Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 167, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 July 1913 — RETIRES WITH RECORD [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

RETIRES WITH RECORD

OLDEST RAILROAD CONDUCTOR IN COUNTRY ENDS WORK. 8. B. Lightcap of Kansas City Had 45 Years of Continuous Bervice With One Lins —Talks of Times' Changes. After 45 years of service, 34 of those year as conductor of a passenger

train, S. B. Lightcap, 816 Forest . avenue, Kansas City, has been retired at the age of seventy years, with a pension from railroad company of $64 a month for the re- v mainder of his life. ----- When Mr. Lightcap retired he was the oldest conductor in years of service, so far as he knows, in the United States.

Mr. Lightcap saw many changes in the methods of railroading. When he went to Omaha in 1868 it Was from Pittsburgh, Pa., where he had gone after being mustered out of the Union army. He was in the Fourteenth Pennsylvania cavalry and was in every principal battle in the east from the second battle of Bull Run to the surrender at Appomattox. “When I began as a passenger conductor from Kansas City to Brookville,” he said, Abilene was the northern end of the long cattle trail from Texas. There was not a bouse north of the railroad, where the principal part of Abilene is now, and I have seen thousands of Texas cattle grazing there. In all of the country for miles east of Abilene, where rich farms are now, there was not a settler and the sod unbroken. Saliha was a

very small village and in all the country west of there a plow had never been stuck into the sod. “I ran through Abilene in the days when Wild Bill Hickok was town marshal, and through Hays when Bill Cody now famous as Buffalo Bill, was marshal there. Many a time I saw the body of a man swinging from a telegraph pole. In' those days railroad trains in the west were infested with three-card monte men, and I knew Canada Bill, the notorious confidence man, who used to operate on the trains out of Kansas City. “I was well acquainted with Jim Bridger, the Indian fighter, scout and trapper who discovered Bridgets pass through the Rockies. I hauled .him many a mile.

“I hauled the rush of gold seekers to Denver and Deadwood, and later to Cripple Creek. I hauled the millions of immigrants who first settled Kansas and Colorado, for Ours was for many years the only railroad from Kansas City to the west. “Oner of my duties in those early days was to see that the tallow candles in the cars were lighted when dusk came. It was several years before we got oil lamps, and years more before we got’ gas light. We had no cJr brakes, but eased the train down at stops with old-fashioned wheel brakes operated by hand. Our engines then were much smaller than those in use now, and so were the passenger coaches. An average coach would carry 40 or 60 persons.” In his 46 years of railroading Mr. Llghtcap never had an accident that injured anyone, never had a passenger killed and was never Injured himself. He never had an adventure that he thinks is worth telling, either. His splendid health and physical condition refute the general belief that railroading is injurious in the long run. He owns the cottage in which he lives, and that, together with the pensions from the government and the railwaj com pan. are all I e has.

S. B. Lightcap.