By Frances Stebbins
{Frances Stebbins has been covering events in Western Virginia, especially those relating to faith communities, since 1953. She lives in Salem.}
This column grew out of several events.
My late husband, Charles Harvey Stebbins Sr., would have been 99 years old tomorrow. He was a newspaper reporter from the age of 16 to his death from the terminal lung condition of pulmonary fibrosis in 2008 when he neared 85.
Part of Charlie’s job in the 1950s writing for the daily evening paper The Roanoke World-News was to visit the headquarters of the Norfolk & Western Railway near Hotel Roanoke. There at least weekly Charlie would talk with the N&W’s promotion manager, the late Ben Dulaney.
Around 1958 the talk turned to O. Winston Link, a photographer who loved the N&W steam locomotives that for decades had carried coal, lumber and passengers around the mountains and rivers of Southwest Virginia.
At the time, Link knew steam locomotives were soon going to be replaced by diesel engines which he thought lacked the romantic quality associated with smoke, smells and sounds of the older trains. So he determined to capture these looks and sounds for posterity.
In my possession is a 33 I/3 rpm record, “The Fading Giant.” I can still play it on a simple turntable. It does indeed bring back the sounds from the childhoods of those old enough to remember; Link achieved his purpose. We bought the record from Dulaney’s office.
Along with Charlie’s birthday this week, and being reminded of O. Winston Link through a feature in a recent Roanoke Times, on Getting Reacquainted with the photographer through a Roanoke rail tourist attraction, I discovered a yellowed newspaper clipping my late husband had written.
The clipping dates from October 2001 when Charlie was for several of his retirement-age years editor of the weekly Vinton Messenger. He wrote a column headlined by “The Passing of an Artist and His Era.”
The column my late husband wrote was in response to the death of photographer Link which had apparently occurred a short time before. Charlie in the column reminisced about his meeting Link, and that in turn got him thinking of a memorable occasion in around 1931 when as a boy of about eight he got to ride in the cab of a steam engine.
{We’re talking here about a reminiscence on a reminiscence so no wonder if you as a reader are confused.}
In his 2001 column my late husband recalled his childhood days in South Boston, Virginia. The youngest of five children—and the only boy born long after four stair-step sisters—he was the son of a banker in the town. Along with the recollections of riding in the cab of a steam locomotive from South Boston to the courthouse town of Halifax five miles away, Charlie had a more somber memory.
It concerned going with his father to see the shuttering of the bank because of the Great Depression. Charlie’s banker father succumbed to pneumonia not long after that; one wonders if he died of a broken heart.
That event led to the sale of the family home in South Boston and the move of my husband and his widowed mother to a series of places where they could be near his older sisters. His love of newspaper work began as a teen in Washington, D.C. , and it continued –along with his love for me—until his death.
In his column of 2001, Charlie wrote “Times were simpler in those days because when the train came into South Boston station, my father and the engineer spoke to each other by name. My father climbed part of the way up the ladder on the outside of the locomotive and talked with the engineer for a minute or two…when my father got down,he asked if I would like to ride over to Halifax where he would pick me up. To us locals, the locomotive was called ‘the engine.’”
The boy was hoisted up and told to sit down and hold tight. He continued:
“It was the thrill of my life being in a real engine with the jerks and wobblings..the sooty wind blowing in my face…I looked up and saw smoke shooting from the stack and trailing off to settle over the passenger cars.
“Looking down, I could see the big wheels turning faster as the train picked up speed and the click clack on the tracks growing faster.”
Charlie likened the locomotive to a real monster, but for the moment he felt he had it tamed as if he was in the driver’s seat.
“Halifax came too soon , and I wondered why I had to get off. Why couldn’t I go on to distant places, not for the places, but for the thrill of getting there.”
And more than 90 years later, the memories on an obsolete music recording and in print are still there.