Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 209, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 August 1919 — TIME TO SEEK YOUR TRAIN [ARTICLE]

TIME TO SEEK YOUR TRAIN

Preliminary Windup of Announcer Should Be Signal for Intending Traveler to Get Busy. A train announcer is a much misunderstood individual. His is indeed a much-abused calling—of stations. But those uncouth, unintelligible, Inarticulate mouthlngs which are his wont when properly warmed up to his work are, if you must know, merely an evidence of your own abysmal ignorance, says Henry H. Cralgie in Judge. What he is really reciting through his megaphone, and which sounds to your uneducated ear like a cross-sec-tion of a buzzsaw apd an asthmatic phonograph, is probably a poem from the Sanskrit, or some delicate strophe from the Syro-Chaldaic poets. It goes sometlilng like this: “Blpxz-r-r-rzyz-nowreddyntrackfour,” but it is not his fault if you need an interpreter to tell you what he is saying. ' Paraphrasing the Immortal words of a contemporary—l think we may call it the RRR of NG—“Your program is Your Timetable,” and about as useful o you as a menu card a la Francaise s to a deaf mute with an intensive appetite for ham and eggs. For your timetable is really your key to the cryptic utterances of the train announcer —and nobody is supposed to understand either. Under the- hypnotic spell of his subtle eloquence you do not miss your train—until it has pulled out, and sometimes not then. If you are slightly deaf it adds to your enjoyment of the occasion, or you can make a game of it, as some do, by utilizing an opera glass in an effort at lip reading. But if you are wise, at the first sound of his preliminary windup you will hunt up that train of yours by main force —and the devil take the MndmosL Delays are dangerous. -•