Michael Mayer - Time Trippers The Nights of the Round Table

The platform was occupied by a mother and her two kids, a boy and a girl about the kids’ age. We sat down and the kids said hello to each other. The girl, Diana, was very pretty with short hair and white dress, her brother Bill was Lauren’s age.

Jonathan and Lauren could not stop talking with them. I relaxed and enjoyed the night, listening to the clickety-clack and the locomotive’s melodious whistle far ahead as we rolled fast, through the gentle curves of the scenic Mohawk Valley, exchanging a few words with their mother, who was dressed very fashionably with a fur collared coat.

Time for bed, the kids parted as friends and we headed back. Our car had been transformed into a green-curtained jungle, making it hard to find our place, but we found the big numbers on the curtains. Jonathan insisted on taking the upper berth and gleefully climbed the ladder after we washed up, brushed our teeth and, with some difficulty, got undressed in our berths. We put our clothes on the hangers provided leaving our shoes peeking out from under the berth so they would be shined during the night. I arranged to have my suit pressed and hat blocked as well with the valet in the Club-Lounge car up front.

I took the lone lower berth on the right side after tucking in Lauren in the lower berth below Jonathan, who was in the upper looking out through his curtains mischievously in Section 5. The beds looked inviting, fresh white linen and Pullman blankets pulled back and tucked in with military precision, fluffy feather pillows and reading light.

The green curtains gently swayed as we rocketed through the night. The car rode smoothly over the Water Level Route as we picked up speed out of Utica, leaving the Mohawk River behind. The lower berth was one of the most comfortable beds I ever slept in, big, wide and snug.

Lauren got lost after going to the bathroom and stumbled into the wrong berth, but the lady was understanding. It was easy to do in the green-curtained aisle. We slowed down, passing right through downtown Syracuse, right in the middle of a main street just like a streetcar, with automobiles parked next to the sidewalk. We picked up speed again, and I wanted to stay awake through Buffalo where we would meet our eastbound counterpart, (although it was only a crew change stop), as in the famous poster ‘Where Centuries Pass in the Night’ but I didn’t make it, falling asleep in no time, gently rocked by the train.

Next morning came all too soon. We got our act together, got dressed, brushed up and packed and went for breakfast as we zipped past South Bend, Indiana, home of Notre Dame where legendary football coach Knute Rockne continued to make headlines. We had a short wait until the Steward found us places at two tables, me with Diana and Bill’s parents and all four kids together. Pancakes and eggs were the order of the morning. The smell of the coal-fired stove, frying bacon and eggs and railroad coffee was overwhelming.

Everyone started looking at a youngish fellow being seated alone at a table for two. I heard Bill and Diana gasp behind me.

“Who’s that, Diana?” Lauren asked.

Diana leaned over conspiratorially: “That’s Charlie Chaplin!”

“Who?” Lauren asked.

“Huh?” Jonathan said.

“You don’t know Charlie Chaplin?!” Diana asked shocked.

“Oh yeah, the little tramp, right?” Lauren said, having enjoyed some of his silent movies with me on DVD.

As Charlie dug into his grapefruit, he noticed the kids looking at him, waggled his eyebrows at them and began to play around with his silverware as if the grapefruit was a tough piece of meat.

Lauren pictured him in her mind as the starving Little Tramp trying to eat his shoe as he did in “The Gold Rush” and giggled to herself.

“That’s really him? Where’s his mustache?” Jonathan asked.

“Silly, its fake!!! It’s him all right! He’s the bee’s knees!” Diana replied. “I’d love to get his autograph!” She told the kids that her mother said that famous people were always on the Century and it wasn’t good form to ask for autographs.

“Well, we got Babe Ruth’s and Lou Gehrig’s on our baseballs!” Jonathan said.

“Really, can I see?” Bill asked.

“Sure!”

“Can we be excused?” they asked.

“Sure!” I said as they dashed back to our car. Jonathan and Lauren dug in their suitcases and produced the souvenir baseballs.

Diana and Bill were amazed, holding them with reverence.

“How’d you get these?” she asked.

“We rescued Babe Ruth from kidnappers, that’s how!” Jonathan said very cool.

Diana smiled at him, “Come on, really?”

“Yeah, you can ask my Lito, I mean Grandpa.”

Bill and Diana asked me and I told them about that night, and Diana looked at Jonathan in a new way.

“I think she likes you, kid,” I told him. But I told them that if it wasn’t for Lauren, he would not have been rescued. Diana gave Jonathan a shy kiss on the cheek and ran back to her car. He rubbed his cheek with a big smile.

“Yeah,” I told him, words weren’t necessary.

Bill looked at Lauren and suddenly gave her a kiss on the cheek before running away as well.

“Hey, look at you!” I told her.

She smiled.

We didn’t get to see the usual race with the bitterly competitive Pennsylvania Railroad’s crack ‘Broadway Limited’ as the two railroads paralleled each other as they got closer to the Chicago area, running on the exact same times between New York and Chicago, probably because we were at least 5 minutes behind the 1st Section of the ‘Century.’ Darn it! That would have been quite a sight!

We got into Englewood, the station just before downtown Chicago on time at 9:35, just 5 minutes behind the 1st Section. We got off to catch a cab, the city of Chicago shimmering in the distance.

The rip-roaringest, rough-and-tumble, wide-open city of the Jazz Age, the city of Al Capone, ‘Bugs’ Moran, Johnny Torrio, corrupt mayor ‘Big’ Bill Thompson, railroad and meatpacking capital of the country lay before us in the bright morning sun, but we’d do that trip another time.

“Maywood Field!” I told the taxi driver.

He was puzzled, “Oh you mean Checkerboard Field, where the airmail goes from, right?”

“Right!”

“Where are we going, Lito?” the kids asked.

“Why, home to St. Paul and we’re going to fly!”

“Fly?” they asked. “They don’t have planes for passengers do they?”

“Not many, the industry is just getting started, but they do. We’re going to take Northwest Airways to St. Paul!”

The old 1921 Willys taxi ground its gears and headed off for the western suburbs of Chicago.

It was a long, slow ride to Maywood on bumpy roads, only some of them paved. We arrived an hour later at Checkerboard Field. Our flight was supposed to leave at 2 pm via Milwaukee and La Crosse, Wisconsin; Contract Air Mail Route or C.A.M. number 9. We went into the hangar and I bought our tickets, $40 each, no half-fares for kids in those days, from a smiling ticket agent.

“Might as well grab some lunch and get some sandwiches to bring along from the diner across the street. It’s a long flight,” he suggested.