Following the bizzarre ironies thread, this one is probably stretching it a bit, but what the hell. Sitting in front of me is a print of a slide my Dad took on New Years Eve, 1958, of Rock Island's #7, the Rocky Mountain Rocket, sitting at La Salle Street Station in Chicago. This shot is the one I selected to enclose in my Christmas cards this year. Lead unit on the train was #652. Of course, #652 later became Rock Island's infamous (and pretty damn ugly) Bicentennial E-8. The irony is that one of the Christmas cards I sent this year which included this photo went to the following address of a friend of mine: 1776 Bicentennial Way, Apt. E-8... My friend, who is not a railfan, was nevertheless also sent a copy of a photo of the unit in its 1976 colors when he first moved into the apartment. He never did comment....
One more and I'm done: One afternoon a couple of years ago, I was in Bobbye Hall's hobby shop here in Dallas flipping through mags and books during a tremendous fit of purposeless leisure. I picked up a copy of Bill Marvel's excellent book "Rock Island in Color: Volume II". Many of you may know that Bill's book intersperses copies of printed company material with the many excellent photos throughout the book. As I flipped through the book, I came across a reduced-size copy of a cover for "The Rocket", RI's company magazine. I recognized the cover as being one that I have in my collection, and was thinking to myself what a coincidence that was, when my eye moved over to the opposite page, where some of the contents of that same issue were reproduced - and dropped my jaw to the floor upon seeing a picture of my late father displaying one of his award-winning safety posters, original caption included (Dad was a safety officer on the RI from 1966 to 1979). I still have a copy of the poster as well, one of a series in which he used outlandish photos of animals from the Oklahoma City zoo superimposed in railroad environments to catch your attention and make points about ankle and foot injuries. (Samples: elephant sticking head out of cab window; caption: Think it's easy getting an elephant into a GP-40?; footnote: You never heard such cussing!.......Rhinocerous walking the running board of a switcher; caption: He doesn't have to watch where he's going! When you weigh 3,000 pounds and are built like a tank, people look out for you. Railroad men are not like rhinos, however...footnote: Several wives have called in with opinions to the contrary.) Anyway, ended up buying the book. A week later I got a letter from Bill Hoenig, former VP on both Rock Island and later SP - telling me he came across the same thing while volunteering at the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento. By the way, you can see a couple of my dad's shots of Rock Island in the 50s and 60s in Greg Stout's new book "Route of the Rockets". Time to go get the shot - sun's finally out! Patrick Lenahan Dallas, Texas -> SPORRS: Serious Photographers of Railroad Related Subjects -> Web Site: http://www.anet-stl.com/acphotog/sporrs
