, 1888-09-19
H CONDUCTOR TALKS.
THE MAN OF THE GRIP CAR GrvEs
BITS OF EXPERIENCE.

How a Woman' Dress Caught Fire from
a Wheel shield-The Amount of Change
Lost Through the openings-why Green
Hands Are Preferred.
Singular things happen sometimes to q
street car conductor. / have been a con-
ductor all my life-that is, for a good part
of my life; not always, of course, but
when l ven to work l was a driver on a
car in an eastern city. came west and
got a position as q conductor on the Olive
street line, and / have held it ever since.
The reason l make these preliminary re-
marks is that | want you to believe what
l tell you about making change, and the
loss of money that people suffer from
rapid transit. l lever thought of this
when l was on a horse car, but now |
know whereof l speak" When a pas
senger gives the conductor of a horse car
90 cents or 81 and gets q handful of
nickels and dimes in change, if he drops
one he will stop to pick it up. 1t gener-
ally rolls to some quiet spot on the plat
form and stops, and the passenger stoops
down and gets it.
Now, if 1 am on the platform and /
hand a man n dime and he drops it, he
will never get it again. 1t rolls faster
than it does on a horse car, and it always
starts straight for the edge. The passen-
ger Will wall unJll l6 hears IL ring on Ile
granite pavement, and then he'll stamp
tiercely with his foot at the place he last
saw it, but, of course, he is toe late, and
the fate of the coin is to fall into the
hands of some small boy who happens to
see it,. There is another way that money
is lost. We conductors dom like to work
both sides of a car, and we always 70
down on the right hand side. The pas
sengers of the left hand have to reach
over to us and we hand the change back,
and, you may not believe me, yet it is
true, the amount of money that falls
through the hole in the floor that the grip
comes through would pay n conductors
wages. The funniest part of it is that l
have never struck a passenger who would
let me bear the loss. Even stingy men
insist that they will bear it, but for the
life of me l don't know why. l desire to
inform you, though, that l shall never
kick when they insist that the loss is
theirs.
HER DRESS On FIRE.
q. DM you ever hear of a grip car setting
fire to a woman's dress? Impossible?
Well, I'll bet it i.!'t. No, it isn't a phe-
nomenon at all. ! 8 rs easy as rolling off
a log. You notice tIat our grips are very
low and the whec.s stick up through the
floor. Well, of course, we have to cover
them, n so we put a wrought iron shield
over them. But when we get a big crowd
on board the car is pressed down by the
weight, and sometimes the wheels rub
against the shield, and in a run of two
blocks the shield will get red hot. l had
a lady passenger sitting over one just the
other day, and all of a sudden she Jumped
up and screamed like some one had hit
her. Every man in the car looked at me
as though l had lone something, but l
hadn't, and l didn't know any
more about it than they did. But
the woman kept on screaming just the
same, and jumped off the car. She nearly
fell down, and l think I'd have been
murdered if she had, but the gripman
stopped the train, and l ran to her to see
what was the matter l was nearly scared
to death when | saw her skirts burning,
because l couldn't imagine what had set
fire to them, but 1 took off my coat and
smothered the blaze, and when we went
back to the grip I found hat the shield
she had been sitting over was red. I'm
pretty sure l saved my life by pointing it
out to the men who were on the car. They
were awfu1ly ferocious. If l had hit the
lady they could not have glared at me
worse, but when l showed them what was
the matter and sent about half of them
back in the coach so that the springs
could lift the car off the shield, they were
humber.
A very clipper young fellow was talk
ing to me about my gripman. He asked
me why we didn't get railroad men to
work the grips. n it was all because we
jolted his necktie out of place when we
were making a crossing. 1 gave him a
piece of my mind, and what told him is
true, too. People talk about professional
railroad men as though railroading was
something you had to go to college to
learn as you do law or medicine, but
that's all nonsense. It's just like every
thing else in this age; it's mechanical.
You know that your own city editor has
got his business Town so fine that ho
doesn't turn the reporters loose and tell
them to bring in what they get. He tells
them what to go and get. Isn't that So
thing else nowadays. The best men
on a road are not those who tell
the superintendent that they have
been ra%ilroading for a century; they are
the green hands. You take a fellow that
is only half a professional and nobody can
tell him anything. Just the same, he
don't know his business. But bring in a
g%reenhorn and he will throw up his hands
and say: Il don't know nothing" and you
can teach that fellow the business, and in
a few months he will be an expert and
won't know it. No, l amt ~fooling.
He will be an expert and won't
know that he has learned anything
about railroading. He never will find it
out until some other Dad offers him mere
money than he is getting, and then he
wonders what they do it for, because he
knows he has been railroading a little
while and he can't get the idea through
his head that he has learned anything
st. Louis Republic.