The Wilmington morning star., 1944-09-24
By wEsTBROOK PEGLER


hi. readers His articles she good purpose Of
making people think.
By WESTBROOK PEGLER
Copyright, 1914, King Features Syndicate, Inc.
Although had travelled up and down and
across and slaunchwise of this and some Euro
pean countries for years and years, had never
been in a railroad wreck until that stunning
instant when Governor Deweys campaign
special banged into stalled train on thel
way from Seattle to Portland, it had occurred
to me, as suppose it has to many others,
that some train on which was riding might
be wrecked by any one Of those many over
sights Of men or failures of machinery which
are, in President Roosevet's word, unforesee-
able, and l had sometimes stirred on my
shelf in the night wondering whether my stout
connemara skull would stand off the impact
with the steel bulkhead at the head end Of
the BERTH but always, until this time it had
been somebody elses train not mine.
With decent respect for proportion and
perspective. l refrain from dramatizing our
own little smash-up on the way from Seattle
to Portland which, as railroad wreck, on its
absolute merits, would not have rated more
than a hundred words in even the local pa
pers, to say nothing of the press associations
and the national and foreign press, if Governor
Dewey and Mrs. Dewey had not been aboard,
as news, it could not have been showed east
Of Spokane under ordinary conditions. About
20 were hurt aboard our train and the regular
passenger train that we hit and, so lar asI
we know, the only one who really suffered
serious damage was bluejacket of the Navy
in the train ahead whose name was not men
toned in any casualty list because war-timel
regulations forbid.
But, actually, train wreck, out lin the
country, is a shocking thing and, in this one
we saw a test of the superstition that neWspa-I
per reporters react instinctively in just onel
way, meaning, to get to the wire at once
whatever else beckon or befall. All of us, OIL
course, must have thought privately at some
time on this trip or some similar one that
if it ever happened the thing to do would
be to get to the car of the historic personageI
whom we were attending, find out whether
he was hurt and if so, to what apparent ex-
tent, or dead, and then ignore all others and
breast the flood or brave the wilds to get
it into the office, ours is pretty good craft
The working press covered the story and act
ed as human beings, too.
I was not even scratched but the men in|
the little alley Of the diner in which I was
having breakfast, popped out in a Mortified
escape from a dreadful trap. The big coffee
urn and all the hot stuff that was cookingl
for breakfast and lunch, the frying fat and
the steam from broken pipes drove them
scrambling. One young colored mans head
was gashed and he was scalded, there was
scrawny, cocky little white man, the chef,
believe, clambering into the aleyway where
the passengers these days writ their turns at
table, he seems not to have been hurt, al
though the urn splattered all around him.
Along the length of the diner, as / rose
from my chair, where had been riding back
ward there was a clutter of men and tables,
linen and smashed tableware and across the
aisle, Sylvia Barbanell one Of the secretaries,
dropped across her breakfast table. Mrs. Irene
Kuhn, who was facing forward at our table,
sat upright but slowly wilted onto her arms.
She was almost out and very pale l helped
Irene to her feet and toward the alley but
turned her around to 60 out the other way
because the cooks were charging our way to
get away from the steam. We walked through
the wreckage to the other end to get Gown
on the right of way.
On the ground we looked ahead and saw
the crumpled ruin OF the red baggage car
where all our friends of the newspaper and
newsreel camera bunch had their equipment
and did their work. 1t looked very bad Irene
said later that she was Mortified most by the
agonies Of the colored man who had been
waiting a minute before and now was
all bloody and scalded I had no recollection
of that but was thinking OF the cameramen
and hoping that by some miraculous favor all
OF them had been out of their working car
WLeu IL udppeueu, DIS IldIIeIS tuIueO olt, tlSy
had just left the red car few seconds before
we hit.
I think at least an hour had passed before
the reporters began to come into the little
telephone exchange in the little town of Castle
Rock, Wash. The people had known that there
was a freight wreck on the turn the night
before but apparently they had not heard our
crash and when we spoke of the wreck they
thought we meant the freight smashup. The
local doctor was out on his calls but regis
tered nurse reached by phone, said she would
come right out; and the Red Cross and the
local Order of Eagles presently delivered a.
big ash can full of coffee for the soldiers
and sailors on the train ahead who were all
going on or returning from leave. An ambu-
lance came and loaded up and returned and
then another came and our people and passen-
gers from the other train began to show up
wearing bandages.
ALI OF them made light of things, every one,
and IN e railroad people and the Pullman
men were so fine, on the instinct OF the mo-
ment, that you would have thought they had
been trained in practice wrecks for years,
although none of those with whom I talked
had ever been in serious accident before.
william Wingate, the Pullman porter in car
nine, my landlord as he and have been call
ing him for more than a week, had hurt his
elbow but he was clearing away the wreckage
in the rooms In ali the other cars it was
the same and back in the diner, when I re-
turned from Castle Rock, the survivors, as
you might say, the men whose cuts and sprains