After his stroke, Railroad Reno carried a bewildered expression on his face and lost all the strength in his left extremities. He had a ruddy complexion, blue eyes, and a fringe of reddish gray hair around his bald head. He was friendly to talk to, but he yelled gruffly for service from the nurses aids when he needed assistance. A man in his eighties, he had been a robust, strong railroad man. He had worked on the trains in Anaheim during the depression where I saw bums riding the long freight trains. Sometimes the freeloaders sat perched on top of the boxcars. Others rode between the cars where the cars were hitched together. Others rode in empty boxcars.
Sometimes one of the travelers jumped the train and walked four blocks down the alley where there was a special mark. I never noticed the mark, but Alberta Brown, my mom, said there must be a mark out there to tell the bums which house to come to for a meal. Mom never charged for the food, and she didn’t make them do any work. This was just one of her ways of preparing for heaven.
I remember Railroad Reno from my childhood when he worked for the railroad companies. He chased us away from the tracks when we got in trouble near the trains. We tried to get free rides on the slow moving freight trains or free moving cars when the brakemen were switching them around. I remember when Reno almost captured a skinny ten year old barefoot Mexican boy on top of a boxcar. Reno chased the boy until the little kid jumped from the top of the very high roof of the box-car. He landed on the hard gravel stones between the tracks. It is a mystery to me how he escaped serious injury. I remember looking down from the top of boxcars, and it's like looking down from a skyscraper. The boy ran all the way home on his bare feet.
At the Sunkist orange packing house, tall box-cars were loaded with very large cakes of ice weighing perhaps two hundred pounds. The ice was used for cooling the best oranges in the world from Anaheim, California. The fruit was shipped to New York City, Chicago, and other cities where orange trees freeze and die after you plant one. The trains passed through hot deserts on their way to the eastern cities. Ice was used to cool the fruit laden box-cars.
Almost every day the workmen dropped a block of ice off the top of a boxcar, and it broke into small pieces on the track. As children we carried pieces of the ice in a wagon or cardboard box and sold it for a few pennies to people who still owned ice boxes. During the great depression of the nineteen thirties, many of the people living in Anaheim could not afford electric appliances like refrigerators.
After selling ice, I used the money to buy candy. We paid one cent for two jaw-breakers, and it took a long time for a sweet jaw-breaker ball to melt in your mouth. A penny bought a pink bubble gum wrapped with a wax paper comic strip as the inside wrapper.
Another railroad track came from Long Beach through Anaheim on it's way to Santa Ana. Very long slow trains with low, open-bed cars carried sugar beets to the sugar beet factory in South Santa Ana. Teen age boys would run along next to the track and grab hold of the moving train and steal a ten mile ride. They walked from the sugar factory to Main Street, Santa Ana and hitch-hiked to Corona Del Mar Beach to body surf. A few lucky Anaheim boys went to the beach in summer every day. We called them beach bums. The tracks ended near Johnny Martin Airport at the sugar beat factory. (Johnny Martin was the first man to fly from California to Catalina Island. It was a dare-devil forty mile flight, and it made Johnny a hero. He made a living at his dirt runway airport giving flying lessons. Johnny Martin Airport’s name was changed to Orange County Airport during World War Two. After John Wayne died, the airport was named after him. John was not a real hero. I hear he was a drunken bar fighter and a women abuser.)
I was over forty when, as a physical therapist, I treated Railroad Reno at a convalescent hospital in Oceanside. He explained to me about why he was tough on kids playing around trains. "Trains are dangerous. I was being kind. You kids could have been killed if I hadn't scared you away. I have seen too many grown men get run over and get their legs chopped off."
I treated him for months teaching him to operate a wheelchair, to get in and out of bed, on and off the pot, and he learned to use a cane to walk short distances. He had no family and we became friends. I had him join me in my home for several holiday dinners. He liked to pet my horse so I gave him my horse Big Red to call his own. I gave him a picture of himself with the horse to put on his bedside table. The horse was mine again a year later when Reno died. He was a man I almost hated from childhood who eventually became my friend. Some people who seem bad become friends.