The 80-year-old woman had been retired from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad for more than 20 years when she sat in an old dining car at the B&O Railroad Museum, listening to a group of porters, waiters and supervisors reminisce about the golden age of passenger service.
Across the table, a former worker from Cincinnati set to musing.
“Y’all remember little Maggie?” he asked. “Whatever happened to her?”
Said Maggie Hudson: “I’m sitting right here.”
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Little Maggie was one of the first women to work as a B&O “porterette.” William Selby and James A. Kearse worked extra shifts, riding the rails for days, working their way up to waiter-in-charge and steward-in-charge and an occasional place on the train of a president.
They took to the “road” on the classy, luxuriously appointed cars of famous trains with names such as the Capitol Limited, the Diplomat and the Ambassador.
From the time the railroad rolled out its first fancy passenger car, through its struggles to compete with planes and automobiles, to its final yielding of passenger lines to the Amtrak system in 1971, the B&O put hundreds of men and women to work serving the rail customer.
As the B&O prepares to celebrate its 175th anniversary in February, the museum, a repository of history about the railroad in west Baltimore, has been working to record the experiences of these workers, many of whom still live in and around Baltimore.
The museum recently got a $12,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for oral historians to record the workers’ memories. And it plans to bring the group together again for more sessions of organized reminiscing.
They’ll be telling stories such as these:
`Little Maggie’
“Black shoes will be kept well polished,” says the rulebook from 1944. “Coats will be kept buttoned. Porters will keep themselves neat and tidy in appearance at all times.”
In a rusty carrying case a baggageman made ugly so no one would steal it while she was working, Maggie Hudson has kept these rules nearly 60 years.
She’s also kept the following from her career as a “porterette” on the B&O: a black bowtie; a timetable from April 27, 1969; an old-fashioned key to the coach bathrooms; a “bid sheet” with a list of the trains she preferred to work; and still-shiny lapel pins she never got to use, wrapped in tissue paper.
Growing up in Shuqualak, Miss., Maggie Hudson never thought about working for the railroad. One of 17 children, she had set her sights on being a secretary. But secretarial school didn’t work out. She moved to South Baltimore in the early 1940s to be with family and got a job with a local shoe factory. But the factory laid her off after Hudson left for five weeks to care for a sick brother in Alabama.
That’s when a cousin’s boyfriend mentioned it: Because of the war, the B&O was “hiring girls.”
Hudson was 22, but she looked 14. The railroad had to be convinced she was old enough. Her fresh face, it turned out, was just what they wanted: A few years later, they made her the model for the new dark blue, custom made uniform for “porterettes,” who would now be called “attendants.”
The attendants worked for the conductors. They helped passengers on and off the train. In the dark, they stayed awake to make sure customers didn’t sleep through night stops. When the railroad was showing movies on board, part of its attempt to shore up its flagging base of passengers with extra amenities, the attendants were the ones to operate them.
But the “road” also kept Hudson from having a family of her own. After a marriage at 17 lasted just two years, she never wed again. There were offers–from a man she saw for some 28 years–but Hudson could never bring herself to trust the institution.
“I went on the road and I’d see the things that people were doing that they weren’t supposed to be doing,” she says. “I guess the travel did something to me. Your mind don’t be the same.”
But she fashioned herself a different kind of family. Older workers looked after her, tried to shield her from some of life’s vices. During layovers in Pittsburgh, they’d dine at the Italian restaurants. In Chicago, they’d ride the “L” to the South Side. One night on the train, she met singer James Brown.
“Seemed like everybody liked little Maggie,” she remembers. “They spoiled you.”
It wasn’t perfect. There were passengers now and again with ugly ideas about blacks and women. Sometimes they’d call Maggie names. She came up with a standard retort: “Oh, is that what you are?”
But the railroad was home. She worked the trains for 28 years, until the day in 1970 when the bosses transferred her to their central building in downtown Baltimore to clean the offices at night. Hudson says she didn’t mind. She worked there nine more years. And she still has the transfer list with her name, hidden in that inconspicuous traveling case.
Traveling in style
Aboard the Capitol Limited, William Selby acquired a taste for the finer things.
It was an all-first class, Pullman train built to bring a new luxury to the rails. And it did, even to the people who served the sophisticated food and tended the plush sleeping cars.
Selby, a native of Reisterstown, had worked at the old Emerson Hotel in Baltimore, starting as a busboy and working up to waiter. From the cooks in the back, he learned how to arrange the food just so. He got a job with the railroad next, but it wasn’t long before the Army drafted him–as a cook.
And it wasn’t long before he found his way back to the B&O.
Selby worked his way up to waiter-in-charge. He’d supervise the serving of steaks and creamed chipped beef for breakfast. For dinner, there would be filet mignon and beef stew, welcomed by passengers flush with expense accounts.
The money was better, so much better than working the Emerson. And the benefits. Play your cards right, work a lot of overtime picking up extra shifts, and you could make $600 in two weeks.
And that’s what Selby wanted–money. He loved the finer things. He wanted clothes from Hamburger’s men’s store, a new Oldsmobile every four years or so, trips to Montego Bay. A second house with five acres.
On the Capitol Limited, says Selby, “you got exposure. Culture, let’s say. You’d learn how to dress, seeing the finer clothes.”
The customers were almost all white; the waiters nearly all black. But that didn’t matter so much–not on a refined train like the Capitol Limited. There might have been segregated cars on other railroads, but not on the B&O. Server and served had a common goal: traveling in style.
He met Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman running service on the B&O. Roosevelt was an avid train traveler, often making the journey from Washington to his mansion in Hyde Park, N.Y.
Selby’s wife, Corinne, liked fine things, too. She taught in the public schools to supplement the family income. In the meantime, she was going to school, riding the train north to New York University to get a master’s degree in English, because black students couldn’t get one at the University of Maryland. They never had children; there wasn’t time.
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There was time for some great trips, though. The only place they wanted to go and didn’t was Paris.
That didn’t mean they didn’t miss each other. On occasion, Corinne would show up at the train station unannounced, just to see her husband.
They didn’t know how short their time was to be. Corinne died in 1962.
Now Selby, who went on to work for Amtrak before retiring about 20 years ago, says he’s too old to travel. For one thing, he lacks a companion. He says he never wants for social invitations from ladies of a certain age interested in taking up with a guy who can cook so well and clean his own house. But most of the time, Selby’s not interested.
And don’t get Selby started on the trains of today. “That’s cheap, just thrown together,” he says of the slumber cars on modern trains. “It’s not the same ball game.”
His life is now lived on a block of Calverton Heights Avenue in West Baltimore, where Selby spends much of his time fixing up the house he has owned for 50 years.
What he misses is that time away from home he spent whisking on the rails from town to town. He misses Corinne, too.
Another calling
James A. Kearse spent many a day in the bowels of Union Station in Washington, playing a card game called Tunk, living to hear these words:
“Jimmy, I want you to go to Chicago on the Columbian.”
He was an extra waiter on the B&O, waiting to pick up a shift. Chicago meant 18 hours: Music to his ears. Food in the mouths of his wife and four children.
He’d heard the B&O was hiring at the end of the war. He’d been a cook and a dishwasher but never a waiter. No matter. They needed the help. Four years later, he was a waiter-in-charge. He would stay until 1962.
You had to learn a few things. How to bone trout at the table while the train was moving, with nary a flake out of place. How to quarter chickens, snap green beans, make it all look effortless.
It could pay off handsomely, as in the case of a man on a train to Jersey City, who gave Kearse $100 to keep the club car open all night.
“We gave service on the train,” Kearse says. “There was a matter of loyalty that was unusual.”
Even if that meant following your heart to another track.
It was on the Ambassador from Baltimore to Detroit that Kearse received a call: to leave the railroad and preach.
It was a conclusion he’d been running from. But there on the Ambassador, he knew it was right. In the club car he ran into a waiter from Baltimore named Biggie Parker and confided his plans.
Kearse didn’t quite know how Biggie would react. But Biggie said: “God bless you, Jimmy. You can do it.”
Kearse considered it a sign.
The man now known as Rev. James A. Kearse told every last passenger on the train.