Archive for September 26th, 2008
September 26th, 2008
Derek Boals takes trains for this simple reason: the 38-year old resort owner from Ludington, Mich., doesn’t like to fly. He’s riding The City of New Orleans to catch a cruise ship to Mexico, where he plans to go fishing and scuba diving.
SCOTT MORGAN | RRSTAR.COM
Derek Boals of Ludington, Mich. (left) and Joe Kulesza of Las Vegas, Nev., sit together Friday, Sept. 26, 2008, on the City of New Orleans Amtrak train between Chicago and New Orleans, La.
Boals, who also owns a Dairy Queen in Ludington, joins in a lively conversation in the train’s dining car, which doubles as a bar car; it seems the closer this train gets to New Orleans, the louder the crowd in this car gets. There’s the southern version of the aging hippie, who followed the Allman Brothers around the Southland the way northern-types chased after the Grateful Dead. The minister who wants us to guess that he really looks like Denzel Washington, and the waitress who doesn’t want me to use her name but lets me know she’s for Obama because he supports Amtrak and McCain votes against funding it. “It’s about preserving my job” she says.
But I digress. Back to Derek Boals.
He admires John McCain because he was a POW who turned down a chance to leave prison early because the other prisoners would not be let go, too. Boals said he’s glad that John McCain will be showing up at Ole Miss tonight to debate Barack Obama. McCain had suspended his campaign and suggested postponing the debate because of the financial crisis affecting Wall Street.
“I like McCain but I am not a big fan of Sarah Palin. I don’t think she has any business being vice president. But he might win the presidency because of it.” Boals, who is independent-minded, says he’d rather have Hillary Clinton run for veep.
Boals is our first interviewee who uses alcohol analogies to describe the Wall Street crisis.
“You don’t drink 25 beers and not have a hangover the next day. You can delay the hangover when you wake up by having a bloody Mary.” He’s not a fan of bailouts.
Boals is concerned about Michigan’s economy, which is suffering from the loss of thousands of factory jobs. He reckons his resort’s business is down 5 percent this year.
September 26th, 2008
With a Walgreens springing up just about every week, they’re going to need a slew of pharmacists. That’s what prompts Tenika Murphy of Willowbrook to study at the University of Illinois Chicago for her pharmacological degree, so she can be one of those pharmicists. It’s a big step up from the pharmacy tech position she currently has at a Chicago Walgreens.
Murphy is on The City of New Orleans with her daughter Kalisia, 7, and son Kevin, 11. They’re bound for Vicksburg, Miss., to visit family.
She’ll vote for Obama, “basically because he’ll try to change the economy for the better and provide hope of new jobs.”
While Watkins agrees the economy is hurting, she says blame is often misdirected.
“I think it’s the war. It’s too expensive. We spend billions a month that could have been better used here at home for housing, businesses, health care. Other countries in Europe have health care; why don’t we?
She’s also concerned about education. She’s only lived in Willowbrook four months, and the reason she moved was because of the schools. In Chicago, she had to scrimp and save to afford private school tuition for her kids; “that’s a big reason I moved to the suburbs, to get a better education for my kids.”
SCOTT MORGAN | RRSTAR.COM
Tenika Murphy and her daughter Kalesia Williams, 7, are pictured Friday, Sept. 26, 2008, on the City of New Orleans Amtrak train between Chicago and New Orleans, La.
September 26th, 2008
Amtrak tries hard, but there’s nothing the national passenger train company can do about the Canadian National, which owns the tracks our train runs on.
At the moment we are sitting on a siding somewhere in rural Mississippi while we wait for a northbound CN freight train to pass us. In theory, passenger trains are supposed to have prioritiy over freights. That’s in theory. In practice, it doesn’t happen. The conductor keeps us updated, admitting that “we don’t know where he is” about the freight train. Obviously, we can’t proceed if he’s still on the main line coming our way.
What was supposed to be about a five-minute delay is now a half hour, and no sign of the northbound. You think maybe CN is trying to tell Amtrak something, like scram?
Now we are under way again. Funny, that northbound never did show up. Hope he’s not down the line somewhere. This is only a single track mainline.
September 26th, 2008
Tomeka Watkins lives in Park Forest, Ill. She and her two children, Amarie, 4, and Aaron, 8, are traveling to Jackson, Miss., today along with a cousin, Aeriel, 8, to visit family.
Watkins is in her final year of nursing school at Prairie State College in Chicago. When she graduates in 24 weeks, “I’m going to Georgia, where I can make more money than in Illinois. The economy is better there,” Watkins says.
Her issues in this election year are jobs, taxes, the war and the stock market.
” We need to create a lot of new businesses that provide jobs for our community,” she says. “Taxes are too high, my (property tax) just went up.” The middle class is subsidizing health care for the poor, she says, and if the squeeze continues, “you’re going to end up with only rich and poor people. The middle class will be gone.”
About the financial mess on Wall Street, Watkins is flummoxed. “I think it’s bad we have to make up for their mistakes, but if we don’t do it, more businesses will close and we’ll lose more jobs.”
Watkins plans to vote for Obama on Nov. 4. She hopes that the Democrat’s talk of change is more than just a campaign promise.
SCOTT MORGAN | RRSTAR.COM
Tomika Watkins studies for nursing school with her children Amarie Watkins, 4, niece Aeriel Turner, 8, and Aaron Watkins, 8, Friday, Sept. 26, 2008, on the City of New Orleans Amtrak train between Chicago and New Orleans, La.
September 26th, 2008
Artie and Pat Jones live in Hammond, La., and they ride the passenger trains frequently. When I meet up with them in the dining car, oops, the “Cross Country Café,” I learn that they’re on the way home from Ann Arbor, Mich., where their son is a lawyer.
Hammond, a city of 18,000, is home to Southeast Louisiana University, 50 miles from New Orleans. Nevertheless, the Joneses’ home suffered water damage after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and minor water damage at the hands of Gustav and Ike this September.
“We think maybe a small tornado came through; there are a lot of limbs down,” Pat Jones says. Both Art and Pat believe tonight’s presidential debate at Ole Miss should go forth. Both explain that there are too many important issues to discuss.
Pat says she’s relying on the debates to make up her mind about who will get her vote. Art doesn’t need a debate. He already knows. “The last time I voted for a Democrat was JFK,” he says. That was in 1960, and he explains that the reason had to do with him being Catholic, same as Jack Kennedy. “I’m leaning toward McCain,” he says. It is a strong lean. “I should tell you that I’m a registered Democrat, because in Louisiana, that’s what you have to be” to make your voice heard in local elections, he says.
As with all the people I have talked with so far on this trip, the Joneses are angry about the proposed $700 billion bailout of failed financial institutions that made risky mortgage loans that turned out to be worthless.
“I think we have a crisis, but when I get in a fix, nobody bails me out. I have to work my way out,” said Art, a retired auto parts salesman. He’s not for a bailout. Pat Jones said if there’s to be a bailout, the priorities should be vastly different from what’s currently on the table – a rescue of failed financial institutions. “Why don’t they just bail out the people in the foreclosed houses instead of making rich people richer?” she says.
Art is concerned with the Iraq war, the economy in general, and the price of gas. He can’t understand why the government bans drilling for oil in much of the continental shelf, “when we’ve been doing it on the coast of Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana for years, with no spills.”
Art says he has a connection of sorts to Rockford, Illinois. “My grandfather’s nephew was a priest in Rockford, his name was Father Joseph Guagliardo.” Maybe, he says, someone in Rockford has heard of him.
SCOTT MORGAN | RRSTAR.COM
Artie and Pat Jones of Hammond, La. eat breakfast Friday, Sept. 26, 2008, on the City of New Orleans Amtrak train between Chicago and New Orleans, La.
September 26th, 2008
It’s 4:28 a.m. The train has stopped at some godforsaken Podunk of a place. Some people got off. I don’t know what state we are in. I can’t sleep, so I fire up the PC. I’ve talked to quite a few people already, kept up with the news on the computer and TV, and frankly I’m getting rather alarmed.
I know I’m on a train, but I’m thinking of buses. As in, Are the wheels really coming off the bus? Our country seems to be in one of those times when the leaders are small men, and now, small women, with few ideas, few qualities that inspire. The Wasilla City Council could do a better job than this Congress and president. Maybe we should draft them.
We may indeed need to bail out failing investment banks with all their once fancy, now tarnished “instruments.” I’m not sure of that. What I do know is that a lot of people I’m talking to on this trip are livid at the thought of being ordered to send their tax dollars to Washington to pay for the very people who sold the U.S. down the river. This crisis is not abstract: Folks are losing their savings. There is nothing in any of the proposed measures on Capitol Hill that has any relief for people with foreclosed mortgages, which were based on home prices that were wildly overpriced.
Many of those I interviewed were also appalled that people routinely bought houses they in no way could pay for, suckered in by the lure of “free money” offered by irresponsible lenders. There’s more than enough blame to go around for the mortgage meltdown.
And for all John McCain made a show of “suspending” his campaign to go back to Washington to solve the crisis, people in the White House meeting Thursday said he didn’t say much. He did do several TV interviews, though. This, then, qualifies as a “suspended” campaign. I think the suspension has more to do with campaign strategy. McCain needed a new surprise.
The train has started up again. As we gain speed, the train lurches from right to left, up and down. I’m bouncing around like crazy in the middle of a country whose government can’t understand that we must have a First World infrastructure if we are going to remain a First World nation. Small men. Small women.
I’ve put Brad Paisley on the iPod. I feel better. “Time Well Wasted.” The title seems appropriate.
SCOTT MORGAN | RRSTAR.COM
Rockford Register Star columnist Chuck Sweeny rides the City of New Orleans Amtrak train Friday, Sept. 26, 2008, between Chicago and New Orleans, La.
September 26th, 2008
Joan Brumfield of Chicago’s South Side isn’t worried as much about the economy as she is about her mom, whom she’s going to see in McComb, Miss.
“I’m going to see my mom and dad, and she’s very sick,” Brumfield said. Her 13-year-old daughter accompanied her.
The owner of an adult day care business, Brumfield says she feels sorry for a lot of people who don’t have jobs and savings accounts, but who also have families to raise.
“This is an unfair economy,” she says. “We are bailing out wealthy people, a $700 billion gift to financial giants who were bad businessmen. We are not doing anything for the small people whose mortgages have been foreclosed.”
She likes Obama, who she says is smart and adept at the art of politics: “He knows how to work a room.” Friends and associates tell Brumfield that “they’ll never let a black man become president,” but she tells them, “yes, they will. He’s a smart, black man. He listens to people.”
SCOTT MORGAN | RRSTAR.COM
Joan Brumfield (right) and her daughter Tiffany Brumfield, 13, of Chicago talk while sitting in the dining car Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008, on the City of New Orleans Amtrak train between Chicago and New Orleans, La.
September 26th, 2008
While I’m interviewing the Rockford woman in the dining car, one of her fellow diners chimes in from the next booth.
“I guess I’m one of the bad guys you’ve been talking about,” he says, laughing. It’s Tracy Wiswall of Memphis, formerly of New Orleans. He’s an officer of a brokerage firm called Wunderlich Securities.
“I’m not getting bailed out,” he hastens to add. I figure, good, we have an expert. What’s he think about what’s going on in the fiscal universe? Is it curtains? Or not?
“There’s a reasonable debate about what’s happening. They don’t know who they’re bailing out. Nobody knows.” A lot of the softness in the economy is the result of bad mortgage debt, he says.
“And the reason we have a mortgage crisis is because of all the Ninja loans that were made,” Wiswall said.
Ninja loans? What in the world is a Ninja loan, I ask him.
“Ninja. No income, no job loans. They were loaning readily available cash to anybody.”
Oh, that makes sense, I say.
Unlike President Bush and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, our man Wiswall says. “I’m glad they said, no way, we aren’t getting this done right away, the process is too rushed.”
Wiswall says he’ll vote for McCain, but he’s not enthusiastic about it. He would have preferred libertarian Ron Paul.
“If I had a choice of McCain, Obama and Hillary, I might have voted for her,” he said.
I asked the classic right direction, wrong direction question.
“Right direction? No,” he said. We are going the way of the Romans, he added.
“The Romans built a vast empire, but the bigger they got, the more liberal they became, and they got too tired to fight. The U.S. is kind of moving that way. It’s more and more liberal.”
September 26th, 2008
It’s 7:13 p.m., and we are being called to board Train # 59, “The City of New Orleans.” Because Scott and I both have ordered roomettes, we get to waltz ahead of the coach passengers, who growl under their breaths as the Amtrak personnel wave us through the crowd.
As we get on, Terry, who’s in charge of the sleeping cars, shows us how to work the various lights and switches in our roomettes. He has “gotten the memo” from Amtrak management that two reporters are to be riding tonight. Terry says that anything we want, just call. We assure him we need nothing special.
This is a train with a famous name, but for many years under the Illinois Central’s ownership it was the “cheap train”, an all-coach train for poor people going between the Deep South and Chicago. Begun in 1947, it replaced another IC train called The Creole. Railroaders call this train the “Chicken Bone” because of the fried chicken that used to be taken on board by numerous passengers. That doesn’t happen nowadays, but the name stuck.
The exclusive, all-Pullman IC train to New Orleans was the Panama Limited, a name Amtrak kept in 1971 when it took over passenger trains from the railroads. In 1981, when Arlo Guthrie’s recording of Steve Goodman’s song became a hit, Amtrak renamed the Panama “the City of New Orleans,” to bask in the popularity of the song.
Scott and I make our way to the dining car, where we find an actual Rockfordian. She’s Lynda Liberatore of Churchill’s Grove. She’s bound for Jackson, Miss., taking her grandson “to meet her sister.” Her grandson’s mom and dad are coming from Dallas to pick him up.
As she enjoys some cajun-style cuisine, Liberatore tells me she’s a singer in the Sweet Adelines, a well-known Rockford group. I tell her I’ve probably heard her sing because I’ve heard the Adelines perform a time or two.
So, does she think we’re in a dire financial crisis, as our leaders have told us?
“Absolutely. We’re just going to borrow the money (for the bailout of failed banks) from somewhere else and it will be paid back by the taxpayers,” she says, dryly.
Liberatore believes Friday’s debate between Barack Obama and John McCain should go on.
“Let ‘em debate. Everything needs to be out there on the table,” she says.
When she goes to the polls Nov. 4, Liberatore will vote for John McCain. As with other McCain voters I’ve talked to, she admires his military experience and his strength under torture as a POW in North Vietnam.
“I guess I’m just a Republican at heart. I’m thrilled that he picked Sarah Palin. She’s a family gal, seems very intelligent and down to earth. She has good morals.”
Scott and I have dinner; he has steak, I have catfish. We’re surprised to discover it’s included in the price of the sleeping car ticket.
This train used to have both a club car and an observation car. Now it’s just the diner, two coaches, two sleepers and an engine. They stop serving dinner at 10 p.m., but the car stays open all night. I bring my laptop in and begin blogging.
The assistant conductor explains that the train used to be on time all the time, but a sinkhole developed under the tracks in Memphis. Canadian National, which owns the line, is reluctant to prioritize fixing the problem because it does not have many freights on the line. Since April, The City of New Orleans has been forced to make a complicated detour around the affected line in Memphis, throwing the schedule out the window. I wonder how late we’ll be getting into New Orleans. The assistant conductor doesn’t know. “Depends.”
SCOTT MORGAN | RRSTAR.COM
Lynda Liberatore of Rockford and her grandson Jaiden Richey, 3, of Irving, Tex. watch out the window Friday, Sept. 26, 2008, on the City of New Orleans Amtrak train between Chicago and New Orleans, La.
