Atlanta Confidential/1960 (Part 2)

Men and the Mail in Underground Atlanta

At the end of my first quarter of college at West Georgia, I was desperate for money-just as I had been when I came to the campus three months earlier. Once school resumed, I would have a dribble of income from my work in the cafeteria and as a student assistant. But meanwhile…?  In those days, everyone had to evacuate the dorms for the holidays, so I would not only have to find a job, but find a place to stay near the job. I had car, but I had a high school sweetheart whose father was the station master at the Atlanta Terminal Company. 

Leon Burson took me in.  My girl- friend’s father was a big, strong guy, Irish-looking with his red hair, florid complexion and occasional flare of Irish temper.  He was a good man who had already taught me a lot about how to fix things. He served as the chief engineer of a submarine in the Second World War and was trained to repair any and every mechanical system on the boat. 

Leon left the family farm to join the Navy in 1938 and was on a sub in route to the Pacific where war was anticipated long before the attack on Pearl Harbor. His sub was ordered to Pacific in 1939, a voyage billed as a ‘good will” visit to the South American ports. While refueling in Montivideo, the war erupted and the German “pocket” battleship, Graf Spee-fresh from its standoff with three British cruisers in the Battle of the River Platt- was ordered out of it’s refueling berth by the neutral government of Uruguay.  British cruisers were waiting at the entrance to the harbor, so the German captain ordered the ship scuttled and sunk. Leon and the crew of the USS Stickleback watched as it sank. I could not have appreciated the fact that few American men had ever seen a sinking battleship, been to Montevideo, or witnessed the first deployment of an A-bomb.

 Leon had seen it all-and would see far worse in the Pacific campaign against Japan. As the war progressed, his old and outdated sub Stickleback was replaced by a long-range attack sub straight off the ways, the USS Salmon. He and the Salmon’s crew witnessed the first nuclear strike from the deck of his boat, a huge flash of light on a far- off city named Hiroshima. The Salmon was parked in the Sea of Japan where its crew was to retrieve any fliers downed by mechanical failure or Japanese warplanes. If the crew of the Enola Gay or Bock’s Car, the B-29 bombers that carried the first A-bombs, were shot down Salmon was to try to rescue the crew. But Japan was all but defenseless against air attacks by then.

 Trained as a mechanic and competent at Morse code, Leon found employment with the Atlanta Terminal Company after the war. It was better known to locals as “the Atlanta train station”, the city’s mechanical heart and the transportation hub for much of the southeast.  

The Terminal Station building was a palace when it was built in the 1890’s.  Each eight- hour shift  required someone to function as stationmaster, managing the incoming and outgoing freight and passenger trains, the switching of cars, the repair sheds,  the switchmen and the men who responded to any mishap in the railyards. It was a stressful job, much like that of a modern-day air traffic controller, I imagine.  And, this would be the guy I would have to answer to if I screwed up on the job he found for me as a mail handler, one of perhaps 60 men-all men then-who loaded and off-loaded the mail that flowed into and out of Atlanta.

What’s a conveyor belt? What’s a zip code? I suppose you were anticipating that mail handlers worked indoors amidst mechanical systems that sped the mail on its way. But zip codes, electronic scanners and mechanical sorters did not exist then-and would have had nothing to do with my work if they did. We handled the mail as it arrived and left the rail yards in big canvas bags. We loaded and unloaded mail cars alongside the tracks that sprawled southward from the passenger station. The tracks were laid at the  original level upon which the city had grown. Today, this is called Underground Atlanta. West and north of the station, the cityscape of sidewalks and storefronts had been built twenty feet or more above  the level of the train tracks. This provided underground supply systems to work, free of the traffic snarls-of horses and carts and later of automobiles and street cars. This subterranean world faced onto the train tracks converging at the Terminal. Along the sidings stretched shed-roofed docks from which freight and mail cars were loaded and unloaded. On their west side, these sheds along the tracks were open to the elements, and concrete docks made them accessible to the sliding doors on the train cars.

There was no instruction.  I was warned to wear warm clothing and buy a pair of White Mule leather gloves. It was the coldest winter anyone could remember, but the gloves were not for warmth. The canvas mail sacks were rough and a day of handling them would leave bare hands raw.

I did not notice the cold at first because I was amazed at the workings of the station, the great diesel engines powering in ahead of trains of fifty to a hundred cars. Unlike the steam locomotives, mostly retired from service after World War II, these new diesel engines-sometimes harnessed in pairs, stem to stern, were painted in bold colors with dynamic  stripes and carried the names of the great rail companies and systems I had only seen from a distance, speeding  by behind the striped cross bars, clanging bells and flashing lights at train crossings.

In fact, I had only been aboard a train twice in my life. I had traveled in a passenger car full of soldiers headed for Fort Knox, Kentucky from Augusta, Georgia. I was not yet four at the time, but I recall that I sat with my beautiful mother-Miss Burke County of 1938-amid a sea of men in uniform, all hoping to catch my mother’s attention and attaching now-useless war ribbons to my little jacket. We were headed to Fort Knox where my father was being discharged.

My other encounter with a train was later, when the “Freedom Train” carrying the nation’s most important documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence on a tour of the country before they were returned to the safety of the National Archives in Washington, D.C. A guard in full dress uniform consisting of one sailor, one marine, one army soldier, a coast guard member and one airman. I will look for the photo I have saved of me dressed in a wool suit with matching cap and lace-up shoes. It was hot as a tin roof in August inside that suit. And the political climate, which I could not have known about then, was also hot. Our visit was to a beautifully appointed museum on wheels, complete with custom glass cases of polished wood and chrome.  It had stopped in Waynesboro, Georgia where we lived after the war.

I would later learn that the tour had been rearranged to avoid some cities a because a controversy had arisen. Black leaders found the absence of any mention of the role African Americans had played in creating or preserving a free society disrespectful. Their concerns were confirmed when the Freedom Train visited the southern states. Local and state officials made sure that Blacks and whites did not stand in line together to see the exhibits. Of course, I knew nothing of such things as a child, but I was reminded of it in 1960 when I arrived at the Atlanta Terminal. The decade ending had been dominated by civil rights debates, court cases and “sit-ins.” School desegregation and busing to achieve integrated schools was already underway. The revival of states’ rights issues, white backlash and segregationist outrage were covered daily in the newspapers and on television. Signs and bumper stickers proclaimed the response of many southerners: “Impeach Earl Warren,” Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. And yet, when I fell in with my co-workers, all of them Black, it never crossed my mind that I would be in danger or might meet with hostility. And I did not. I was a strong boy and eager to work.  And, “college boy” I might be, but  I was doing a job that most of my classmates back at West Georgia would not have considered enduring.  

The work turned out to be hard but satisfying and at times, very exciting. When the mail was off loaded it worked this way. Big- wheeled freight carts, designed and built in the previous century, wood sided and painted green with red wheels, were spaced in a semicircle around the mail car door. A line was formed that stretched and branched to each cart. A “reader” stood just inside or just outside the box car door. Then with a hum, the handlers passed the bags individually to the reader who started a chant, calling out in a singsong fashion the destination inscribed on a tag attached to the rope that held the bag securely closed. The singsong was repeated down the line, determining where its handlers claimed the bag for the cart to which they were assigned. It was automated, but the cogs in the system were human beings, all involved in keeping the process moving and alive.

 My generation was keen on folk music and I realized immediately that I was participating in ritualized work, alongside men who sang the songs both because they had a purpose in the work and because there was comfort in the communal singing. “Sit down” when sung out sent a mail bag to the wagon being loaded for the City of Atlanta Post Office, while “Rock on” hummed along to the Rockmart cart and the city of the same name.  Even in my inexperienced boyhood, I realized I was experiencing history firsthand, and that I should try to remember what I was witnessing before it was gone.

Speed was not an issue. The Reader set the pace and the mail bags could not move along until he had read-or sung-their destination. Most bags were filled only with “flat mail’- letters and cards. The Christmas Season brought a tidal wave of mail and I was thrown into the breech at once. Sacks were bulging during the busy seasons, weighing forty or fifty pounds each—and occasionally much more. When the bags reached the handler alongside the freight wagons, the last man on the ground tossed the bag up to a man standing in the wagon-a “stacker,” who carefully built a pyramid of mailbags.

Once the wagons were filled to the top of their wooden side, the stacking began in earnest. Sacks were stacked half-in, half- out of the wagon, creating a bigger base for higher rows to be stacked. This was an art, maybe not of the familiar kind, but stackers were practiced and skilled, competing to see who could most completely utilize each wagon. The height was limited only by the height of the shed roof of the platforms some  twenty  or so feet above us.  If the mail bags were unable to pass under the rafters, the stacker lost the contest because the mail bags fell in an avalanche. And, once the stacking was completed the stacker had to find a way to get down without breaking an arm or leg. This did not deter the younger stackers, whose agility could be amazing.

Loading the outgoing mail required less specialized work. Entire carts were destined for a single station and were loaded in their entirety ACCORDING TO THE REVERSE ORDER IN WHICH THEY WOULD BE UNLOADED. I never knew anyone to give orders. It all happened according to practices that likely outdated the terminal building itself.

On some occasions we were witnesses to disaster, even tragedy. High above us and to the north about two hundred yards was the Mitchell Street Bridge, an overpass that carried traffic from the above -ground city over the dozens of sprawling train tracks and sidings, over the busy diesels and over a proud old steam engine that suffered the indignity of being demoted to use as a switch engine.  As we awaited the arrival of another mail car being pushed alongside our shed by this venerable and wheezing black  hulk ,  we turned toward the shouts of people running along the Mitchell Street Bridge toward a man in a business suit who had climbed onto the guard rail. He stood momentarily looking back at those rushing to help him, and then casually stepping off the sixty- foot arch of the bridge to his death on the tracks below.

Human error accounts for most accidents on the tracks. Even skilled and experienced switch- and signalmen make mistakes. Less often, engineers  miscalculate their speed or enter the yards to find another train directly ahead on the same tracks. On one occasion we were taking a break, awaiting the arrival of a fresh mail car on our siding and so we had a clear view of the switch yard.

We noticed a signalman walking with a lantern down the next siding over. He was wearing carefully starched and ironed bib overalls, a denim shirt and an engineer’s billed cap—the striped denim- kind with pleats around a high crown. He also was wearing what looked to be a brand new pair of high-gauntlet gloves. He looked like a railroad man out of a children’s book. And he was more conspicuous still because he was an albino. He came to the end of the siding where a gigantic butting block of iron rails and heavy timbers was attached to the end of the two rails. I should add that those final rails were welded to the next pair of rails in line. All this was to prevent a gently rolling car’s momentum from allowing it to carry a car out onto the ground. It’s a hell of a mess to get a train car back on its tracks.

There were no walkie-talkies then, no hand-held radios. Our resplendent signalman stood to one side of the tracks and motioned with his lighted signal for the switch engine to continue  toward the butting block to allow as much as many cars as possible to fit onto the siding.  The cars hit the butting block with such force that the safety device was irrelevant. There was splintering, grinding crash and two cars spilled end-to-end off the tacks, dragging two sections of rails with them. The first turned on its side. The second rammed into the first with a thundering noise that momentarily paralyzed the yard. I knew without doubt the switchman was in big trouble.

We had our work to do. But we also contributed to the storm of description and rumor that followed. No one ever found the dapper signalman. Despite the conspicuous image he had cut standing in the yard, no one could identify him, nor did the officials ever find him.  The consensus was that he was an imposter who was overcome by a desire to work at the exciting job of guiding trains. It was likely about the romance attached to the enormous and powerful engines, the rails that had built the country, the siren’s call of the engine’s whistle, the lure of the rails.

On Christmas morning, the mail slowed to a crawl. Packages and cards had been delivered. Santa had come and gone. The bitter cold relented and the rains set in. The next day the trucks arrived to offload the 1961 Sear Catalogues destined by rail to homes across America. They came to us on carts in bags of twelve. A reminder: Paper is heavy when amassed into catalogs. And Sears Catalogs were printed on thin, slick paper that felt like lead. Atlanta was the southeastern regional headquarters for Sears at that time, housed in a gigantic building located on Ponce de Leon Avenue, opposite the Atlanta Crackers Baseball Stadium. None of us could have guessed that we were nearing the end of an era and that Sears would crumble away.

During the next decade, like most working Americans, my young family would depend on Sears Revolving Credit Cards to finance our first lawn mower, washing machine and clothes drier. Of course, J. C. Pennies offered alternative brands and often shared the same shopping centers that were being built in every city of any size during the 1960’s and 1970’s. But their days were numbered, and the Atlanta Terminal along with most passenger service also would all but vanish. Rail passenger service numbers have steadily  declined since 1920, truckers labor unions such as the Teamsters and the completion of the Eisenhower-era Interstate Highway System, the freeways, would reduce rail traffic to shuffling bulk materials between storage facilities and seaports, a transition that would leave the United Sates far behind the other industrialized nations of the world in rapid transit. In much of the south, even the rails themselves have been taken up.

My classmates and I would not have guessed that air travel would become commonplace for most Americans, or that we might enter an age in which postal clerks were no longer required to read longhand-addressed packages or letters. Or that electronic scanners and zip codes would be largely displaced by electronic communications, by cell phones and computer messaging. But something is lost when we no longer need singing mail readers and their high-stacking crews, when human beings are relegated to poverty because foreign trade brings goods while sometimes diminishing the number of jobs available to Americans. Yes, many of those jobs were physically hard and low paying, the kinds of jobs that enable a young and inexperienced person to work their way through college. Jobs that teenagers can perform to help their struggling parents. Jobs that a parent might endure to permit them time to see to their children’s well being, or a bridge to the next full time job, the kind of jobs that now carry a stigma for the children of the wealthy and educated.

I would work through another two-week holiday season loading mail in 1961. And, I have ever since regretted that I did not take notes and record more about the lives of those around me, those patient older men to whom I was a “college boy.”ed but privileged boy,