On The Train

When I was four years old I took a train ride from Camden, New Jersey, to Ft. Wayne, Indiana, that was perhaps the most important journey of my life.

My father had snatched me from my mother after their divorce and decided to change our name so she couldn't find me. He also decided, after he was drafted into the US Army Air Corps in 1941, to give me temporarily to my Indiana uncle and aunt, who had also changed their name from Bonanno to Bowman as part of the plot to keep my mother from tracking me down.

I remember the train ride vividly, particularly one episode that today, 67 years later, is as clear in my mind's eye as the computer screen in front of me as I write this. The 700-mile trip on the Pennsy Railroad train was an over-nighter. Within the first hour I was transfixed as I looked out the window at the dogwood lined Appalachian Mountains. My dad caught me looking and told me that in a few minutes we would be going around a hairpin curve. I asked what that was. He explained that I would be able to see the train's engine as it looped around, going in the opposite direction of our car. I remember thinking that was impossible. But moments later I saw the engine and several cars of our train across a deep chasm, heading toward the next curve. I was enthralled and pretty sure in that moment I would one day be a railroad engineer.

Years later, when I related the story to my dad, he replied that he had not been on that train ride with me. He had asked a friendly stranger to "look after" me. Over the years I had turned that stranger into my dad, perhaps not believing that any father in his right mind would put a little boy on a train by himself for a 700-mile trip to be handed off to relatives he had never seen. I wonder what ever happened to the stranger and I am grateful for his kindness. I cannot imagine that scene repeating itself in today's culture.