7758: Contextual Cultural Cluelessness…?

A Los Angeles Times story on the oldest living Pullman porter is accompanied by a banner ad for Net-A-Porter.com.

7757: I’ve Been Working On The Railroad.

From The Los Angeles Times…

Oldest living Pullman porter looks back
Lee Wesley Gibson, 100, began working for Union Pacific in 1936. The railroad job helped him lift his family into the middle class.

By Ann M. Simmons, Los Angeles Times

When Lee Wesley Gibson began his new job as a coach attendant with Union Pacific Railroad in 1936, the country was in the grips of the Great Depression.

Millions of Americans were out of work. Like so many others around the country, Gibson moved from Texas to California in search of new opportunities. Within a year he landed a job with the railroad in his new hometown, Los Angeles.

It was the beginning of a 38-year journey, during which he traveled the country and ultimately landed a much-coveted job as a Pullman porter, one of the uniformed railway men who served first-class passengers traveling in luxurious sleeping cars.

“I was very happy,” Gibson said. “It helped me feed my family … take care of them.”

Like thousands of other African Americans of his era, Gibson had found a job that provided steady work and helped elevate his family’s socioeconomic status. He was able to buy a car and a brand new home.

“For African Americans, it was a middle-class job,” said Lyn Hughes, founder of the A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum in Chicago, which celebrates the contribution of African Americans to the nation’s labor history. “It represented a sort of freedom, flexibility and education all in one bundle.”

The Pullman Palace Car Co. was founded by George Pullman in 1867 and was most famous for the development of the railroad sleeping car, which featured plush upholstery, marble-topped wash basins and lavishly decorated interiors. In the beginning, the company hired only African American attendants.

In 1925, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters became the country’s first all-black labor union and helped pave the way for equal employment benefits; it later played a role in the civil rights movement.

Today, at 100, Gibson is the oldest surviving Pullman porter, according to records kept by the Randolph museum. There are fewer than 50 of the railroad men surviving.

“It was hard,” Gibson said of his work. “But it was fun.”

On May 21, the centenarian celebrated his birthday with more than 200 of his friends and family, which includes three daughters, six grandchildren, 18 great-grandchildren, 13 great-great-grandchildren and one great-great-great-grandchild.

President Obama, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, the Union Pacific Black Employees Network and the USA Retirement Railway Board all sent cards, certificates of recognition or gifts.

Born in Keatchie, La., Gibson was the second of two children raised by a single mother. The family later moved to Marshall, Texas. When Gibson graduated from high school, he wanted to enroll in tailoring school, but the family couldn’t afford it.

Instead, he worked at odd jobs and started a cleaning and pressing service, before moving to Los Angeles in 1935 in search of a better life. He lived with a friend, earning his keep making sandwiches at a local tavern and at one time doing cleaning for a food production company.

Then one day in 1936, a deacon at his church who worked for the Union Pacific Railroad as a coach attendant asked Gibson’s wife, Beatrice, if her husband would be interested in a job with the railroad. Gibson jumped at the opportunity.

“He took me to the superintendent,” Gibson said, “and they hired me on the spot.”

In the late 1960s, Gibson graduated to the position of Pullman porter. His first trip in this new role was to Promontory, Utah — famous for the summit where the country’s first Transcontinental Railroad was officially completed in 1869. Soon he was rubbing shoulders with celebrities such as composer, pianist and big band leader Duke Ellington, jazz singer Cab Calloway, and jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong, who Gibson recalled was always friendly and willing to talk.

“He played Vegas and would catch my train from Vegas many times,” Gibson said. “He was quite interesting.”

Being a Pullman porter “was desirous by most African Americans,” said Hughes, who has written a book on the subject. “But not everyone could do that job. You had to be a certain type of person. You had to have natural elegance, stature … and the ability to interact with people at all levels.”

Porters sometimes also had to endure humiliation and racism as well as the caprice of some passengers and white railway employees. The black union would help to protect workers from some of these abuses.

Gibson says he was always treated with respect.

The Pullman Co. ended operation of sleeping cars in 1968, according to Aaron Hunt, a spokesman for Union Pacific. At that point, the various railroads took over the function, and Pullman porters were transferred to such companies as Union Pacific and later Amtrak.

Gibson, who retired in 1974, joked that the long periods away from home helped to strengthen his marriage.

“It kept the wife from not getting tired of me,” he said.

Despite his age, Gibson remains fit and alert. He takes no medication, doesn’t wear glasses and still likes to drive.

His wife died in 2004, after 76 years of marriage. But he has a lady friend, Evelyn Dotson, 82, and three doting daughters, Gloria Gibson, 65, Barbara Leverette, 76, and Gwendolyn Reed, 78. His firstborn, a son, died in 1958 of Hodgkins disease.

His daughters take turns looking after Gibson, preparing meals, taking him out to dine, making sure he has new clothes.

“He’s the backbone of the family,” Reed said. “At 78 years old, I can holler ‘daddy’ louder than anyone in the world, and he will always say, ‘What do you need?’ — at 100. He’s a role model for all the young men in our family … for all the men in the neighborhood.”

Gibson, a former state employee, gushed as she recalled how her father tailored her first formal dress to attend a junior high ball. He also made his daughters’ flag girl uniforms.

Only middle daughter Leverette was willing to throw a friendly jab at her father.

“My father and I are oil and water,” she said. “He’s so stubborn.”

Gibson didn’t miss a beat.

“And you’re stubborn-er,” he fired back, with a mischievous grin.

6616: Amtrak Seeks Porters.

From The New York Times…

The Last Pullman Porters Are Sought for a Tribute

By Jennifer 8. Lee

For more than a century, Pullman porters were a part of American train travel, until competition from planes and automobiles led to the decline of sleeper cars. Now the last generation of porters — who played a critical role in African-American history — is rapidly dying off. And Amtrak is attempting to locate the last few for National Train Day.

In 2001, the A. Philip Randolph Museum compiled a national registry of black railroad employees who worked from the late 1800s to 1969, a record that could be useful for historians and genealogists.

“There are a thousand people on this list — as we mark it up, it’s not looking like the same list anymore,” said Hank Ernest, who is coordinating the publicity for Amtrak. Asked how many they had found, he said, “Double digits.”

For his book “Rising From the Rails,” Larry Tye interviewed about two dozen former Pullman porters, so called because they worked for the Pullman Company, which made sleeper cars. “The youngest were in the 80s at that time, and the oldest were in their early 100s,” he recalled. In between the time he did the interviews and when his book came out in 2004, he estimated, a third of those men died. Another third have died since then, he estimates.

“The fact they are disappearing is taking with them a piece of American history,” Mr. Tye said.

Though it could be demeaning, the job of porter was considered for decades one of two good jobs for black men in the United States. (The other was working in the post office.) At its peak, the Pullman Company was the largest single employer of black men in the United States, employing 20,000.

The Pullman porters laid the groundwork for the civil rights movement by forming the first black labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, under the leadership of A. Philip Randolph in the 1920s. The union gave leadership and money to the civil rights movement.

It was a former Pullman porter, E.D. Nixon, who selected Rosa Parks as the sympathetic figure for the Montgomery bus boycott, and recruited a young minister named Martin Luther King Jr. to lead the protest.

“If Martin Luther King was the father of the civil rights movement, then A. Philip Randolph was the grandfather of the civil rights movement,” Mr. Tye said.

The Pullman porters also played an important role in the great black migration, since they were the only blacks who regularly moved between the South and the North. By carrying copies of black newspapers like The Chicago Defender and The Pittsburgh Courier, they offered Southern blacks in small towns a glimpse of what life was like in the big cities.

The porters were also playing a critical role in gaining an economic foothold for their descendants. “They are — to a disproportionate extent — the father, the grandfathers, the uncles of the black professional class today,” Mr. Tye said.

A number of prominent black figures have Pullman porters in their lineage, he said: William E. Kennard, a former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, had a Pullman porter grandfather; Thurgood Marshall, the Supreme Court justice, and Willie Brown, a onetime mayor of San Francisco, were the sons of Pullman porters.

The porters’ wages were supplemented by tips, and at times they threatened to strike if tips did not improve. An 1890 article in The New York Times debated the ethics of tipping porters: “Tipping is objected to by austere and frugal American moralists upon the ground that it undermines the manhood and self-respect of the tippee. But this proposition loses all its force when the tippee is of African descent.”

But with meager wages, Pullman porters made substantial contributions to their home communities. For example, in the late 1800s, a Pullman porter built and supported a school that educated hundreds of black children in Covington, Ga.

The Pullman porters were the inspiration of George Pullman, the company’s founder, which is why they were often called George, regardless of their real names.

He was looking for the perfect servant to signify the luxury train experience. “Who better to hire than ex-slaves?” Mr. Tye said. “They were brilliantly attentive. They were incredibly inexpensive to hire.” Not only were they servants, they provided entertainment, as they were organized into choruses, orchestras or bands.

The porters largely settled in cities that were major rail stops — Chicago, Boston, Washington, New York — but they could be found anywhere the railroads ran. “We found pockets of them in Nebraska, in Omaha,” said Mr. Ernest, who works for Images USA, which is working with Amtrak on the National Train Day project.

The men have retained a certain dignity. “When we find them, they are dapper,” Mr. Ernest said. “They are men, even at this age, who wear suits and ties.”

“They will look at you and have a great conversation, because back then that’s what they had to do,” he said.

Former porters should contact Saunya Connelly of Amtrak at (202) 906-4164 or connels @amtrak.com with the following information: name, telephone number, mailing address, age, years of railroad service, and routes if known. The deadline for response is April 14. A ceremony honoring the porters is scheduled to take place during the celebration of National Train Day, on May 9, at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia.