Chapter 12
For the city of Albuquerque and the Locomotive Repair Shops, as for America in general and indeed most of the developed world, the period between 1925 and 1950 was one of extreme political and economic swings. It saw, for instance, both the lowest and the highest employment rates ever at the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops, which reflected the national economic roller coaster.
As seen in chapter 10, in the aftermath of the 1922 Shopmen’s Strike, there was a wholesale replacement of staff at the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops. The result was a younger, more Hispanic workforce, although foremen and managers remained uniformly non-Hispanic. Both the company and employees evidently made an effort to get permanently beyond the bitterness engendered by the strike. By 1924, the company boasted of a smoothly operating shop facility at Albuquerque, one that ran with more productivity than ever. That was attributed at the time in large measure to more harmonious relations between the shopmen and company management. A 1924 article in the Railway Mechanical Engineer gave some of the credit for this turn of events to the company having initiated monthly council meetings to discuss matters of shop welfare. Employees were encouraged to attend and discuss ways to improve working conditions and efficiency. According to the article, there were also fifteen-minute noon meetings held three times a week to discuss specific topics, such as safety, wage rates, and methods of eliminating waste in the workplace.1
This was part of a national shift by railroads, exemplified in an article written by the vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, E. T. Whiter, in the December 1923 issue of Railway Mechanical Engineer. “Railroad management realizes that contented, healthy employees, mentally and physically, are one of the greatest assets a railroad can have,” he wrote.2
A lasting improvement in labor relations at the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops is attested by the career of boilermaker Thomas C. Cordova. A member of a family from Cabezón, New Mexico, in the valley of the Río Puerco of the East, Thomas joined the employ of AT&SF at the Albuquerque Shops in 1927. He was hired as a boilermaker apprentice, became a journeyman boilermaker, and ended his career in 1976 as a welder. From the union’s founding until even beyond Cordova’s retirement and up until he died in 1981, he was secretary-treasurer of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, Local #76, in Albuquerque. He is remembered for enthusiastically repeating that he was “the luckiest man in the world.” The Shops were “the best place to work,” and he had the best job at the best company there was. He was immensely proud of the benefits the Brotherhood had brought to workers at the Shops. Every month he attended the meeting of Local #76 at the VFW Hall, located in 1950 at 416 N. 2nd. For decades Cordova collected dues and kept the books for the union, in addition to supporting efforts to improve the pay, benefits, and general welfare of all Shop employees.3
Thomas Cordova began his nearly fifty-year association with the Shops during a period of extreme national optimism, but the economy was also heading toward the worst financial collapse in the country’s history. As John Stepek recently and succinctly writes, “From 1923, America was on a roll.” By the end of the decade, about 60 percent of American families owned a car, most had electricity, and 40 percent or so had a telephone. Prosperity seemed to be everywhere, paid for to a significant extent by personal debt. The stock market was soaring. It looked to some as though the United States had stumbled into a permanently rising standard of living.4
For many decades Albuquerque’s well-being was tethered to the fluctuating success of the Santa Fe Railroad, specifically to the volume of work at the Repair Shops and the size of its workforce. Thus, in the 1920s, Albuquerque shared in the good times and exhibited many of the same trends as the country at large, while railroads were booming.
In 1910, 470 motor vehicles were registered in New Mexico. Just ten years later the number was more than 17,000, and by 1930 it was about 84,000. That represented a quintupling of motor vehicles on New Mexico’s roads during the 1920s.5 That switch from horse transport to reliance of cars and trucks came about in tandem with improvement of arterial streets and roads. “Albuquerque in the decade of the 1920s invested in paving the city’s major east-west streets—Central, Grand, and Coal, and its north-south thoroughfares—2nd, 4th, Broadway, and Edith. Between 1926 and 1929, twenty miles of streets were paved.” A state highway system came into existence after the US Federal Aid Road Act of 1916 became law. In 1926, what had been New Mexico Highway 1 became US Highway 85, crossing the state from north to south and passing through Albuquerque. At the same time, the main east-west road in the state became part of US Highway 66, again passing through Albuquerque.6 More all-weather roads encouraged more car ownership, and more car ownership drove a demand for more engineered, hard-surfaced roads.
In 1928 Albuquerque’s trolley company went out of business, and much of its trackage was torn up. In its place, the privately owned Albuquerque Bus Company opened for business. With an ever-widening web of routes, the gasoline powered buses shuttled Shop employees as well as other workers, shoppers, and students all over Albuquerque for nearly forty years until the city purchased the system. The City has operated and expanded it ever since.7 Freed from the constraints of the fixed iron rails of the trolley system, bus routes were much more flexible, which made it increasingly easy for shopworkers to live in housing developments on Albuquerque’s expanding perimeter rather than only in the original residential core of the Barelas and South Broadway neighborhoods.
On January 1, 1929, the manager of the Albuquerque Bus Company reported that after one year of operation, bus service was being provided in eight buses, up from the original five. That number was expected to grow again in 1929. In October of that year the bus company’s schedule showed six distinct routes in operation: East Central, West Central, East Silver Avenue, Sawmill, North 4th Street, and South Edith. The last of those routes served the Locomotive Repair Shops, disembarking passengers eight very short blocks east of the Rail Yards’ east gate.
Figure 12.1. Two Albuquerque buses outside the Albuquerque city bus garage, 1956. Bus on the left dates from the 1950s; the one on the right from 1928. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the Albuquerque Museum, Photo Archives, Catalog No. PA1982.180.066.
Two years later, on February 2, 1931, a full-page ad in the Albuquerque Journal trumpeted the advantages of living in the Monte Vista Subdivision, “Albuquerque’s fastest-growing subdivision,” east of the University. One of those advantages was “the new Monte Vista public school, Albuquerque’s most beautiful public building, [which] was opened to the public yesterday and today 217 lucky children are attending classes there.” Furthermore, the ad boasted, “The Albuquerque Bus Company runs a regular schedule of their fast, luxurious buses through Monte Vista.” Less than two years after that, the newspaper announced the addition of one more bus trip per day to the new Veterans’ Hospital.8
Figure 12.2. Schedule of the Albuquerque Bus Company, October 1929. Of the six bus routes, it was the South Edith Route that most directly served the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops. Albuquerque Journal, October 7, 1929, p. 5.
Driven principally by employment ramping up at the enlarged Locomotive Repair Shops during the last six years of the 1920s, the original Albuquerque town site saw explosive in-fill residential building. In the Barelas neighborhood, between 1900 and 1920, the number of houses had already jumped 330 percent to 615. Likewise, “the number of houses in the various Highlands additions, east of the railroad tracks had increased to more than 1,000.” That nearly frenetic building pace continued. The newer Raynolds Addition—south of Central and west of 8th Street—witnessed similar spectacular growth, increasing during the 1920s from just 50 houses to more than 240 by the early 1930s. That meant an average of more than one new house per month in that one neighborhood alone. The Raynolds Addition was far from unusual; between 1900 and 1940 in excess of 300 new subdivisions were laid out in Albuquerque.9
The largest subdivision undertaken in the 1920s, at 156 acres, was the Huning Castle Addition between 15th Street and the Rio Grande, south of Central Avenue. That stretch of land had been a farm owned by Franz Huning, one of the original site developers of New Town, surrounding the Locomotive Repair Shops in the 1880s. But in 1928 the land was bought by A. R. Hebenstreit and William Keleher, son of David Keleher, one of the early Shop employees. An important component of their new development was the establishment of the Albuquerque Country Club golf course to replace the earlier sand-green course in the arroyo where Lomas Boulevard is today, near the University of New Mexico main campus.10 The new course was of particular interest to the instructor of apprentices at the Repair Shops, Joseph Swillum, who was an avid golfer his whole adult life. As pointed out in chapter 9, he had a work schedule that permitted him to get in a round of golf nearly every Wednesday during the warmer months.11
Albuquerque’s exuberant residential growth naturally had its counterpart in building in the city’s commercial heart, centered on 3rd and 4th Streets and Central Avenue, as well as adjacent streets. In 1922, for example, Albuquerque gained its first high-rise building, the nine-story First National Bank at 3rd and Central. That was followed one year later by the Franciscan Hotel at 6th and Central and a year after that by the six-story Sunshine Building at 2nd and Central. As William Dodge notes, “The piece de resistance of downtown architecture in the 1920s was the KiMo Theater,” which opened in 1927 at Central and 5th. “Neighborhood businesses also flourished helped in large part by the dramatic seventy-five percent increase in the city’s population during the decade.”12
Figure 12.3. Albuquerque Country Club clubhouse under construction, 1920s. Photo by Joseph Swillum, Apprentice Instructor at the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops. Courtesy of Mary Jeannette Swillum Koerschner.
New Mexico’s embrace of the automobile spurred the opening in the early 1920s of dealerships for car companies, including the Buick Automobile Company, the Simms Motor Company, and the Galles Motor Company, all on Central Avenue.13 Among purchasers of automobiles during the early 1920s were, of course, employees at the Locomotive Repair Shops. Those included—to mention only a few from 1920—Assistant Shop Foreman C. L. Bernstdon, who in January bought an Oakland Six; Material Supervisor W. E. Blood, who purchased a Mitchell in October; and instructor Joseph Swillum, who became the owner of a Nash automobile in January.14 These car owners were all among the better paid members of the Shop workforce, but many employees bought cars during the 1920s. The mechanical know-how and skill of many shopmen made cars intriguing for them and also permitted them to keep the vehicles running at far less trouble and cost than for the average car buyer.
Increasing reliance of Albuquerqueans of all walks on automobiles in the 1920s and the concomitant proliferation of car repair shops and dealerships resulted in competition among those businesses and the AT&SF Shops in hiring machinists. Over the years quite a number of AT&SF machinists quit their jobs to move to positions as automobile mechanics, among them A. F. Blank, who was reported in January 1920 to have “resigned [from the Shops] and [to then be] working at his former trade as an automobile mechanic in an uptown garage.”15 Michael Keleher remembered a former AT&SF machinist named Joe García who left the Shops and got a job at Galles Chevrolet, where he subsequently worked for about forty years.16 Loss of experienced, skilled shopmen to the automobile industry irked the railway because it seemed as though automobile businesses were poaching AT&SF’s apprentices. In effect, that meant that the Santa Fe Railway provided technical training and education to employees of other businesses. Such loss of experienced machinists from the Locomotive Repair Shops certainly added to the company’s concern to try to keep its employees contented. It may help explain in part the AT&SF’s decision in 1926 to “expand their medical facilities [at Albuquerque] for employees (now numbering well over 1,000).” The company constructed a three-story hospital complex at Central Avenue and Elm Street, later known as Memorial Hospital—today the Hotel Parq Central.17 Free medical treatment for AT&SF employees and retirees at such a modern facility was a considerable perk that came with employment by the Santa Fe.
The Locomotive Repair Shops were humming and Albuquerque was growing by leaps and bounds when the stock market experienced a catastrophic slide in October 1929. Nationwide deflation set in during 1931, dragging down national economic activity, including in the railroad industry. The US Bureau of the Census recorded that the total value of all finished commodities in five categories, perishable, semi-durable, consumer durable, producer durable, and construction materials, plunged from $37.8 billion in 1929 to less than half that amount, $17.7 billion, in 1932. Likewise, the number of railroad passenger trips plummeted, from 786.4 million in 1929 to only 434.8 million in 1933.18 Considering the US economy as a whole, “by the time that F[ranklin] D. R[oosevelt] was inaugurated president on March 4, 1933, the banking system had collapsed, nearly 25% of the labor force was unemployed, and prices and productivity had fallen to 1/3 of their 1929 levels.”19
Figure 12.4. New AT&SF Association Hospital, Albuquerque, NM, 1925? Photographer unknown. Courtesy of Palace of the Governors, Photo Archives., (NMHM/DCA), negative number 163617.
In the early 1930s, with decidedly fewer passengers and less freight being transported by rail, fewer locomotive repairs and overhauls were necessary. In response, the Santa Fe reduced its workforce dramatically. At the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops, “the low point in the Shops’ operation was in 1933 when only 300 men were employed 3 days per week.”20 What had been a constant hive of activity and noise was now often nearly silent and empty of workers. Figures from the Bureau of the Census show, however, that the total value of all finished commodities in the United States in the same five categories mentioned above began to rise significantly again in 1933 all the way through the 1940s and beyond, with only a relatively small setback in 1938. For example, the annual commodity total for 1934 stood at $23.2 billion, up 30.7% from the total for the low point in 1932.21
For railroads, including the AT&SF, the decade of the 1930s “was colored by two major influences: the prolonged period of business prostration, with the attendant collapse of business and agriculture; and the effective competition with other forms of transportation,” especially long-haul trucks and passenger buses.22
Additionally, as early as the 1870s and 1880s, several inventors in Europe had begun experimenting with internal combustion engines in which fuel was ignited by compression. By the late 1890s, Rudolf Diesel began licensing his design of a highly efficient engine of this type, which ever since has borne his name. The diesel engine first became popular in stationary power plants and ocean-going vessels especially because of its reliability and durability. Diesel-electric-powered locomotives ran many times longer between shop visits for maintenance and repair. There were also fewer stops for refueling during each trip, and of course no stops for water. Traveling from Chicago to Los Angeles behind a diesel locomotive automatically trimmed hours off the travel schedule when compared to steam.
With ridership on the Santa Fe down significantly during the 1930s, as well as on most other railroads, the company sought to entice passengers with faster travel. Seeking to increase the speed of transportation of both goods and passengers and to reduce the cost of human labor involved in the maintenance of steam locomotives, the AT&SF turned increasingly to diesel power.
Census data show that the first commercial diesel locomotive used by one of the major (Class 1) railroads in the United States was reported in 1925. It was strongly held by AT&SF management in the 1930s that switching to diesel locomotives would mean huge savings on maintenance and repair costs and drastically reduced outlay for purchase of locomotives. The first diesel locomotive on the Santa Fe line began service in 1935, at almost the midpoint of the Depression. The next year, in May 1936, a new streamlined, diesel-powered Santa Fe train, the Super Chief, began making regular runs from Chicago to Los Angeles. The Super Chief averaged about fifty-seven miles an hour, and in 1936 ran one 200-mile stretch of track averaging more than eighty-seven miles an hour! James Marshall writes, “The fastest steam locomotive hauling a freight train between Chicago and Los Angeles took nine engines and 35 stops for fuel and water, whereas in 1938, a diesel-powered train made the trip using only one engine and five fuel stops, cutting four to six hours of travel time.23
Figure 12.5. AT&SF Super Chief diesel locomotive, 1935. Photographer unknown.
Such remarkable speeds were attributable not only to the switch to diesel power. The Santa Fe also substituted light-weight, stainless steel passenger coaches for wooden and cast iron ones, cutting the weight of its passenger trains about in half. By the end of the 1930s, AT&SF owned the largest fleet of light-weight, streamlined, diesel-powered trains of any American line.24
While these developments helped AT&SF weather the prolonged economic crisis, their effects were ominous for shopmen at Albuquerque and other major steam locomotive repair shops. But the brewing employment catastrophe for them was postponed, first by the continuing Depression and then by World War II. During the 1930s, AT&SF added more diesels than steam locomotives to its fleet, but purchase of new locomotives of both types remained far below pre-Crash levels. As a result, the number of diesel locomotives remained at “demonstration” levels through World War II. That was, though, only because locomotive manufacturing capabilities were diverted to production of war materiel and transport of troops and equipment.
Even before entry of the United States into the War, the national economy began to accelerate out of what had been a slow, modest recovery from the depths of Depression. By 1940, war in Europe and Asia was already driving a rapid rise in the volume of US railroad traffic. Also “the entry of the United States into the war late in 1941 brought record volumes of passengers and freight. Formerly the struggle was to get traffic; now the struggle was to handle traffic.”25 “During the war, the railroads carried 90 percent of all military freight and 98 percent of all troop movement.”26 That brought with it an equally sudden and urgent ramping up of work at locomotive repair shops across the nation. Recruitment of more shopmen in Albuquerque, especially any with previous experience or training, became a pressing priority. So much so, that “women were hired at the shops for first time.”27
Among those hired on at the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops as the workforce was expanding rapidly in 1940 was Eloy Gutiérrez, a resident of the Barelas neighborhood, then sixteen years old. Both his father and grandfather had worked at the Shops, as did his brothers Fred, Tony, and Frank and at least two uncles. As pointed out earlier, the employment of multiple family members was not unusual at the Shops. Eloy worked summers and Christmas vacations as an apprentice sheet metal worker while he was still attending Albuquerque High School.
Eloy’s pay rate at the Shops was originally thirty-four cents an hour. Like all apprentices, Eloy took classes offered at the Shops by apprentice instructors in preparation for becoming a journeyman machinist. Decades later, he remembered specifically receiving instruction in the making and reading of blueprints. With the War raging when he graduated from high school, Eloy was tempted to enlist, but he was too young and continued to work in the Shops instead. Finally, though, he did enlist, still short of his twentieth birthday. He served with the Aviation Engineers, helping to build the new airstrip on the recently recaptured Pacific island of Guam. With the end of the War, Eloy returned home to Albuquerque and again took work at the Locomotive Repair Shops. Going over his experiences much later, he recalled his wife Cecelia (Cinocca) making his favorite lunch every day, an egg salad sandwich, which he usually ate in the brick layout building within the Shops complex, even though he was only three blocks from home.
Eloy remarked that during his years of part-time work at the Shops he knew an African American man who was employed pouring brass for bearings at the babbit shop. Although the Santa Fe employed many African Americans throughout the system, they were usually confined to menial and unskilled jobs, as well as passenger car conductors and porters, so the skilled babbit man stood out in Gutiérrez’s memory. He also remembered one Native American working at the Shops as an electrician.
Although a number of his relatives made careers of working at the Shops, with his brother Frank eventually becoming equipment supervisor for the entire Santa Fe Railway, Eloy decided instead to enroll at the University of New Mexico and followed that with four years at Washington University in St. Louis, where he earned a degree in dentistry. In 1954 he opened a dental office in Albuquerque where he became a highly respected professional and passed on his involvement in dentistry to his children, retiring himself in 1988.28
Prior to US entry into the War in December 1941, the Army Air Corps established Kirtland Army Airfield on Albuquerque’s Southeast Mesa as a training facility for bomber pilots and bombardiers. As a result, “many businesses in Albuquerque were awarded military contracts. The AT&SF was in the forefront of moving these manufactured goods to their destinations.”29 Two military bases in Albuquerque, Kirtland and Sandia Army Base, relied on rail service to transport men, supplies, and materiel. The number of people on payroll at the Locomotive Repair Shops continued to grow. In 1943, while Eloy Gutiérrez was getting ready to ship out to the Pacific, the AT&SF workforce in Albuquerque reached 1,787, a more than fourfold increase since ten years earlier. At $3.5 million a year, the Santa Fe was meeting “the largest single payroll in the community other than that of the Federal Government.” The Locomotive Repair Shops were “busy day and night,” running nine-hour shifts and completely overhauling about “forty-one locomotives a month.”30
Figure 12.6. Aerial photo of Kirtland Army Airbase, Albuquerque, NM, April 1942. View to the east. Note bomber pilot and bombardier training school and VA Hospital. Photo by unknown airman or Air Corps employee.
During the War, the AT&SF and all other railroads had to compete with the US military and military contractors to keep their shops at full staffing. Even in the immediate aftermath of the War, there was no letup in the need to ship supplies and transport people by rail, now to deal with rebuilding a war-ravaged world and to satisfy long pent-up domestic demands for family housing and retail space. Once again, that offered opportunities to many Albuquerqueans.
One of those to seize that opportunity was Mike Baca, born at Five Points in Albuquerque’s South Valley, who began working at the Shops in 1945, at age sixteen, as an apprentice machinist. As with Eloy Gutiérrez, Mike’s father and grandfather had also worked as machinists at the Shops. Machinist apprentices, including Mike, were now making sixty-three cents an hour, nearly double what Gutiérrez had been paid just four years earlier. At the same time, Mike’s father, journeyman machinist Refugio Baca, who helped Mike get his job, was paid ninety-six cents an hour.
There were a number of parallels between the Baca and Gutiérrez stories, in addition to the number of their relatives who worked at the Shops. Both Mike and Eloy were good students, who took quickly to the apprentice evening classes in mechanical drawing and excelled in their shop duties. In Mike’s case, that meant running a precision boring mill to fabricate brass bearings. Neither Mike nor Eloy ended up making a career with the railroad; instead, both earned college degrees and joined the growing ranks of Hispanic professionals in Albuquerque.
Mike’s father supplemented his machinist’s pay by selling lots in a small housing development he established on Baca Street in the Barelas neighborhood. He also used his free railroad pass from AT&SF to travel frequently to El Paso to visit relatives who had moved there during the 1920s Shopmen’s Strike. Refugio had a fraught relationship with a particular supervisor at the Shops. That supervisor one day ordered him to pick up a 300-pound locomotive part under pain of dismissal if he did not. Refugio attempted to lift that weight, suffering a hernia in the process. For years afterward he suffered the pain of that torn muscle, afraid that if he took time off from work to have the hernia repaired, he would be fired. After he finally did retire from the Shops in 1952, with forty-five years of service, the hernia was repaired at the Santa Fe Hospital and at the company’s expense.31
As Albuquerque business exploded, so did its population. “Following World War II, Central Albuquerque experienced an unprecedented population boom. The 1940 census recorded the city’s population at 35,449; however, by 1950 the population had more than doubled to 96,815.”32 One of the families counted in that increase was the household of Louis Johnson. He was a native of the Laguna Pueblo village of Paguate, where he had been born in 1920. During the War, he served in the Navy Seabees (Construction Battalions) in the Pacific, and was mustered out of service in the Oakland–Alameda area in California. Because of the already existing Laguna Pueblo satellite village at Richmond, California, associated with the AT&SF locomotive repair shops there, he was able to sign on as a car repairman, under the Watering the Flower Agreement between the tribe and the railroad, discussed earlier. There he married a nurse, and they had their first child.
Around 1949, Louis and his little family returned to New Mexico, where he again got work with the Santa Fe, now as a machinist at the Albuquerque Shops, where he worked especially on wheels. The Johnsons lived in an upstairs flat on 4th Street in the Barelas neighborhood, above the Wing Ahn Grocery Store. From there, it was just a threeblock walk to work for Louis. By now the work schedule at the Shops had settled back to forty hours a week. His oldest daughter remembers each of the children being given a dollar so they could walk to Woolworth’s on Central Avenue to have cherry phosphates and grilled cheese sandwiches and then go to a movie. On the weekends during the warm part of the year, and intermittently the rest of the year, the growing family would travel the fifty miles to Laguna Pueblo to help relatives with their farmland.
In 1955, they all moved to a house on Mescalero Avenue in the near Northeast Heights. From then on, until he retired in 1975, Louis commuted to the Shops with three other shopmen. The family now had a car, a turquoise-colored Mercury Comet. Sandra, the daughter, remembers a comfortable life growing up. The children were all sent to parochial school; the family owned their own home, made possible in part because her mother continued to work as a nurse.33
Louis Johnson’s arrival at the Albuquerque Repair Shops came in the midst of a huge project the Car Repair Shops had been assigned. As reported in February 1948, “The Car Shop has just completed the rebuilding of 1700 obsolete freight cars . . . and is about to begin a new program of 1000 additional cars.”34 That was part of what kept the Shop complex working at a steady pace through the early 1950s and kept optimism high among AT&SF employees and the long list of local businesses that depended indirectly on the Shop payroll. But that was about to change.