News of little use on a busy news day
A 1976 train wreck doesn't mean much now, except to those of us who were there
I’m writing this because it’s the 45th anniversary of one of the most remarkable moments of my life, national news when it happened. But you probably shouldn’t interrupt what you’re doing to read this today, unless what you're doing is trying to escape 2021 news. Maybe even then.
There are a lot more important things to read about. 1976 is certainly not current events, and those are pretty compelling right now.
But I’ve never published this story before, despite more than half a lifetime in journalism. Either my bosses didn’t want the story, or I missed the anniversary, or I had more important things to do, which was usually the case. It’s the case now. But it’s certainly within the realm of possibility that I could become too forgetful or too dead before the 50th anniversary. So I’m finding the time.
It’s actually amazing how often I missed the anniversary, because the day of the train wreck is a date I’ve never forgotten. Not because of death or drama, but because of a radio gimmick.
A DJ had announced that day was “The Bicentennial Day.”
Jan. 9, 1976 could be looked upon, and he did, as “1-9-76, which spells out 1976.” It was lame radio shtick, but it has stuck in my head all this time.
Aside from 1976, I remember another, much smaller number from that day: three, as in three degrees above zero. It felt colder, because it was windy. When I parked my ‘68 Chevy on Dakin Street near the Irving Park Road station (on what’s now called the Blue Line), I took the weak battery out and put it in the slightly-warmer interior of the car, so that it would be more likely to hold a charge.
I had worked the night before, and never studied for my Spanish test, which was coming up second period at Circle (now called UIC). I’d never even read the chapter. So I planned to read it on the el, and reread it when I got to school, at least an hour early.
I boarded the front car of the train, and there were no seats left. I stood between the doors, put my book bag on the floor, and looked for the chapter. There was plenty of light, because it was one of the then-new stainless steel cars, with the big windows. I found the right page, and as soon as I looked down, something distracting happened.
I remember thinking that I finally understood why artists drew across comic book panels, in big capital letters, red, with black shading, BOOM. That’s exactly the noise I heard.
We had slammed into the back of an old-style green train at the Addison Street station. Our train had bounced back along the rails a short distance, its modern front end smashed and tilted up, the back of the train in front of us smashed in, too, but not tilted like that.
My immediate reaction was peevish. Man, look what you CTA idiots have done. You probably just killed some of us. And you have really screwed up these trains. This’ll take a while to straighten out, you bet.
I saw the motorman, uninjured, standing almost next to me. I wondered how long he had been there. But I thought to myself, Well, we all do what we have to do to survive.
The interior of the car was suddenly more colorful. Yellow insulation was fluttering all around. And all over, faces were splattered with bright red. The sudden stop had propelled them against the hand rails that stretched moronically above every seat back. It was a festival of broken noses. The CTA would never again buy rail cars with grab bars like that.
I then saw, for the first time, an interesting phenomenon common to situations like this: most people who have been badly frightened try to get the hell away as fast as they can.
The people on the train car moved as quickly as almost any crowd I’ve ever seen, clutching their attaché cases and newspapers and purses, through to the next car, and then out the doors that would still open. The sound of their feet was like that of soldiers marching in quick-time.
There was a man on the floor at my feet. “I can’t get up,” he said. He looked like he was faking, but I straddled his body so no one could step on him in the rush to get out.
I learned many years later that in such situations, most of the people who don’t run off are the people with training: cops, firefighters, medical personnel -- and Boy Scouts. Say what you want about boy scouting, and there are a lot of negative things to say, but they teach you first aid, and how to react in an emergency.
I was a few years away from having been a very bad Boy Scout. I never rose above Tenderfoot, and was actually encouraged to depart the organization after my only extended camping trip, because of an unfortunate breaking-and-entering incident. But I’d been an ace in the first-aid competitions.
One of the things they told us as Boy Scouts was to back off when the experts get there. And as soon as most of the people fled the train, the firemen appeared on the platform (Not “firefighters.” It was a long time ago.) Aside from the injured, there were only a few of us left in the car.
The firefighters (that sounds better now, anyway) unceremoniously broke out the big windows with axes and Halligan tools. That got our attention. I think they just assumed that the able-bodied men on the train -- I guess there were three or four of us still standing – were there to do the heavy lifting while they did the paramedic thing. So we helped load the injured onto stretchers and handed them out the windows.
There must have been a lot of injured people in that car, because we were there for what seemed like a long time. At one point I guess we had run out of stretchers, because a rawboned cat in his fifties motioned me to sit down across the aisle from him, and suggested we take a break. He pulled a red pack of Winstons out of his jean jacket, and handed it to me.
I shook out a cigarette, and it had no filter. That couldn’t be. Winston hadn’t made a filterless cigarette for years, but this pack was soft and fresh. I looked at him funny. He just smiled.
Instead of questioning him, I questioned my own sanity, because the whole experience was surreal. Had I been hit on the head? Was I even really awake?
I stared at the cigarette for a few more seconds, and then smoked it. Whatever was going on, I thought, this is the best Winston ever.
We got back to work quickly. It was better to move, because the wind was really whistling through the open windows. Finally, it was done. I followed a firefighter off the train, and looked back. It was empty.
Walking along the platform, I passed a lady holding a tear-off pad of paper against a column, pen at the ready. I looked at the pad as I went by. Nothing was written there.
When I reached the street, there were hundreds of people waiting in lines, clouds of vapor pouring from their mouths and noses.
“It’s so cold. What are they doing?” I asked a firefighter. “Waiting for ambulances,” he said with a smile.
I began the walk of a mile or so back to the car. I had my bag tucked under my arm, because there seemed to be something wrong with my hands. They were now white and huge. The fingers were stiff and three times their regular size. They looked like frozen bratwurst.
I couldn’t spend too much time worrying about that, however, because I realized there was one person in the world who would assume I was on that train and dead or near death. That person, of course, was my mother.
As I walked I looked for a pay phone, hopefully one indoors. I found a gas station, with a pay phone inside the office, where three guys were hanging out enjoying the warmth. I tried to get some change out of my pocket, but my hand wouldn’t fit. The guys stopped talking and stared. I managed to pull a dollar bill out.
“Can you give me some change, man?” I got it, but dropped it coin by coin on the floor, and each coin that went down was down for good.
“My hands are frozen,” I apologized. One of the guys says to me, “Stick ‘em in your pants.” I swung one of my giant hands to my belt, poking it feebly, and he said, “No, better not.”
Finally, I got a dime in the slot. Then these three guys watched me fail at turning the dial with those sausage fingers for a few minutes before one of them said, “Hey, you must have been on that train wreck,” and one of the others made the noble sacrifice of getting off his butt to dial for me. So after I made the call – yes, she knew I was on the train -- we were all buddies long enough for me to stay and thaw my fingers a little.
I walked the rest of the way to the car, put the battery back under the hood, and drove to school. I actually arrived a few minutes early.
I stopped for coffee in a cafeteria. I couldn’t look at the Spanish because I was buttonholed by a friend who wanted me to write about him in the Chicago Illini.
I got through my classes, and then drove either home or to work. I don’t remember which. Coming north on Ashland Avenue, I was pulled over by a cop, who asked me how it was that I hadn’t noticed the red light everybody else had seen and obeyed.
“Sorry, I missed it. I just stepped off that wreck,” I said.
“I bet you were in a wreck,” he grumped. He wrote me a ticket.
Postscript: Early reports had three dead in the wreck. It turned out there were only two, so, to me, it seemed like some kind of miracle.
Postscript two: My right hip hurt like the devil, but I didn’t notice until the next day.
Postscript Three: The CTA and the National Transportation Safety Board blamed the wreck on deficits in the signaling/switching system, which made skip-stop service -- “A” and “B” trains -- possible. No significant human error was involved. You are free to ponder why anyone can’t see something as big as a train stopped right in front of them in broad daylight, however.
Postscript four: I aced the Spanish test. Don’t ask me how.
Postscript five: Decades later, I found out what some American sport fishermen of the 1970s and other travelers to Canada knew: In our neighbor to the north, they still made filterless cigarettes for brands that had long since stopped offering them in the United States.
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