah. That Thule Lake is actually about 10 miles away from the kept from where the Kepner collection was kept. And I started doing the well, if I were to move somebody from San Francisco to Thule Lake, what I would do is I'd use the commuter rigs because the commuter rigs can fit 90 people out of whack. And that's a day trip. You can haul them up there, drop them off, and come back in a day. Yeah. And so you start thinking about it logistically.

SPEAKER_01 30:46

Now, I mean, there's no record that says that that's exactly what happened, but it's like I mean, having said that, Denshow, I believe, is the place that a lot of the first hand stories and the narratives are gonna be found. I have not gone through Densho. If any of you like armchair keyboard warriors want to, yeah, please do it. So we've used our allotted time basically on this, but I'm gonna keep going and production can deal with it. So Because it was supposed to be the other big guys that were. I am gonna move on. Um production just disappeared anyway.

SPEAKER_03 31:15

They they took off, they knew this was gonna go.

SPEAKER_01 31:18

Okay, so we're gonna put a pin in that.

SPEAKER_03 31:21

Yeah, but we got it. The entire two hours would be.

SPEAKER_01 31:25

When I okay.

SPEAKER_03 31:26

Are you going back to the other thing I sent you? Whereas like, hey, put this in your back pocket and then it triggered the other spiral and the opposite.

SPEAKER_01 31:33

No, um, so the other thing I started doing is I, for the last almost 10 years, I have heard stories. Hurry up, because I gotta pee. Do you need a break first? No, I'm I'm good, but I gotta pee. We can keep going while you pee. Do you want me to follow you to the bathroom? No, just keep going. Um so I have I've grown up on Mount Rainier Scedic Railroad from the ages of 29 to 37, uh hearing you uh talk about stories about watching watching Blackie and Tiny switch the yard. It wasn't Blackie and Tiny switched the yard, it was Blackie switching the yard.

SPEAKER_03 32:13

Blackie switching the yard. And the thing that got me was is that I mean, Lord knows I've heard enough tiny stories. Oh my god. The the thing that so when Blackie was switching the yard one day, and so the thing about Blackie Mosier was that he was a gruff guy. Yeah, he was a really, really gruff guy. And every once in a while there were like these little windows that opened up in his personality, and you could actually see kind of into his past. And we were switching the yard one day, and he started going into this long because I mean, you've seen his education.

SPEAKER_01 32:43

Well, I'm I'm gonna read his obituary, I'm gonna give the highlights of his obituary because I didn't know for a long time.

SPEAKER_03 32:52

You didn't know as much as I knew about Blackie. So when I when I sent you that thing that had been written about him, you were just like, holy shit, and I'm like, well, yeah, that's Blackie.

SPEAKER_01 33:01

I went on another deep dive to the point that I contacted his um significant other's daughter to get I mean, I went full-blown. Oh, it is I stalked real hard yesterday, but anyway. Um, so Blackie was born in 1931. Um he was, you know, and this sort of just goes on to say that he was a 15, 57-year, 11-month, you know, three-day Mason. Um, you know, he hung out at the hot rod garage on Thursday nights, um, really liked it. Turn, turn, turn by Pete Seeger and later the birds. Um But then it got into things that I didn't know that Blackie was Cherokee. Um, that his um So the reason why he was called Blackie, so everybody knows, is because of the I didn't know this. Because of his black. I remember asking at one point if Blackie was black because that's not a big bigger black.

SPEAKER_03 34:02

He had just he had when he was younger, he had this just raven black hair. I mean, like black, black hair, and he always had a beard. So everybody called him Blackie because of how dark his hair was.

SPEAKER_01 34:15

So his grandmother in Oklahoma took him in. I guess there were all I really know is that he said his mom didn't really want him. Um he didn't know who his dad was. No, no, no. At that point at that point, yeah, okay. Um so his grandmother in Oklahoma um raised him, and he was sent to a white church one week and ter Cherokee teachings the next. So he was sort of living between two cultures. His grandmother passed when he was twelve, and folks wanted to play place him in an orphanage, and um in those days what would have happened is he would have been sent to what they called an Indian school, which was basically forcible re-education. Yep. Um and you know, this is this happens in populations, indigenous and native populations all over the world. Well, I mean Columbia.

SPEAKER_03 35:10

Columbus said that the Native Americans were gonna be the easiest to subjugate anyway, so let's just get that out out of the way. It's awful stuff.

SPEAKER_01 35:19

Um that's coming from the guy that votes red 90% of the time. I know I know. Um so this article goes on to say that Blackie rebelled and he he hopped trains and road trains all the way to the northwest. Yep.

SPEAKER_03 35:33

From the he didn't know that his dad was up here, but he had a pretty dang good idea of the state. He thought he was. Um, mind you, this is before he even turns 15 years old.

SPEAKER_01 35:43

He's 12. He's 12. He's 12. Um so he r arrived in the greater Seattle area and was asking a bunch of employees of the Great Northern Railroad questions. Um, and then he was eventually questioned by his father. Um and they reunited. And Blackie started basically working on the Great Northern when he was a kid.

SPEAKER_03 36:11

A kid, a real young kid. And I mean, I mean, because you gotta remember he went to he went to work on the Alaska Railroad, which our Alaska Boxcar. He the thing about Blackie, he's he he kept all his records from all the stuff that he ever did. Yeah, and when our Alaska Boxcar actually showed up on the property, he looked at it and he goes, I've seen this car before. And he went home because he lived in Euphrates at the time. Then he came back and he had his record log with him that he had been on a train that he had pulled that boxcar before.

SPEAKER_01 36:44

I mean, just it's so again, I'm reading this, I'm reading this obituary, and it says Well, that wasn't his obituary. This is an article, but I read several obituaries too. Yeah. Um said that he had won a scholarship from the Great Northern to go to Princeton to study mechanical engineering. Um so this kid that was gonna be sent to you know, an orphanage in Oklahoma. Popped a train from Oklahoma to Washington State, worked for the railroad as a kid, ended up winning a scholarship, went to Princeton, and then after that worked for the Alaska Railroad, but then um went to Korea. Yep.

SPEAKER_03 38:17

And what did he do over there? He drove trains. Um got blown up a couple of times driving trains, but he drove trains.

SPEAKER_01 38:23

Drove trains in Korea with a Princeton education.

SPEAKER_03 38:28

Yeah. Um and then the thing of it is with the Mosier family is the the the depth of railroad history that that family alone covered. Because you gotta remember something. He he was he was a part of it, but his grand his father worked for it at the hit one of the hill railroads. His grandfather worked for Northern Pacific, his great-grandfather was one of Jim Hill's construction engineers building the Northern Pacific across the world.

SPEAKER_01 38:55

Well, and we know, and we'll get into this within Squally, right? Like, I mean, there's oral I just yeah, the Great Northern Railroad in the history of like native populations, too, is yeah, it's it's it's enough to make your head up. So yeah, so Blackie until 95 worked for um Northern Pacific when they merged with BN, and after that point he was exclusively at Mount Mount Rainier. Um so and I'm I'm sort of sitting here reading through this, going, like, oh my god, what a story. Um I mean well, I grew up with a guy. You grew up with a guy, but you know, when selfishly, when we're trying to contextualize the impact of the railroads on indigenous populations, right? Like the railroad didn't necessarily it's it's a different story, right? And it's it's a way that put like it's it's a way to connect stories, right, is to what was happening and you know, the different populations that worked on the railroads, not just you know, there's one story that's often told, but it's a lot more subtle than that. Like when we um when we first started out, we had a bunch of Nisqually elders come out to the site, and we didn't know how that meeting was gonna go.

SPEAKER_03 40:18

But pretty soon they were all off with me because I didn't care about swearing, and we were talking about drinking and all the other things. Meanwhile, everybody else is in their business suit.

SPEAKER_01 40:26

So everyone's sort of like going like, hey, railroads and Native Americans do not have what is considered to be a great relationship. But what did he say?

SPEAKER_03 40:38

He said railroads and Native Americans go hand in hand.

SPEAKER_01 40:41

Yeah, and it was it was just it was a thing conversation.

SPEAKER_03 40:45

One of the things he did end up saying was that our histories at that point were interlinked.

SPEAKER_01 40:50

Yeah, so the the Great Northern prospected the railroad in like 1865.

SPEAKER_02 40:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:55

And the Nisqually had been, you know, driven. There was like the Nisqually Wars and the Puget Sound Wars at the time, and the Nisqually had been moved to a reservation that were in Etonville. And we know that the Great Northern Railroad um hired local Indian guides, is what they said. Um then the And then Hanford shows up and he goes, Well, yeah, our oral histories tell us that you know they showed up at the reservation, hired some folks, and that, you know, we just took you all for a walk from village to village on all of our the thing of it is that it it wasn't the Northern Pacifics people that showed up to hire them for it, it was the Milwaukee Roads people, the skies at the Tacoma and Eastern.

SPEAKER_03 41:42

And the two railroads were racing for Kapalsin because Kapalsin was the key to get to Mount Rainier National Park. Yeah. And the Milwaukee Road ended up beating them to Kapalsin first.

SPEAKER_01 41:53

And um, but in Hanford had said, um, this is Hanford McLeod, he's like, well, yeah, our history says we just took you from a took you all for a walk from village to village, you know, and basically what would have been our highway.

SPEAKER_02 42:05

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 42:05

You know, and obviously it's a little tongue-in-cheek, but when you look at a lot of people say, oh, the railroad is built through all of these former Nisqually villages, and the history doesn't necessarily intersect.

SPEAKER_03 42:16

It doesn't, but if you stop and look at it, then the new highway is actually Mountain Highway is built on what the natives called the trail to the mountain. Yep. Along with the railroad, very closely following what Mountain Highway ended up being.

SPEAKER_01 42:33

So I guess my my point in all this is um and wanting to be respectful about how we're telling the stories and you know communicate with their families, right? We're not that far removed from Blackie Mosier.

SPEAKER_03 42:47

Oh no, we're not. Right. I mean, my me especially. I mean, something someone I was reading something somewhere the other day where someone said that two people have two deaths in their lives.

SPEAKER_01 42:57

Where the first- You can just commented on one of our Facebook comments.

SPEAKER_03 43:02

The first death is when you leave your physical body and you actually die. Your second death is when the last person that knew of you says your story and speaks your name. And that's the ripples we leave. Basically, and that's so that's like for me, Blackie was a huge chunk of my life. A lot of people don't realize just, I mean, back before I even started hanging around the railroad, I had a cat named Blackie. And the reason being is because whenever we would because we were Martin's got a Lego dog named Rowdy. Yeah, but every year we would show up to go for a ride, and of course, my dad would, you know, bullshit with him and whatever. And the very first time I ever rode in the steam locomotive was with Blackie. It was the fucking climax of all locomotives, and we damn near died on the way back to town. But the thing of it is is that when I started hanging out as a kid, he had every right to sit back and say, You need to get because you're not old enough. But instead of saying you need to get, you're not old enough, what he would do is he'd find me things to do. And he would tootle. I mean, he would he he would he would teach. He, I mean, if I had a dollar for every time he called me stupid, I'd be rich. But if I had a dollar for every time that he actually taught something, I'd be even richer because the stories which he told growing up in the area were just like, oh my god. It was just line in line with my grandfather, you know.

SPEAKER_01 44:24

Yeah. So I mean, it's but to me, you know, just telling these stories um does just such a better service to the history of this place. Way more than providing statistics.

SPEAKER_03 44:39

As you said the other night, you used texted me and was just like, oh my god, the history of Mount Rainier Scenic Railroad reads like an epic historical fiction.

SPEAKER_01 44:48

Yeah. It would be too contrived, though. It's like yeah. So I texted you last night and I said, uh, you are remarkably normal, considering the folks that you grew up with at this railroad. I said you are as normal as you can be. And what did you reply?

SPEAKER_03 45:06

But you mean growing up with big guys in gym shorts with the balls hanging out is not normal. Which brings us to Tiny Freeman. Brings you to tiny I I th and this is where Calvin's gonna start to h go hunting for beeps. Because there isn't a tiny quote on the planet that doesn't have the word f in it.

SPEAKER_01 45:25

Yeah, those both need to beep beep. So all I've known about Tiny for a long time is that Tiny was not Tiny. That Tiny's business card that shows a bowler hat covering its junk is still on display in the break room.

SPEAKER_03 45:38

I'm fun, you're not. And when the back of the bull of the card says fk you, f me, f with that with chuck boxes for everything. And then uh okay, so you know he ran the Shea when it was at Pickering, he was a Pickering locomotive engineer, and he ran our Shea, and he told me one of the funniest stories I've ever heard. Okay. Off that um when running a locomotive, and it involved two people fing in a tent in the middle of the tracks. And Rowdy dies. Oh my god, it's great. And Rowdy dies. Oh my god. You're bringing back pieces of my childhood.

SPEAKER_01 46:18

Um so I'm doing this thing, right? I'm on my full full-blown spiral uh yesterday, and I Google Tiny Freeman. Tiny Freeman.

SPEAKER_03 46:30

You find out that he ran for Congress.

SPEAKER_01 46:33

I find out that this man was the quote unquote mayor of Fremont. Um there was one internet thread that had more comments about his balls than anything I've seen. There's one post that's from almost 10 years after he died that says, Does anyone remember Tiny Freeman? This is in like vintage Seattle, and there's 115 comments. The guy was in its wine.

SPEAKER_03 46:56

Yep. What what he made his own wine. And he sold it for a buck fifty? Yep. He ran for government office at one point in time, and his headquarters was the tavern in Fremont.

SPEAKER_01 47:08

Yeah, that was his that was his campaign headquarters.

SPEAKER_03 47:11

That was his campaign headquarters. And if you wanted if you wanted to bring concerns to Tiny Freeman, you just went down there and that's where he handed you the card that said, I'm fun, you're not f this fucking. Tiny himself was just a character. So what was it like growing up on with that guy?

SPEAKER_01 47:30

So for I mean, and this is in Seattle, right? This isn't even Mount Rainier.

SPEAKER_03 47:34

This isn't even before he gets to Mount Rainier, and this is post when he was in California blogging with the Pickering Lumber Company.

SPEAKER_01 47:40

Yeah, so I mean his whole life he was working for railroads and logging and I didn't realize wine and hawking it on a street in front of the room.

SPEAKER_03 47:49

I didn't realize until he was until I was older. Because you gotta remember a lot. He was also in the army too. He was in the army too. Because what people gotta remember is when when I was hanging around these people hardcore, I was like 11, 14 years old. And the impression that they left was like, oh my. I mean, here's the thing is that what that Dave Overholser or whatever his name is, since the I have I use the the English language and the word fk uh artistically or whatever. You gotta remember, I grew up with Blackie Mosier, Tiny Freeman, and Deadwood.

SPEAKER_01 48:21

Yeah, I mean he worked tugs from Seattle to Alaska. He was a truck driver, who is a Vietnam vet, which allowed him to use the VA hospital, blah blah blah. Um he was at Snoqualmy, he was an engineer here, he worked in logging camps. He ran for Congress. Uh he declared him unofficial mayor of Fremont. He had a DJing enterprise, um a newspaper contributor. What I'm scared of is I'm gonna grow up and grow old and be like. Yeah. With an 1890s mustache and a black bowler hat.

SPEAKER_03 49:03

The thing of it is, for the folks at home, is okay, so she just gave the perfect description of him physically, but the entire time I knew him, he wore like 1980s gym shorts. You know the ones that are way too short? With no underwear on underneath them, and his ball sack was always hanging out one leg or the other. Always and when I was uh when I was young and growing up, uh my one of my first years on the railroad, I was sitting at what used to before we had a depot, it was the baggage car and the Heistler and all that sitting down there in town. I was sitting there waiting for the train to get back because I was gonna get on it, and because I had my season pass. And I hear the diesel horn coming, I think, oh god, the train's broken. And here comes the Alco and the Morrison Knutsen car. And it's Tiny running it. And he rolls up to a stop, he looks down and he goes, Hey kid, what are you doing? I'm like, I'm waiting for the train. He goes, No, you're not, get on. I need somebody to go with me. These don't know how to stop at the crossings. Calvin beep it all out. The Calvin beep it all out. You're on overtime at this point, buddy. Anyway, so we take so I get up on the train. Now he's sitting there with his legs splayed out in the engineer seat of the goddamn freaking alcohol, and his balls are hanging out the entire time. I can't look at him. And he's like, hey, see that thing over there? Yeah, it was a bell ringer. Because the Alco used to have bell ringers on each side. He goes, remember we get to our crossing, you need to have something to do. You just read, you just ring the bell for me because I can't remember this shit. Every other word out of his mouth was either the C word or f. So we go down to Randall Sand.

SPEAKER_01 50:43

He's gonna be a great congressional candidate.

SPEAKER_03 50:45

Yeah, so we go down to well, I mean, look at me, I'm running on freaking bring back the whores. Anyway, so we go down to Randall Sand and Gravel, they load us up with with rock and the Morrison Kinocin, and we come back and he starts telling me this story about when he was running the Pickering 11, the 11, R. Shea, yeah, at Pickering. And he comes around the corner and there is this tent in the middle of the tracks. And he's like, oh shit. And so he he's rolling up on it, so he starts blowing the whistle because he doesn't want to stop because they're maxed out. If he stops, they can't get going again. Yeah. And he says these two faces look out at him, and then go back inside the tent, and the tent just starts making like cartoon gestures where there's there's bumps coming out on every same. Anyway, I can't describe it for the people at home. It's funnier than shit. Anyway, then two naked bodies come out of the tent, throw the tent in the back of a woody wagon, and then they take off. He thinks, oh well, this is great. They get like a hundred feet down the road, they turn around and they come back and they crash into the side of the shade. And so he shuts the throttle, they come to a stop, and he looks down at him, and they're both looking up at him, buck ass naked. And he says, Who the f taught you how to drive? and just opens the throttle wide open, and the crankshaft on the shea just tears the woody wagon apart. And they don't even stop, they head off for the freaking mill. And I'm sitting there at 12 years old going, this is fing funny shit. I can't believe mom let you hang out here. Oh, mom didn't have mom didn't. I I don't know if mom liked it or not, but I think mom realized that there was really I mean, because there wasn't anything she was gonna do about it. There was nothing she was gonna do about it, especially after well, like what I wrote the other night on my Facebook when I found that picture. Because you say, hey, can you do you know of any pictures on the five in the 90s? And I found that picture of the five in the 70s. At 17, I was like, oh my god, this reminds me of my first trip to Tacoma, where all this freaking wild shit happened.

SPEAKER_01 52:49

Yeah. I mean, I think it was at Randy Marquis that I think it was Tiny in the engine that tells the story about like some kids on the Nisqually Bridge and like leaking warm water from the engine down on him and telling him that they'd just dumped this.

SPEAKER_03 53:05

Yeah, I like No, I know which one you're talking about. Where the that what it was is there was a bunch of bungee jumpers trying to bungee jump off of one of the bridges and they didn't make it. So don't do that, folks. So we went over it and they opened up the water for the injector and blew water down on top of it. That's what it was. And then somebody told them that we had opened up the thing for the uh septic tanks. When I was a kid, yeah, I know. The um when I was a kid when I first started around here, the bathrooms for the 901 and the 902 were the old school bathrooms where they just went right out on the tracks.

SPEAKER_01 53:34

So when you see those signs, don't flush in the station, people always still ask us if you can flush in the station. Yeah. That was why.

SPEAKER_03 53:42

That was why because you were gonna dump a turd in the freaking platform.

SPEAKER_01 53:45

Yeah. Um but anyway, so I think that um one of our jobs is to figure out how to take these stories that are sort of just bigger than the thing of it is the And put it in a damn museum.

SPEAKER_03 53:59

Here's the here's the the point of fact: Mount Rainier Scenic Railroad wouldn't exist today if it hadn't been for Blackie Mosier. Yeah. Because when Jack left, but part 230. People in the YouTube, in the YouTube and everything always hear me talk about when part two thirty came around. I lived through that. Okay. There was this massive amount of no one really knew what the hell to do about it. And Blackie Mosier came along after Jack left, and the FRA sit there saying Mount Rainier Scenic Railroad needs to be shut down. Yeah. You guys don't know what you're doing, you're not doing anything safe. You are gonna be shut down. Production is getting antsy. Anyway, Blackie Mosier stepped in with his foot the people he knew and saved the place and got the place turned back.

SPEAKER_01 54:44

How long do you how many years do you think that Blackie spent at the throttle of a locomotive? 50.

SPEAKER_03 54:52

To be honest with you, um, he showed up the last time he showed up here, he he he wanted to, I think he knew the end was near. Yeah. And the 70 had just been uh uh rebuilt. And he wanted to go for a ride on the 70, and and part of that was he just wanted to pull the throttle one more time. Yeah. And um, we won't say their names, but we know they're pricks, said no and treated him like shit and ran him off the property. And six and less than four months later, he was dead. And um that's all he wanted. He l to watch that man on either seat of a steam locomotive was pure magic. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 55:34

So um the question for you is uh sit your asses back down. We're getting there. I'm I'm wrapping up. I'm wrapping up. Um What do you think your legacy will be? I don't know. I hope it's a good one.

SPEAKER_03 55:53

What do I want my legacy to be? That you want to be taxidermied and hung on the wall of the shop.

SPEAKER_01 55:58

I want to be mounted a bad boob job. I want to be taxed. I want it to be a bad taxidermy job. Yeah, I'll I'll get a nice pair of boobs out of it.

SPEAKER_03 56:07

Uh no, they're gonna be terrible. It's gonna be like a couple of freaking tennis balls in a frickin' sack. Give me more than I got now, Frank. And it'd be more like a couple of bean bags and a freaking pair of nylon. Give me something to work with. Something, something. Um, like the Vegas statues where the boobs and the freaking bucket was polished. That's what it's gonna be like.

SPEAKER_01 56:25

Well, I that's that's my goal, right? Is I I want a bad tax and a job. I was in DC and I was talking to my friend, my best friend Natalie, and I was like, hey girl, when I go, I just I need you to do this for me. And this is where I want to start to be number one again on the friend list. Well, right, because you got all like, what do you mean your best friend? Um and I uh anyway, so Natalie, who is a doctor and very high functioning and all of that nonsense, starts looking into the legality of human taxidermy, and she's like, I can't do it. So I text you and I'm like, hey, I needed like DIY taxidermy job, and you're like, it's not gonna be good. And it was like a fucking moment. But you're like, yeah, absolutely. So I want my legacy is I want to be taxidermied and I want to be mounted on the wall of the shop like a little gargoyle, just sitting there haunting you all for the rest of eternity.

SPEAKER_03 57:19

My legacy, I hope to God, is that I am able to do something the way that I was given here. That is what I hope my legacy is, is that when I first started coming around here, I was 11 years old.

SPEAKER_01 57:33

And they had every right to tell me to get the fuck out. Here's the thing, friend. I have no doubt that your legacy will be a good one. I'm not the one playing with steam engines, though, so I don't think anyone's gonna remember me unless I'm taxidermied and mounted on the wall of the shop and rubbing the boobs is the like good luck charm, the start of the day. So there we have it. We're supposed to be moving on to the in the news segment because production got antsy with our history segment. But we're gonna talk about historic news. So, true or false, we have a steam donkey there that your grandfather lost his leg on, and we have the prosthetic hand that went with his amputated leg that's been donated to the museum.

SPEAKER_03 58:15

True. Um, so a lot of people don't know. In the news, folks. A lot of people don't know the big Willamette unit that used to sit in um the campground over here in Mineral, which is now sitting here in Mineral. My grandpa worked underneath that when he was so a lot. I mean, so you talk about connection. My great-grandfather started one of the first mills in the Little Mills Qually outside of Alder. Yeah. My grandfather and my grandfather, the the the donkey I want to jump in and be like, he was mine too, but we're not actually really. So my great-grandfather and my grandfather both, the donkey that's sitting in the park in Morton, that was their donkey. Um, he my grandfather was the Donkey Punch, and my great-grandfather was the guy in charge of the entire crew. Uh so when my grandfather went to work for back then, it was um this because this unit, it's not donkey, it's a unit. Uh, West Fork bought it brand new to on the Hood Canal, and it was one of the only things they brought up here from the Hood Canal. They took it over and logged the warehouser campus with it in 1926, and then it moved up here. And my grandfather was working underneath of it. They didn't realize that the hay rack rack boom was rotted on it because they moved it for a few years from place to place, and it broke. And when it broke, so a lot of guys sit back and go, Well, why does this it's a Willamette unit? The back engine set is Willamette, the front engine set is Seattle Ironworks, and uh a lot of people for over the years, I don't understand why this is. Well, it's when the hay rack broke, it was pulling up logs the size of fucking buildings, and it it literally ripped the front engine set off of it. Well, as the logs tumbled down the hill, my grandfather was trying to run out of the way of them. One grazed him and it completely crushed his leg, foot and all, from the knee down. And so he ended up going to the hospital. They rushed him to the hospital in Morin. Yep, and then he went to the hospital in Seattle. And that is where my grandmother was working. As a nurse. As a nurse. And uh, long story short, is several surgeries later he lost most of his leg. But the hand.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:29

Hold on, hold on. So I'm gonna from So I'm asking mom this story one day, um, right, because this is what I do is I ask people questions and I find information and blah blah blah blah blah. So your mom's telling me this story. She doesn't get to the end, but like three days later, she comes waltzing in with a prosthetic hand.

unknown 1:00:52

The hand.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:53

And she's like, here's the hand. Yep, the hand. It's for you, here's the hand.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:59

The hand, yep. So anyway, go ahead. So while he was at the hospital, they had this prosthetic hand, and the hand is rubber. It's a rubber hand. Yeah. And what he had done is on his stump, well, so the guy next to him had lost his hand. So had lost his hand. So what he had done is he'd he'd put the hand on his stump, and they would go, because back then they would wheel people around the hallways and stuff like that to get them out of their rooms. And so they would be wheeling him down the hallway of the big hospital up there in Seattle, and he had everybody in there convinced that his doctor had surgically grafted a hand to his leg. There's no family. I don't think it was that that happened in the 40s. Um, since then, the hand has been a thing that's just been passed down through the family. Yeah. And it's been one of the things of, hey, you need a hand, and they say yeah, and you throw the hand at it.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:53

And comes flying at you. So we don't necessarily know what the museum is going to look like when it reopens. We are actively working on it.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:01

But folks, there are the hotel in Morton. He was in that. Well, the fiddle. Well, the fiddle, you have the fiddle. You have the fiddle. But the hotel in Morton, he was staying in that hotel one night. He took his prosthetic leg off and stuffed it under the bed while the foot was hanging out. Yeah. And the guy that was sharing the room with him comes in and goes, looks at the foot and and goes, kind of has this look of like, what the fuck on his face. And my grandfather, who had this bad sense of humor, looks right at him and says, Don't worry about him, he'll wake up in a few hours. And the guy left the room and slept in the hall and left the room to my grandfather the entire time. The Leroy wrote up in uh up in uh I have a book, it's called uh Before It's Gone. Yeah, it's got a lot, a lot of what my grandfather and my great grandfather did.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:54

Yeah, because he formed a surveying company after he lost his leg.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:57

Leroy surveyors, both my grandfather and great-grandfather were part of that. And I didn't know it until uh I was talking about something to do with my grandfather in front of Tom Murray, and my and Tom Murray just kind of leans forward and goes, Is your grandfather Herb Leroy? And I went, Yeah. He goes, Your grand great-grandfather would be Wade Leroy. Really, yeah. He goes, God damn, they were the two best donkey punchers I ever had working for him. Something. And then after that, it was like there's there there was this weird relationship between almost like Tom Murray and Tom, I was like a second grandson to him or something.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:36

Because he treated me way different than anybody else around here. He'd always walk up because I chewed Copenhagen at the time. He was supposed to be chewing Copenhagen, and I'd be firing the locomotive, and I didn't know he wasn't supposed to be chewing Copenhagen. But when we'd go for a run with him in the locomotive, he'd walk up, he'd tap me on the shoulder, and he'd give me the the the look like hey, pinch. And I would slip in my can of Copenhagen and he would take a pinch out of it, put it in his lip, and then he'd just ride there the entire time until he went over to ride the run the locomotive. So it was weird. It was just like, you know, my family has always kind of been circling around Mount Rainier Scenic Railroad. It's been weird the entire time.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:11

Okay, moving on to the questions because production's over there getting antsy. Um okay. With the tubes, are you welding the firebox end or are they just rolled to seal them? Here in New Zealand, we're thinking about just rolling both ends.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:25

Okay, so the the the thing about that is it depends on what your firemen are capable of. If you got good firemen, you can roll both ends and not have to worry about it. If you got guys that are young and dumb and and new to the game, seal weld the firebox end, otherwise, they are going to leak. So we are going to be welding, seal welding the firebox into the tubes because when you're trying to teach people, that's just the way it goes. We got a lot of people to teach. We got a lot of people to teach. It makes your locomotive so much better for the teaching aspect of it. Um, one of our sister railroads down south, one of the things they had happen last Christmas was that they had a new fireman and some of the tubes started to leak. They had to take the engine out of service. But the seal weld does. The seal weld gives you heat transference. So it it protects long and the short of it because Calvin's over there getting antsy. Um, seal weld the firebox end if you want long-term results. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:24

Um we did that question.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:28

Click the pen. Boop, boop. Freaking key is starting to kick my ass.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:32

Southern Pacific 8984 asks, would it be possible to extend the runaround in LB by a few car lengths? You're not currently occupied by the hobo in. If not, could a longer it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. The short answer is it doesn't matter because we are constrained by the crossing and the highway. You're constrained by the crossing and the highway.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:48

The thing of it is, hobo in side of things, we don't own it. Yeah. The side of the side that that is towards the parking lot, we take away parking space. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:56

If anyone wants to donate us the hobo in, then we'll consider it. Basically. Since reopening, what are some of your most memorable days on the railroad?

SPEAKER_03 1:06:09

Being in the cab of the 70, at the end of the day, heading home. I think that the most memorable days to me were in 2023. And when we we were running on a hope and a prayer. We were doing it though. And you were at the hospital, and every day I you'd send me a text place and go, I don't know what the hell you're doing down there, but keep doing it. And Brian and I, who have been around the place, are Brian was 17 years, I was, you know, pushing 30 at this point. We're looking back at that train full and going, We're doing it. We're really doing it. This place has never done this before. We are doing it. And I think that some of the my my fondest memories have been on the 70 on the way home at the end of the day, saying, Holy shit, we we we packed them in that day. We had a successful day. And I think that for me, my fondest memory to to uh if you want to put it up there, because there's a lot of them, was when we were coming home at the end of Christmas, and you got to run the I I told you to run the engine for her last mile. But when we were coming home at the end of Christmas, and it was like, holy shit, we did it. We just put 175 days on a steam on one.

unknown 1:07:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:25

Steam locomotive. And we hauled 78,000 people in that process.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:31

Yeah, I think those for me are definitely uh you got more because your son's freaking just completely and totally one is um Martin was just over a year old when I started working here, uh, which was volunteering for a while to try and reform the damn thing. Um, and I was um home alone with Martin a lot, um, and like trying to work with the kid, and then he hung out at the railroad a lot because Tony and I and Martin spent a lot of time at the railroad. So you got then a two-year-old who just is like, you know, two-year-olds love trains and just like gaga over you over the shop, right? We would call every night and he would be like, Mom, say hi there, rowdy, rowdy, is the engine fixed yet?

SPEAKER_03 1:08:33

Right.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:34

And that became a thing for a while until he found Eve. And then uh shut up. There's a five-year-old. She's very sweet. We like her. We're planning an arranged marriage. Um but uh and then I spent a few weeks in the NICU with Momo. Um, and I was working while I because what are you what else are you gonna do in the NICU?

SPEAKER_03 1:09:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:03

You have a baby on your chest, right? Like just sleeping. You could spend a lot of time doing this, and it was a really, really like postpartum hormones wild. It's a really good distraction from the fact that you're not at home with your other two kids, one of which is also a newborn.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:18

Um, because that wasn't an option, because we yeah, 24 was rough. It was hell. 23, 24 was fucking rough from both aspects.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:30

It was hell. Um, but the my mom was visiting, and it was October, I think, and Momo had been out of the NICU, the twins were a few weeks old, and we came down for the first time, and the place was fucking packed. Yeah. And I remember standing on the platform and Martin is in his overalls watching the 70 come into. He's like, Mom, it's moving, it's moving, it's moving, it's moving. Mom, it's moving. And I have a video of it, and it's just Yeah. I mean, this week.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:00

That's the that's the best stuff. Is it's the little things. It's not the you get a local it to me, it's not the it's the people. To me, it's not gonna be the five getting done. It's gonna be the the memories that the five makes for people in the future, and for me, also the memories of how much work Chris Wendt has done.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:22

Everyone, everyone, but how much work Chris Wendt has done.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:24

Oh god, the the the five is Chris's baby. He's worked on that thing on on more on more. I mean, I think everybody expects me to freaking pull the throttle on that thing for the first time. It's just like, no, he's he's that's his. He's worked on it from every point of it from the very beginning to the very end. Moral of the story, it's about the people. It's about the people. At the end of the day, it's all about the people. Okay. Without the people, yeah, okay, yeah. Clean key together. Frick Alphonse's off the gone. My battery's gonna die! Bye.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:54

And that wraps up this episode of Off the Rails. A huge thank you to our totally real, definitely not made up production crew. Sound design by Microphone, catering by Cornelius Cobb, track maintenance provided by Rusty Switches, and marketing brilliance, courtesy of souvenir. I'm your host, reminding you to keep your hands inside the train at all times, because around here, things always go off the rails.