“Everyone was riding trains back then,” he would tell me.
He had started working as a staff writer for the magazine 52 years ago and eventually bought the magazine for himself. In the three years I worked for the magazine, I had yet to travel by train. When I accepted the job I thought I would be taking all kinds of train routes to cover various stories, but Sidney always told me there wasn’t any money in the budget for travel.
“Maybe one of these days you can take the California Zephyr. I took that line at least 25 times,” he once told me.
I wrote about the country’s rail system and all its problems from the cubicle of my office. I’m embarrassed to say that I hadn’t written one original article for the last few issues. I would go on the web and surf for railroad industry stories. At first I would find a story and rewrite it a bit so it didn’t seem like I was plagiarizing, but even that seemed like too much work. Then I decided just to do some very minor edits on stories that I ripped off, but that seemed like too much work as well. So for the last two issues I used articles from other publications and I didn’t change a damn word. In one issue I lifted an article, word for word, from an old Newsweek about the dangers of transporting hazardous materials by rail. I gave it to Sidney and he was happy. It was a pure cut and paste job and nothing more. In the last issue, I lifted an old article from the Wall Street Journal about cutbacks in federal spending for the rail system.
Sidney loved my stories. In a couple of the stories I changed the name of some D.C. bureaucrat who worked in the Transportation Department to Charley Dart in homage to my childhood Hillbilly King. I also renamed the Amtrak public relations director to Marlene Knuckles in memory of Charley’s old squeeze. Sometimes when Sidney walked pass my cubicle, I’d be talking to a friend on the phone, but to impress Sidney that I was really working, I would start to shout out Charley Dart’s name. “I know Charley Dart is there! Please put him through to me at once!”