Murphy, Lee Get That Kid Outta Here ... I By Lee Murphy AuthorHouse Copyright © 2009 Lee Murphy All right reserved. ISBN: 978-1-4490-1967-9 Chapter One Southbound What do people think about-if they think at all-when they're on their daily commute? The wife, or husband? The kids? The boss? The future? The past? Trains today are like strip-malls on wheels. They're ubiquitous and not all that attractive. And crowded. Something to get away from as soon as the doors open at your station. "Last stop, Grand Central. Please take your belongings with you and have a good day." Actually, this part of the day and the trip might have been more pleasant if our conductor had asked that one witless cellphone user to keep it down and make it short, or better yet, just shut up. But there was a time when a train was more like a procession of elegant Rolls Royce limos, long on entitlement and romance, and class. Broadway, Hollywood and Buckingham Palace all rolled into one. You could 'Shuffle Off to Buffalo' with Dick Powell and bride, or take the same 20th Century Limited to Chicago, with your lover, in a drawing room. Eat in elegance on linen, using real silver flatware. Yes, class. A train could be somber as well, taking hundreds of young men... and a handful of women ... off to war. Or carry a dead man home to rest. Right on this same route that lines a shelf along the east shore of the Hudson River. Here, in 1865, one such bleak train passed by, and wept more than steamed, as it carried the body of Abraham Lincoln all the way from Washington, where he was assassinated, to Springfield, Illinois, where he was to be buried. There's this tone poem, or oratorio-words and music-called 'The Lonesome Train', written in the 1940s, which depicts that mournful journey and the more than one million people who lined the tracks in sadness along the way ... as the voice of a conductor called out the grief-filled stops made by the 'seven coaches, painted black'. "Baltimore!" "Philadelphia!" And something wonderful happened at every location. Real events and some mischievous fantasies, such as Lincoln not being on that train, but attending services in a poor black church in the deep south, listening to the preacher's sermon about freedom and the end of slavery. "New York City!" Then up the Hudson. Where it's unlikely that the conductor acknowledged, "Spuyten Duyvil!" Spuyten Duyvil. Still, an historic place, being a narrow course of water that empties out into the Hudson River at the northern tip of Manhattan island, where a hapless but brave man on the way to deliver a message to George Washington or some other Revolutionary War figure, drowned attempting to cross the current-swept channel, and as myth would have it, blew his trumpet one last time before sinking below the race-tide surface. However, that small event is but a footnote to Spuyten Duyvil's truly significant claim to fame: the construction of the Henry Hudson Bridge. And I helped build it. The year was 1936. I was four years old. Of untried engineering capacity but with tons of enthusiasm-more than the weight of all the steel that was being craned into position and riveted together. And then there was my need to start a career; to become self-reliant. 'Get that kid outta here! He's gonna get killed!' But the foreman, working high above along the main rising arch I had climbed onto was wrong. I wasn't killed. And I was no more (or less) a kid then, than I am now. In fact, I supervised three major projects at that time. The Bridge to begin with. Second, the relocation of the channel just to its east, which included the dynamiting away and disappearance of a section of land shaped like a llama's udder on the Riverdale or north side of the cut, and finally, the creation of a new park using landfill that was dumped into what had been the sharp arc of the old twisty waterway on the south or Manhattan side of the stream. All in all, it was quite a busy period. But I took it in stride. Told how proud I was of all this work, my mother chirped, 'You're a regular deLesseps, aren't you?' In fact, it would be difficult to later remain so much the master of my destiny as I was at that moment. A single personality presiding over one body. At the same time I was out there helping to direct these civic improvements, my parents were stuck in a mire of their own making, de-constructing as the losses started to mount. Not everything could be blamed on the Great Depression. I've never known what my father did before the Crash, when he 'lost everything', but I certainly came to understand the result of his financial ruin. For those who didn't go through it, the Crash and the Depression do not have interchangeable meanings. A crash is a single event that may be devastating, as the economic collapse of 1929 surely was. Instead, the Depression went on for year after numbing year, and for many Americans, didn't end unti