S.E. Shelby
50 years with the GM&O
Saint Louis, MO. — Bicycle Messenger Boy to Clerk
Mobile, AL. —
Clerk and Freight Traffic Representative - travel line
Birmingham, AL. — Commercial Agent
"No One Expects a Long Life, and Only a Fool Expects an Easy One."
When my father was four years old, his father died. His mother, two older twins, brother and sister, experienced horrific poverty for years. At one time his mother's sister Ruby, living in Paducah, Kentucky, and her husband, Duncan (last name may had been Cain), took my dad to live with them. At eleven years old, he worked full time as a laborer for a shoe manufacturer in St. Louis. Without finishing grade school, my dad went to work for the railroad and stayed for fifty years. He achieved what he viewed as ultimate success: marriage, children, owning a home, obtaining middle-class status, and the final fulfillment in life of retiring where he always wanted—Mobile Bay.
My dad was proud to be a white-collar railroad man. He married into a family that worked for the same railroad, the Mobile & Ohio RR, later, the Gulf, Mobile & Ohio RR. My mother worked as a clerk for the railroad in the same building as my father at 104 St. Francis St., Mobile, Alabama when they met.
Her father, Clovis Rufus Ellis (Pop), started work for the M&O as a fireman shoveling coal into the steam engine's firebox and later became a locomotive engineer. He finished his fifty-seven year career with the GM&O. His father, Claiborne Ellis, worked many years for the same railroad as a brakeman, my great uncle, Edward Franelich, worked for the railroad as a brakeman and then conductor until he got sick and died. Another uncle (by marriage) Herbert Calametti worked fifty years in rates for the same railroad in the Mobile office.