January 2011

Once upon a time—some eighty-three years ago—a likable lad named James Aloysius Farley was horn in the milage of Grassy Point, New York, on the west bank of the lower Hudson River, to “poor but honest”parents, Irish to the core. When he was nine, his father was killed in an accident. “Jimmy” promised his mother he would help her run the grocery store and saloon, go faithfully to Mass, and neither smoke nor drink. He has kept every one of those promises. When he grew to manhood—six feet two inches—he wed Elizabeth Finnegan, whom he had known all his life, and lived happily with her until her death in 1955. He also commenced another lifelong and still warm affair, common to young Irishmen of his generation—this one with politics, inside the hospitable embrace of the Democratic Party. And it was this that brought him to a place in life where he spoke as a friend to Presidents, prime ministers, and popes, and even heard his own name placed in nomination for the Presidency.

In the early 1870’s two American scientists began a vicious personal contest for position and eminence in the world of science. As vertebrate paleontologists they delved into the crust of the earth for evidence of ancient life, at a time when the surface had barely been scratched and popular interest in such discoveries was intense. In the infancy of a new science, both men sought immortality. Their quarrel led them to maneuver within the institutions that served American science, and their story reveals much about the workings of that institutional complex. Edward Drinker Cope, a Philadelphia Quaker—elegant chestnut mustaches and a jaw that was an affront to the peace—was barely thirty when the decade opened, yet already his opposition to Darwin as well as his reputation for precocious brilliance was well established among fellow scientists. His chief rival was balding, bearded Othniel Marsh of Yale College, nine years older, slower, more methodical, and less established. Once they had been friends of a sort, but paleontology and old bones had come between them.

The story begins at the fence of a slaughterhouse two or three miles outside the town of Oroville, California, at dawn on August 29, 1911. Oroville, then a town of some 3,800 people, is about seventy miles north-east of Sacramento.

Personal charm and affability are traits not commonly associated with revolutionaries, and rarely has an agent of social upheaval been held in such universal esteem by his contemporaries as was Dr. Joseph Warren. He seems to have been a man nearly everyone liked, and his qualities come down to us in those dignified adjectives of the eighteenth century—gentle, noble, generous. So it is difficult to know if it was because of these characteristics or in spite of them that he was one of a handful of provincials most feared by British officialdom.

The lithograph of the Hinkley locomotive that appeared on the cover of our December, 1970, issue elicited a response from Mrs. Gretchen R. Rändle, librarian and curator of the Newcomen Society in North America, which is situated in Downingtown, Pennsylvania. Not only does the society have a similar lithograph in its possession but also a model of an 1870 Hinkley, built for the Boston & Albany Railroad, that has an interesting history. To quote Mrs. Randle: The model was built by George EH Whitney, grandnephew of Eli Whitney and a nephew of Amos Whitney, a founder of Pratt and Whitney Company. George Eli Whitney started the model at age thirteen and completed it eight years later in 1883. He made every part himself using blueprints from the Hinkley Locomotive Works. Each part was carefully checked for tolerances and quality by his uncle Amos. The engine has been operated by live steam on five-inch gauge track.

The end of an era in United States maritime history was marked in the quiet twilight of last January 8, when the Prudential-Grace Lines ship Santa Rosa slipped from her pier in Manhattan on a cruise to the Caribbean with 187 passengers on board. She was the last regularly scheduled American-flag passenger ship to sail from an Atlantic Coast port. Her final run left only four American liners in the ocean passenger service, and they all operate from ports on the West Coast.

The switchmen knew by the whistle’s moans
That the man at the throttle was Casey Jones.

As the ballad says, Casey Jones was a famous hand at the whistle. His was homemade, with six cylinders banded together, and he could make it cry like a plaintive whippoorwill, say prayers, or scream like a banshee.

No more ballads will be written about locomotivewhistle maestros, for their day is gone forever. The whistle still talks, but it can no longer sing. Its rise and fall is a saga that can bring fond memories to those over forty, unheard-of tales to those under, and fascinating anecdotes to all.

A PARTING SHOT OLD CAMPAIGNERS PEARL HARBOR, 1899 IT RAN IN THE FAMILY THE LAST VOYAGE