Wallace W. Abbey: A Life in Railroad Photography
240
Wallace W. Abbey: A Life in Railroad Photography
240eBook
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Overview
From the late 1940s onward, Wallace W. Abbey masterfully combined journalistic and artistic vision to transform everyday transportation moments into magical photographs. Abbey, a photographer, journalist, historian, and railroad industry executive, helped people from many different backgrounds understand and appreciate what was taken for granted: a world of locomotives, passenger trains, big-city terminals, small-town depots, and railroaders. During his lifetime he witnessed and photographed sweeping changes in the railroading industry from the steam era to the era of diesel locomotives and electronic communication. Wallace W. Abbey: A Life in Railroad Photography profiles the life and work of this legendary photographer and showcases the transformation of transportation and photography after World War II. Featuring more than 175 exquisite photographs in an oversized format, Wallace W. Abbey is an outstanding tribute to a gifted artist and the railroads he loved.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253035486 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/05/2018 |
| Series: | Railroads Past and Present |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 56 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Wallace W. Abbey (1927–2014) spent his career as a railroad journalist and public relations executive, primarily in the Upper Midwest, from the 1940s through the 1980s.
Kevin P. Keefe is a Milwaukee-based journalist and a member of the board of directors of the Center for Railroad Photography&Art.
Scott Lothes is President and Executive Director of the Center for Railroad Photography&Art and a freelance author and photographer whose work appears frequently in Trains and other publications.
The Center for Railroad Photography&Art, www.railphoto-art.org, is a nonprofit arts and education organization whose mission is to preserve and present significant images of railroading.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
ALONG THE SANTA FE
DID WALLY ABBEY HAVE A FAVORITE RAILROAD? HE NEVER explicitly said. But it would come as no surprise to learn that, if pressed, he answered "Santa Fe."
For a schoolboy living in one of Chicago's north shore suburbs, the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe might as well have been a thousand miles away. The Santa Fe operated out of Dearborn Station, way across the Loop from Abbey's more familiar North Western Terminal on Canal Street. And when the Chief and all the other famous AT&SF trains pulled away from Dearborn's gates, they immediately headed in a southwesterly direction, away from Abbey's childhood Evanston turf.
But family often trumps geography, and for that reason some of Abbey's earliest encounters with trains came 607 railroad miles west of Chicago, in little Cherryvale, Kansas, home of his maternal grandparents, Samuel and Luella Squier. From as early as he could remember, Abbey took family trips to visit "the folks," usually by train. And once he got to Cherryvale, there was plenty to see.
Cherryvale is in southeast Kansas, on what once was Santa Fe's Tulsa Subdivision linking Kansas City with Oklahoma's second-largest city. It wasn't one of the railroad's premier main lines, but the Tulsa Sub saw its share of business, including some passenger trains that made strong impressions on the boy from Chicago. "The Santa Fe figured in my early travel rather strongly, because of those frequent trips to Cherryvale," Abbey recalled. "I have no idea what year it would have been, but I can distinctly remember riding in the observation of what must have been the Oil Flyer, northbound out of Cherryvale in the afternoon."
The Oil Flyer wasn't the only name train running through town. In the prewar years, Abbey also saw the Tulsan, an early streamliner, as well as the daily M.154 gas-electric doodlebug to Coffeyville and Winfield, the latter via Santa Fe's branch to Wichita. And if he ever got tired of watching the Santa Fe (not likely), there was always the St. Louis–San Francisco depot a few blocks to the north, where the Santa Fe crossed the Frisco's Wichita–Joplin line.
Cherryvale's Santa Fe depot was a great place for a boy to get started with trains. Built in 1910, it was a sizable brick affair, with broad eaves, arched windows, stylized Santa Fe logos, and a handsome porte cochere on the street side of the building. Today it appears to be in pristine condition, serving as the local offices of the South Kansas & Oklahoma Railroad, a regional line owned by the Watco interests. In the late 1930s, it must have been the perfect hangout for a budding young photographer.
As Abbey got older, he continued to be drawn to the Santa Fe. When he graduated from high school, he chose the University of Kansas, certainly in part for its great journalism school, but also because the campus was only a mile from the AT&SF main line.
Like many college students in those days, Abbey tried his hand at hitchhiking, and his frequent destination was 25 miles or so eastward to photograph trains on Olathe Hill, an especially difficult grade between Holliday and Olathe, Kansas, where, as Abbey wrote, "Santa Fe found a reasonably graceful way to climb out of the Kaw River lowlands." There he photographed FT freight diesels, 4-8-4s on passenger trains, double-headed 2-8-2s, and just about anything else on the railroad's roster.
When Abbey graduated from KU in August 1949, the Santa Fe was still tugging at him, and he took his first journalism job in Chanute, Kansas, just 29 miles up the road from Cherryvale. There he reported for duty as a reporter and photographer for the Chanute Tribune, a daily newspaper with a circulation of approximately 3,500. Between chasing police cars and attending school board meetings, Abbey could hang out around the city's grand station, which included division offices and a Harvey House hotel.
Abbey left the Tribune after only a year to join Trains magazine in Milwaukee. It was there that Abbey's love of the Santa Fe was crystallized in January 1954, when the magazine published his eighteen-page, 10,000-word cover story simply titled "Super Railroad." The article kicked off what editor David P. Morgan said would be a series of comprehensive system stories on several major railroads. For the magazine, a lot was riding on the series, and the Santa Fe, with its glamorous reputation as a passenger carrier, was the perfect place to start.
To accomplish the assignment, Abbey got the support he needed from Morgan: nearly fourteen months to prepare for the story, and arrangements to ride approximately 6,300 miles of the Santa Fe system, much of it in the cabs of steam and diesel locomotives.
Abbey's reporting and photography was comprehensive. He visited yard towers and dispatchers' offices; spent time in the offices of officials across the system, including at the railroad's Michigan Avenue headquarters in Chicago; inspected the new retarder yard at Argentine, Kansas, and the locomotive shops in Albuquerque; enjoyed a Fred Harvey lunch in the station at Gallup; and relished the view of New Mexico's Wagon Mound from the dome of the Super Chief.
It was great magazine writing, full of facts and figures and expert analysis, but always delivered with Abbey's characteristic exuberance: "Santa Fe is making a liar out of whoever it was who said the railroad industry is not modern. Indeed, John Santa Fe runs probably the most progressive railroad in the country. Its operations set the standard for modernity; its thinking is fresh and relatively unfettered by tradition. It dwells not, principally, in the criticisms of declining patronage, government regulation and subsidized competition which typify many roads old enough to know better, but looks forward to extending itself with new trains, new territories, new ways to greater efficiency." If Abbey's copy sounds a bit like a public relations man's dream, then that might say something about the career direction the author was headed. In fact, "Super Railroad" was very nearly Abbey's swan song at Trains. The February 1954 issue one month later would be the last with his name on the masthead. But not before he had the chance to make good for his favorite railroad.
CHAPTER 2
THE TRAINS MAGAZINE YEARS
WALLY ABBEY ARRIVED AT AL KALMBACH'S SMALL BUT GROWING publishing company in the summer of 1950, reporting for work at the firm's stolid old eight-story building on the northwest fringe of downtown Milwaukee. His timing couldn't have been better, both for himself and for the magazine staff he was joining.
By 1950, Trains was at a crossroads. Launched by Kalmbach ten years earlier out of sheer passion and contrary to good business advice, the magazine's first few years nonetheless were a sensation. It tapped directly into a market of railroad enthusiasts hungry for something that treated its subject with intelligence and craft. In his first message to readers in November 1940, Al Kalmbach even named National Geographic as his standard. Trains would be a literate magazine, printed on slick paper and illustrated with the best photographs. In the immediate postwar years, its circulation surged.
But by the end of its first decade, Trains' fortunes stalled. The reason was obvious to anyone who came trackside to watch trains: the steam locomotive was disappearing. Always railroading's central object of affection, steam had defined America's romance with the industry for more than a century. By 1950 the barking, hissing, whistling engines of songs and novels and movies were giving way rapidly to mass-produced and decidedly unromantic diesels.
Abbey loved steam, but mostly he loved railroading, in all its forms, and as a professional journalist he was determined to tell good stories, steam engines or no steam engines. It helped that he was coming to a staff loaded with comparable talent. Abbey's name first appeared on the Trains masthead in the September 1950 issue, joining David P. Morgan and Rosemary Entringer among the small corps of associate editors working for then editor Willard V. Anderson.
Pairing Abbey with Morgan was pure serendipity. Abbey had already proven himself to be a skilled reporter and photographer, his early freelance work informed by his experiences as a working railroader. In Morgan, he had a colleague that would go on to become a legend, someone blessed with incredible writing chops and a vision of the industry that thrilled readers. That both men found themselves working out of the same shop constituted a dream team long before anyone invented the term.
The challenge for Abbey and Morgan was simple but daunting: make this brave new world of the modern railroad interesting to an audience raised on steam and coal smoke.
Trains' bosses quickly figured out Abbey's role: get out on the road and cover the hell out of what's going on. As a reporter and photographer, he was too good a double threat to keep in the office. His skills with the camera probably had as much to do with it as anything, given the magazine's graphic aspirations. A bonus was Abbey's talent for capturing railroaders at work. "It was understood that photography was part of the job," Abbey told writer John Gruber in the Summer 2010 issue of Classic Trains magazine. "While not a direct assignment, there was lots of it, and it was better if we had pictures with people."
So with his camera always in hand, Abbey went on a dizzying variety of assignments. In that very first September 1950 issue, Abbey contributed a brief but highly readable report on how Union Pacific humped its freight cars at the giant yard in North Platte, Nebraska, illustrated with nine photos by Abbey. Abundantly evident was his gift for elegantly weaving together the salient fact, the telling detail, even in this little piece about such a common aspect of the industry.
Then the plum assignments began rolling in: "Night Ride on the El Capitan," in which Abbey rode one of Santa Fe's most famous passenger trains; "Central States Dispatch," an odyssey aboard a unique freight train across seven different eastern railroads; "Route of the Flying Saucers," analyzing the Erie Railroad's hottest freight trains; "The Press Previews the Congressional," showcasing the Pennsylvania Railroad's newest high-profile passenger train; and "Temple of Transportation," an homage to illustrious Cincinnati Union Terminal. His article on the Terminal was especially memorable; legions of talented photographers flocked there in the early 1950s to record the Art Deco passenger-train mecca. But Abbey's photographs were definitive.
The capstone of Abbey's Trains years came with the January 1954 issue, featuring his eighteen-page you-are-there analysis of his beloved Santa Fe, called "Super Railroad," an article profusely illustrated with the author's photographs. This unprecedented look at a single railroad showcased all of Abbey's skills: his arresting, vivid photographs, of course, but also his engaging text, a detailed but absorbing exercise in long-form narrative that would stand up today as state-of-the-art magazine journalism.
Abbey's years at Trains were a happy chapter of his life. He and his wife, Martha, settled in Cedarburg, a charming little German-heritage town on the northern fringe of the Milwaukee suburbs. With the births of their two daughters, Mary and Martha, they began their family. Wally and his wife enjoyed the social whirl of those early Kalmbach years, making lifelong friends of a number of employees and their families. At work, Abbey embraced the relentless magazine deadlines and enjoyed the healthy competitive pressure that comes with talented colleagues. His career was off to a great start.
But his tenure at Trains wouldn't last long. In less than four years, Abbey was ready to move on, his last appearance on the masthead coming in the February 1954 issue. By then he had taken a job at the Association of Western Railways, an industry trade group. Perhaps he was motivated by a rivalry with Dave Morgan, who went on to be the beloved editor in chief of Trains for thirty-three years, although Abbey denied that in an interview decades later. In fact, he was quite fond of Morgan. More likely is that Abbey was responding to simple ambition, the kind that could not be rewarded fully at a small magazine for enthusiasts. Instead, he felt the pull of railroading itself.
CHAPTER 3
SOO LINE STORYTELLER
BY 1959, ABBEY WAS READY TO MOVE ON TO SOMETHING NEW. He'd proven himself as a transportation journalist in both the consumer market at Trains and the trade arena at Railway Age. He'd had success at an industry association. Now he was ready to work in the middle of the action, the executive suite of a major railroad.
His first opportunity was unexpected: an offer from a vice president of the Soo Line, who had admired Abbey's Railway Age coverage of a landmark rate case Soo had before the Interstate Commerce Commission. Surprised and perhaps a bit flattered, Abbey embraced the opportunity, taking over as special assistant to the president and director of public relations at the Soo Line Building in Minneapolis.
Abbey's arrival was timely. The old Soo Line, a stalwart carrier in the upper Midwest, was in the throes of becoming the "new Soo" via the 1961 merger of its three key related entities, the Minneapolis, St. Paul & Sault Ste. Marie; Duluth, South Shore & Atlantic; and Wisconsin Central. In truth, it wasn't all that much of a groundbreaking merger. All three properties were wards of the Canadian Pacific, and all shared enough operating practices that, in many ways, they functioned as a single railroad.
But it was an old-fashioned operation, a barely profitable company still stuck in the world of written train orders and loose-car railroading. The Soo owned 5,000 miles of railroad, but too much of the system was light-density branch lines. The railroad was heavily dependent on overhead Canadian traffic. The only salvation lay in the economies of scale available in a merger, a turnaround ultimately fed by new high-horsepower diesels, hundreds of miles of welded rail and centralized traffic control, and intelligent cost cutting.
The Soo Line had never been high on Wally Abbey's list of favorite railroads. He wasn't even aware of the company until high school, when, after church on Sundays, his dad would take the family to a barbecue chicken place near Deerfield, a far northwest suburb of Chicago. "I remember us bouncing across a single-track railroad and me asking Dad, what railroad is this? 'The Soo Line,' he said. 'Goes up into Wisconsin somewhere.'"
Now, suddenly, Abbey was a Soo executive, and what he found wasn't altogether encouraging. Before Abbey, the company appeared to treat modern corporate public relations as an afterthought, leaving it to a clunky three-man department headed up by a vice president whose responsibilities also included personnel and safety. There was only minimal contact with the local news media.
Abbey would change all that. "I found that it wasn't so much that the Soo Line was misunderstood in the world at large but that the Soo was hardly understood at all. I soon began to hear how, should a train be derailed or some other misfortune occur to cause reporters to begin calling (someone) at home, the fellow who should have handled the calls would unplug his phone. Very little in the way of the mechanisms of a public relations operation were in place. There was not even a reliable mailing list."
The company's handling of those derailments gave Abbey an opportunity to school upper management. Rather than wait for the news media to call, Abbey suggested the railroad be proactive and contact the press first. "My superiors didn't think that was an altogether wise move. But sooner or later they grudgingly, but tacitly, agreed that the news reports on the accident were factual and non-inflammatory. And sooner or later they quit arguing with me when I suggested that the only way to not have derailments show up in the newspapers was to not have derailments."
Abbey's efforts began to be appreciated by people across the industry, not least by his successor, John Bergene, whom Abbey hired initially to edit the company magazine. Bergene went on to oversee the Soo's public affairs for many years and recalls Abbey's role as critical in the company's history.
"Wally was the first professional PR type at the Soo," said Bergene in a 2017 interview. "When he came in they had a former passenger agent acting as an advertising manager who also edited an employee publication — both in old-school fashion. In just the short time we worked side-by-side, he was constantly on the phone working with national media and trades to gin up some press about the new Soo. And he was good at it, as the files were full of stories about the 'New Soo.' We were small, but he kept us in the public arena."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Wallace W. Abbey"
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Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Along the Santa Fe
2. The Trains Magazine Years
3. Soo Line Storyteller
4. Chicago at its Zenith
5. Class By Itself
6. Fighting for the Milwaukee Road
Epilogue
Acknowledgments