CHAPTER 8
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the rhythm and pace of life at the Locomotive Repair Shops, in the neighborhoods of Barelas and South Broadway and throughout much of the rest of Albuquerque, were governed by the routines of steam locomotive overhaul. Those routines began before most of the workers arrived in the morning. The stationary engineers fired up the boilers that powered electric generators to supply most of the smaller power tools and to provide light in the Shops. Separate boilers generated steam that was conducted by pipes and heavy hoses to numerous locations for use in cleaning parts and hosing down floors and walls. Other water heaters supplied the four large washrooms that allowed workers to scrub off the grease and grime that came with locomotive work. During the cold season, massive heating coils on the roofs of major buildings and the associated distribution fans had to be switched on so that by the start of work interior temperatures would be sufficiently warm. When the weather itself was warm, the same fans were turned on to force cooler air through ductwork to help cool the massive Shop spaces. An August 1922 article enthused that “[this] ventilating system has a capacity sufficient to change the air in the entire shop building three times in an hour.”1 Furthermore, 4 percent of the glass panes making up the walls of the machine and boiler shops were hinged, allowing them to open with a series of mechanical cranks to permit cooler exterior air to flow into the buildings or hotter air to rise out.
Figure 8.1. Shopworkers washing up at the end of the day’s work at one of four lavatories at the Albuquerque Repair Shops, 1943. Photo by Jack Delano. National Hist Reg Nomination, 2014, figure 12.
Under normal circumstances, a steam whistle sounded at the Shops every working day at 7:45 a.m. As Eloy Gutiérrez, an apprentice sheet metal worker in the early 1940s, remembered, he would get out of bed as soon as he heard that whistle, throw on his coveralls, and reach the time clock before the whistle sounded a second time at 8:00.2 That time clock, in a small building near the entrance gate, was one of several scattered around the shop grounds. Because the lunch hour was not paid time, employees were expected to clock out at noon and back in at 1:00. Work in the Shops involved routinely handling greasy, grimy parts and equipment; therefore, shopmen habitually scrubbed up in one of the industrial lavatories at lunchtime and before leaving work in the afternoon.
Figure 8.2. Shopworkers checking out for lunch at one of the time clocks in the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops, 1943. Photo by Jack Delano. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, catalog number LC fsa 8d15501.
There were commercial laundries scattered on streets around the Shops to deal with the mountains of oil-caked work clothes of shopmen. For instance, there were businesses such as the Albuquerque Steam Laundry, which later became the long-lived Imperial Laundry at 2nd Street and Lead Avenue, and the Hubbs Laundry, which became the Excelsior Laundry at 2nd Street and Coal Avenue (later moving to 2nd and Roma).3 In addition, there were smaller laundries, which in the nineteenth century were often run by Chinese entrepreneurs, such as Chong Lee at 307 S. 2nd Street, Hong Gee at 409 W. Central, and Hop Sing at 214 N. 3rd Street.4
Even with all the scrubbing of hands and arms and faces, and the boiling of clothes, it was sometimes not possible to rid oneself of all the noxious residue of work in the Shops. Former chief justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court Joseph F. Baca, who had many relatives who worked at the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops, remembered one of his uncles in particular, a machinist, who no matter how clean he looked always seemed to smell of oil and grease. It was as though the various lubricants suffused his entire being.5 There were other shopmen, though, who in their off-hours managed to betray little evidence of their constant daily contact with coal dust, petroleum products, paint, and the fine residue of shaping and polishing metal. Bonifacio Shaw, for instance, a machinist at the Shops in the 1920s and 1930s, although he wore overalls to work, at home he “always had clean hands, and on the weekends he wore a nice, freshly laundered shirt, and a tie.”6 Some shop employees had working conditions that were generally less grimy than those of their workmates, Joseph Swillum for one. During his more than forty-year career as an apprentice instructor, he almost always wore a tie, coat, and hat to work. Of course just being on the grounds of the Shops and meeting other employees meant that sometimes his wardrobe ended up less than spotless.7
Figure 8.3. Photo of the Albuquerque Steam Laundry on S. 2nd Street, with employees, 1880s. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the Albuquerque Museum, Photo Archives, Catalog No. PA1978.050.743.
Figure 8.4. Photo of safety warning sign, depicting the character “Acci Dent,” stenciled on a door at the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops, undated. Courtesy of the photographer, Patrick Trujillo.
Many shop employees walked or rode bicycles to their nearby homes for lunch. Others carried their lunches to work in lunch boxes or bags, which during the morning were stashed in lockers that were assigned to each individual. Some even went to cafes and lunch counters, such as several on 1st Street where a person could eat for twenty-five cents.8
The lunch hour on Thursdays was different, as attendance at a safety meeting was required. The company used images of a cartoon-like figure called “Acci Dent,” painted on walls and other surfaces around the Shops, to remind employees of dangers and precautions, and they were admonished about these at the Thursday lunchtime meetings. Avoiding accidents and injuries was very important to most shopmen because, as Eloy Gutiérrez said, if you got “injured, you got fired.”9 Nor was there any sick leave, so most men worked even when they were not well unless the illness laid them up.10
Another shrill of the steam whistle marked the end of the workday. Ordinarily, that was at 5:00 p.m. The powerful whistle could be heard all over Albuquerque, so it synchronized many people’s activities, whether they were directly connected to the Shops or not. Judge Joseph Baca remembered that, as a youngster, when he heard the 5:00 o’clock whistle, he would run inside the house in order to listen to Superman on the radio.11 The whistle also sounded at times of emergency and on special occasions. In mid-May 1941 and again a year later, for example, extremely heavy rain swelled the Rio Grande. When the river’s waters threatened to flow into city streets and drown the zoo, the steam whistle at the Shops sounded the alarm.12 Calling up a very different emotion, attorney Michael Keleher remembered vividly that he was in Presbyterian Hospital as a child on the morning of April 6, 1945, having his tonsils removed, when at 6:00 a.m. the whistle at the Shops began to blare. It continued for many minutes, announcing the end of World War II in Europe, or V-E Day.13 When he was ten to twelve years old, Joseph Baca was stationed outside one of the shop gates at quitting time, as a paper boy handing out the newsletter El Greco.14
Prior to the 1916 and 1917 passage of federal laws and regulations governing the standard workday for railroad employees, the ordinary workday was nine hours long, and sometimes longer still.15 The work week, too, was longer, typically including Saturday. During both World War I and World War II, as well as during the heart of the Great Depression, the work schedule at the Shops varied considerably from that of more normal times. As former machinist apprentice Mike Baca said, during World War II, the workday at the Shops began at 7:00 a.m. and was nine hours long.16 The Shops also operated seven days a week during the war. That did not mean that individual shopmen worked nine hours a day, seven days a week, although that was not unheard of. And Olivia Cordova Loomis recalled that in 1962 or 1963 the company changed the daily work schedule by decreasing the time for lunch to just half an hour. Thus, the workday ran from 7:30 a.m. till 4:00 p.m., including the lunch period.17
At the opposite extreme of what was required during the World Wars, during the Depression, Thomas Cordova and his fellow shopmen were repairing locomotives at the Shops only “maybe three days a week.” Nevertheless, Cordova was proud years later that he had still been “able to pull his family through.”18
Figure 8.5. Shopworkers leaving the grounds of the Locomotive Repair Shops by the west gate at the end of the day, 1943. Photo by Jack Delano. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, catalog number LC fsa 8d15944.
After hours, many shopmen pursued activities that kept them in the company of other Santa Fe workers. The reasons behind that were not at all difficult to imagine because the residential areas encircling the Shops seemed to be home mostly to AT&SF employees and their families. For example, industrially sponsored adult amateur baseball has long been popular in the United States: “By the 1890s . . . shopmen throughout the [AT&SF] line annually organized baseball teams to play each other and whatever other competition could be found.”19 Many Albuquerque shopmen joined their coworkers to play baseball in the evenings during spring, summer, and fall. Bonifacio Shaw, for example, was always on the baseball diamond after work.20 Albuquerque machinist Amado Baca played ball for the Barelas Blues in the 1930s.21 When they were not playing baseball, many shopmen were in the stands watching baseball games involving local teams. And when the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958, a number of Albuquerque shopmen began using their railroad passes to ride the Santa Fe to Southern California from time to time to watch a game or two.
Figure 8.6. Photo of the Albuquerque Shops’ All-Star baseball team, near Tingley Field (formerly Apprentice Field). The Sandia Mountains can be seen dimly in the distance. Undated. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of Center for Southwest Research, University Libraries, University of New Mexico; H. W. Stowell Pictorial Collection, Box 1, PICT 000-505-0095.
Recreation, though, was not the only way shopmen used their off-hours. Eloy Gutiérrez knew one young shopman who spent his evenings as a carpenter, building apartments, and “worked himself to death.”22 Quite a number of shopmen cultivated vegetable gardens in their spare time, thereby simultaneously continuing family agrarian traditions and adding to the wellbeing of their own families.
The company, reflecting generally paternalistic attitudes of employers of the day, worried about young single employees getting into trouble when they were away from the structure provided by their jobs. In Albuquerque the AT&SF donated land for a YMCA (the Y) building on Central Avenue. The local Y became a joint city and railroad enterprise. With similar reasons, the Santa Fe provided space on the third floor of the General Administration Building at the Shops as a reading and billiards room. As explained by the Santa Fe’s superintendent of reading rooms, “The general plan contemplates having one large room for a reading room in which are placed all the periodicals of the day, and a library of choice books in circulation, a smaller room for cards and amusements, a large room for billiards, also bath rooms [sic], toilet and wash rooms. Recently, we have added sleeping rooms and bowling alleys. The use of these privileges is absolutely free to all employees regularly on the payroll of the company.”23 “As elsewhere within the AT&SF system, the Albuquerque ‘Y’ provid[ed] services similar to the reading rooms, . . . held socials, Bible studies, and prayer and inspirational meetings.”24
In addition, there was a club especially for apprentices and their families, which met on Saturday evenings in the 1920s and later at the El Fidel Hotel in the 500 block of Copper Avenue NW. Usually also in attendance at the club meetings were the apprentice instructors.25 Furthermore, all members of the shop crafts brotherhoods had union meetings as often as twice a month, as well as annual national meetings that some local union officials would attend.
Once shopmen reached journeyman status at the Albuquerque Repair Shops, they tended to stay put for a long time. Many worked their whole careers at the Shops, thirty, forty, even fifty years. Thomas Cordova, for example, retired in 1976 after forty-nine years, including a couple of layoffs. His railroad pension was good enough that it paid him more money in retirement than he had earned in some years he worked.26 Carman and welder Louis Johnson worked thirty years for the AT&SF, part of that time at the shops in Richmond, California, retiring from the Albuquerque Shops about 1975.27 Having started working as an instructor of apprentices at the Albuquerque Repair Shops in 1914, Joseph Swillum retired in 1955, just as the transition to diesel power was being completed. He had put in a full forty years with the railroad, but he kept golfing another twenty-two years.28 Refugio José Baca hired on as a machinist apprentice at the Shops in 1907 and retired as a journeyman machinist forty-five years later, again as steam locomotives were being retired en masse.29 Thomas G. Turrietta worked as a carman at the Albuquerque Repair Shops for thirty-nine years.30 One thing suggested by all this information on length of service is that many Albuquerque shopmen must have been generally content with the working environment there and with their retirement pensions. It was very common for the retirement of long-time Locomotive Repair shopmen to be marked with a brief party at the Shops.
Figure 8.7. Postcard depicting the Albuquerque YMCA building, at the corner of Central (formerly Railroad) Avenue and 1st Street, early 1900s. Authors’ collection.
Figure 8.8. Photo of retirement party at the Albuquerque Repair Shops for Frank G. Gómez, sheet metal worker, and Raven Bean, machinist, after thirty-six and thirty-five years of service, respectively, 1958. Gómez with placard; Bean to his right. Courtesy of Center for Southwest Research, University Libraries, University of New Mexico; H. W. Stowell Pictorial Collection, Box 1, PICT 000-505-0112.