Pythia Peay's Blog - Posts Tagged "pennsylvania-railroad"
Labor Day Excerpt from "American Icarus: A Memoir of Father & Country"
This Labor Day, I honor my Irish grandfather George Carroll, who was a machinist for the Pennsylvania Railroad, my Irish great-grandfather William Carroll, a PRR blacksmith, and my German great-grandfather John Feser, a member of the "seat gang" for the PRR. All three were plain and simple, hard-working laborers whose lives were bound up in the rhythms of early industrial America. Here is a scene from "American Icarus: A Memoir of Father and Country," in which my father and I are contemplating these photos:
"As we sat that day gazing into the faces of these workers, Joe and I fell silent. I found myself wondering about these men who were the undergirding of my life and who also laid the first transportation grid of the country I live in today: my two great-grandfathers, my grandfather, my father and his brothers, these sons of Altoona. Profound respect for the discipline, humility, and honest devotion these ancestors gave to the labor of their lives surges through me. I note the way I draw on these qualities in my own profession as a writer, and thank them silently in my heart for this inheritance—not of money, but of character, patience, manual endurance, and physical strength. These "Pennsylvania Forty-Niners" who "found a wilderness and builded [sic] an industrial empire" and who conquered the "triumphant conversion of steam to a useful agent" were indeed, as celebrated by the Altoona Chamber of Commerce, master builders.
But as much as we inherited the bolder, brighter, virtues of courage and perseverance from our laborer forebears, so we also bear in our American psyches and on our shoulders their physical weariness. We are a depressed nation, I believe, because we have not stopped yet to rest. Exhausting one industry, we immediately begin another. We are chronically tired because we cannot halt our manic building and development, cannot stay in place and take care of what is already there. This obsession may have been magnificent at one time, but it is outworn and has exacted a steep emotional toll. It has gone on too long. From the distance of a century, I ask my ancestors, now in their eternal sleep, to dream American dreams that are more rhythmic and sustainable in nature, and to rest in the soft hills of Altoona, land of good worth, where they lie buried.
"As we sat that day gazing into the faces of these workers, Joe and I fell silent. I found myself wondering about these men who were the undergirding of my life and who also laid the first transportation grid of the country I live in today: my two great-grandfathers, my grandfather, my father and his brothers, these sons of Altoona. Profound respect for the discipline, humility, and honest devotion these ancestors gave to the labor of their lives surges through me. I note the way I draw on these qualities in my own profession as a writer, and thank them silently in my heart for this inheritance—not of money, but of character, patience, manual endurance, and physical strength. These "Pennsylvania Forty-Niners" who "found a wilderness and builded [sic] an industrial empire" and who conquered the "triumphant conversion of steam to a useful agent" were indeed, as celebrated by the Altoona Chamber of Commerce, master builders.
But as much as we inherited the bolder, brighter, virtues of courage and perseverance from our laborer forebears, so we also bear in our American psyches and on our shoulders their physical weariness. We are a depressed nation, I believe, because we have not stopped yet to rest. Exhausting one industry, we immediately begin another. We are chronically tired because we cannot halt our manic building and development, cannot stay in place and take care of what is already there. This obsession may have been magnificent at one time, but it is outworn and has exacted a steep emotional toll. It has gone on too long. From the distance of a century, I ask my ancestors, now in their eternal sleep, to dream American dreams that are more rhythmic and sustainable in nature, and to rest in the soft hills of Altoona, land of good worth, where they lie buried.
