I saw an obituary in my hometown newspaper and realized we have really come to the end of an era. The death of James Lantz, a retired engineer on the Lehigh Valley Railroad marks a very real end, not just for the railroad and its relationship to Sayre, PA, but on a personal level as well. My grandfather was also an engineer on the Lehigh Valley, starting off in the first decade of the 20th century shoveling coal. By the time the 1920's rolled around, he was sitting behind a desk. When the Depression hit, and many lost jobs, he kept his in part thanks to his on-going union membership. When engineers were being let go, he left his desk and got behind the wheel again. He continued to drive those trains - the Lehigh had been a Rockefeller railroad, connecting various NY and PA rail lines - and even finagled a job for my father in what was known as the Big Shop in 1940 or so.
James Lantz must have been one of the last engineers on the Lehigh. My grandfather retired in the 1950's, and even then the line was ailing. Were he, by some miracle, still alive, my grandfather would be 119 years old this year, twenty-four years older than the late Mr. Lantz.
At one time, the Big Shop in Sayre, PA was one of the largest enclosed spaces in the world, housing a couple rounds, and space enough for engines and other cars to be dismantled for a thorough cleaning. My father told me about an old man named Chacona (his son would go on to be a long-time mayor of Sayre) whose job was to guide wheels in to a vat of acid for a thorough cleaning. The wheels, having been removed from the car, were hoisted on to a conveyor that carried them along the line. It would stop above this vat and the winch would lower the wheels ever so slowly down. Mr. Chacona would stand on a plank set across the top of the vat - with the acid fumes rising, no rail, no breathing equipment, no safety suit - and use a long pole to make sure they entered the vat just so. That was his job, and he did it day in and day out for years without an accident. Such was some folk's work experience before OSHA, I guess . . .
While not born from the rails, Sayre benefited enormously from them - the Lehigh even subsidized housing on a street along the rail yard - named (what else?) Lehigh Avenue. There was a tunnel that was built below the yard, with an entrance smack dab in the middle of Lehigh Ave.. Men in overalls, carrying their lunches in pails, would pour in to that tunnel every morning, and out again in the afternoon. When I was a kid, we would drive by that old tunnel entrance, long since boarded up, and I always wanted to go through it, but my father told me how dangerous it had become. While I am quite sure he was right for any number of reasons, part of me wishes I had not heeded his warning and taken that walk before both ends of the tunnel were sealed permanently.
The above photo, showing the Big Shop and its massive smokestacks, is very personal for me. I remember well the last days of the Lehigh yards in Sayre, and the final images as the Shop was taken down and those stacks were dynamited, tumbling with a sad majesty to earth. While that was certainly one mark of the end of the era of the rails in small town America, the death of someone very likely one of the last engineers on the Lehigh Valley Railroad draws to a final close - a kind of sad, human coda - this once wonderful, vibrant chapter in our national life.
