Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 January 1915 — BILL DAIDY'S CHAPTER [ARTICLE]

BILL DAIDY'S CHAPTER

By ROBERT F. HOFFMAN.

It is a feature of the glad, free life of this republic that every man is entitled to an opinion on everything under the sun, and, within wide limits, is entitled to the unrestricted expression of that opinion. Bill Daldy is one of those who believe there is good in the large exercise of that privilege, although of late years he has added caution to candor. In the old dayfcftie came in off his engine, loaded with the usual accumular tion df griefs over the shortcomings of the roundhouse, which are apt to loom large in the long watches of the night run. • He gradually grew the habit of closing his regular harangue to the round- . house foreman with a sort of peroration which summed up the real or im- ‘ aginary derelictions of everybody connected with the road, from call-boy to president. . ;r'lL,In an effort to break the -flow of Bill’s rough eloquence the roundhouse foreman unwittingly set Bill’s feet upon the path that led upward—downward, Bin laughingly insists sometimes.

“Bill, why in thunder don’t you write a book?” said the long-suffering foreman, when Bill had become more than usually aggressive in his none too gentle impeachments. “You are sure wasting your talent on an engine." Rill glared for a moment before he was able to let down the pressure of road management which he had mentally assumed, and then, as the recollection of a purchase he had recently made for his growing son flashed across his mind, he gave way to a slow and said: “Blamed if I don’t believe that’s a good idea, Ballard. Maybe I’ll just go ;you a chapter, when my boy gets lit with his machine.” So, Daldy, in his evenings at home, took to rehearsing his daily griefs to the boy, who laboriously hammered them out of the typewriter into grotesques of composition and the printr * B art. Daldy “dictated” and “revised," “killed copy” and “edited,” although he did not know it in those terms, and after many days what he had grown to call “The Chapter” was finished, decked out with border lines that fairly exhausted the resources of the boy and the eighty-odd characters of the .machine. Bill gloated over it for a week of nights, and then liked it so well that he decided to have it all done over again, in order that he might not only supply Ballard, but also send carbon copies of it surreptitiously to the superintendent of motive power, the division superintendent, and —holy of holies —the general manager. The superintendent of motive power duly received his copy, threw it in the waste basket, and remarked casually, "Bill!" He. liked Bill, but not Bill’s too free excoriations. The division superintendent read his copy and, laughing, pigeonholed it for future use in letting down the pressure of the superintendent of motive power when next they should lock horns over engine failures. The general manager took up his copy from its personal cover and read It from start-to finish, as follows:

Chapter One. If this don't fit your case, you get a clearance card right here. The board Is out for others. When you build an engine and want the most results and don’t care what kind, fix yourself with a lot of discouraged draftsmen, and, for chief, get a good wrangler that talks into his whiskers and don’t decide much. Tell them fellows, at the start, that you put them into that cheese-box office to stay, and they can’t break out onto the road to see an engine do' business, noways. Don’t pay any of them too much. They are working on paper, and you can easily fix the engine after we get it Hire a lot of master mechanics that know all about sawmills. There ain’t none around here, but you can see them running in the woods if you take a ride with me. They will be ready to lay up your new engine when it comes out. Fix up boiler steel specifications that you know are O. K., and then let the purchasing agent bluff you into taking something better but cheaper; he can prove it. That will sure give a lift, once in a while, to some of us fellows that’s a little slow about circulating in the scenery, and It will make things brisk in the boiler shop. Them fellows need work. They are too strong to'rest nights. Use hammered engine frames. If I was a track man l*d like to be able to put my hand on a busted weld and say, “Them’s It,’’ after the engine jumped the track and got pulled out of a borrow-pit. The dispatcher won’t care, if she don’t block the track. It makes work for the blacksmiths. Fix your spring-rigging so, when it breaks, the equalizer will hit, point down, in the track. Gives the engine a better start when she jumps. She will go farther and everything had ought to be made to go as far as it can. Truck-pedestal binder-bolts should set low enough to rip up a frosty pfacnk OTpephßg. - It gives the anghtet g_ good 'name as goers. One nut’s enough. Two itay on too well. Put your driving-box wedge-bolts in a safe deposit box behind tbs driving

wheels. Somebody might get at therw with a wrench, on the road. Wedgebolts had ought to be smelled or heard from when the journals screech; not semi. - '>l . If anybody thinks he wants to slack a wedge-bolt, let that man shoot the Jamb-nuts off with a gun. That’s what guns is for, and they’d ought to be carried In the tool kit. The roundhouse gang’s too good for the job. New engines don’t run hot soon enough to suit yours truly. Put a crew of hoboes in there and tell them they got to save oil and ram the cellar-packing down in with a pinchbar. They will do it. The babbit and stuff you drop over the division makes good ballast. Wall in your cellar-bolts, so if a fellow gets them out, digging babbitt out of the cellar, on’ & fast run, he can’t get them in again inside of flf-, teen minutes apiece. The dispatcher won’t care —ask him —and the engineer daresn’t. It’s all he can do to talk his way out of a lay-off. Don’t you worry .about front-ends. If the engine looks good to you, but don’t steam no more than a teakettle with the bottom out, let the trainmaster put on a helper once in a while. Three .or five years from now somebody else will have your job anyhow, and he’ll set most of your front-end furniture out on the scrap pile while he cleans house, and forget to put It back again. That will help some. If you’flnd there’s rooms to rent in the front end after you get it done, and the heater men show up again without the Incubator, fill her up with their stuff. It’s hang for us fellows, but it helps hold the front trucks down when _you’re going some. Bend your feed and air pipes as sharp and as often as you can. It Shows that nobody was looking and they freeze up quicker. Look out for your engine cab. Fix it so that if a fellow goes to the front door he can’t get back again to the throttle without getting orders from the dispatcher, showing that the main line of the cab is clear.

The boy allows we -are working too many nights at this. He wants a change. We are. So don’t bother about fire-boxes and ash-pans. When the president sends word that he “couldn’t see the right of way on his last trip for smoke,” send him to me, and I’ll tell him he was on the wrong end of the train. It was all clear ahead of the engine. That’ll make him know that we are men of some parts; part wood and part leather, with brass trimmings—which I am

Yours truly, WILLIAM DAIDY, Engineer. When a man has enough strength of character to get his head above the common level, however grotesquely he may at first appear, there is usually something in him worth observing. If he has balance and staying po>wers he may get his feet upon the solid, and a leader has been discovered. Somewhat in this fashion the general manager reasoned as he read Bill’s chapter. He called his secretary, and by careful question and reply it was soon established that neither* of them knew who William Daidy was, nor what of William’s chapter was fact and what fancy.

Therefore, the general manager made a brief investigation, put some pointed questions to the superintendent of motive power, who fumed a little, but electrified the master mechanic (as witness his short and simple inquiry of Bill), and thus Bill’s little seeds began to grow apace. Changes were made. Plans were devised and revised until new engines bore signs of Improvement These things were discussed on the home road, and the news of them went broadcast over many roads. Bill’s ideas bore the test of service, and flourished like the proverbial green bay tree, until finally they came before the “First Intelligence,” the “Great Arcanum,” or “Court of Laßt Resort” of the railroad mechanical world, and were called good. No longer bearing the name of “William Daidy, Engineer,” it is true, but labeled with the naihes of many men, for that is the way of the world, and the destiny of all things that are good enough to prove good. Bill never got beyond “Chapter Ono” of Ballard’s “book.” 'There wss no need. But having demonstrated that he was “a man of parts,” it was thought advantageous to transpose him to the. ranks of those he had smitten. Thus, Bill became a road foreman of engines—and more.