WALLACE W. ABBEY
WALLACE W. ABBEY
A LIFE IN RAILROAD PHOTOGRAPHY
KEVIN P. KEEFE AND SCOTT LOTHES
PHOTOGRAPHS BY WALLACE W. ABBEY
RAILROADS PAST & PRESENT
GEORGE M. SMERK & H. ROGER GRANT, EDITORS
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
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© 2018 by Center for Railroad Photography and Art
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Contents
Introduction
1 Along the Santa Fe
2 The Trains Magazine Years
3 Soo Line Storyteller
4 Chicago at Its Zenith
5 Class by Itself
6 Fighting for the Milwaukee Road
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Index
WALLACE W. ABBEY
Viewed through a doorway leading to the Track 4 platform at Cincinnati Union Terminal, a redcap hurries a handcart loaded with suitcases toward New York Central’s James Whitcomb Riley as passengers hustle to board the Chicago-bound streamliner. Making just a handful of stops en route, the Riley had the fastest schedule of NYC’s several trains between Cincinnati and Chicago, covering the 300 miles in just five and a half hours. For its strong composition and great human interest, Trains magazine selected this photograph among its “100 Greatest Railroad Photos” in 2008.
INTRODUCTION
THE IMAGE IS AT ONCE PROSAIC AND DEEPLY MYSTERIOUS. THE photographer has placed you in the portal of a doorway leading to the Track 4 platform at Cincinnati Union Terminal. Before you is a scene of urgency and commotion. Passengers scramble to board the westbound James Whitcomb Riley, the New York Central’s morning streamliner to Chicago, and a redcap hurries with a handcart loaded with suitcases. It is 1952, still the high tide of the American passenger train, and everything you see is commonplace.
And yet, in this tiny moment, the photographer has created something magical. Light shimmers over the top of the train, almost blindingly, overexposed in order to bring out detail in the foreground, a ghostly proscenium arch for the stage below. The redcap appears to glance at the photographer, but only for an instant, his uniformed body creating a slight blur. Just beyond him, an elegantly dressed woman also turns to the camera, almost hauntingly.
The image is a masterpiece, and just one of tens of thousands created by Wallace W. Abbey III, an influential force in the world of railroad photography. From the late 1940s onward, Wally Abbey created a body of work that is a rare combination of journalistic and artistic vision. His success was the product of a diverse career that took him from newspaper newsrooms to magazine editorial offices to the corporate suites of major railroad companies, seasoned with countless experiences in locomotive cabs, cabooses, and junction towers. A camera was with him almost every step of the way.
Abbey’s ascendance as a photographer coincided with the rise of the first golden age of railroad photography, a genre driven in part by railroad enthusiast magazines and the emergence of several gifted practitioners. Together they revolutionized a durable old hobby, veering from traditional and often static “train pictures” to deeper, more meaningful portrayals of the entire railroad environment.
In the most fertile period of his photography, the late 1940s through the 1960s, Wally Abbey’s work was comparable to that of any of the emerging new talents. His composition was imaginative, sometimes even daring. He had mastered the photographic technology of the moment. He knew railroad operations and technology cold. Most of all, he had the instincts of a skilled journalist, and the necessary reflexes to react.
FROM EVANSTON TO KANSAS
Wally Abbey was born October 30, 1927, in Evanston, a leafy old suburb along Lake Michigan on the north edge of Chicago, and also the home of Northwestern University. His parents were Wallace William Abbey II, a career newspaperman with the Chicago Tribune, and Margaret Peal Squier Abbey, herself an occasional editor and writer. The young Wally spent his entire childhood and youth there, graduating from Evanston Township High School in 1945.
Abbey wrote warmly of his Evanston roots, recalling Fourth of July parades, swimming in Lake Michigan (“no further than the nearest sandbar”), Sundays at Northminster Presbyterian Church, and, of course, frequent visits to the Chicago & North Western Railway depot on Davis Street. “By the time I got to high school, I’d developed interests in three areas far removed from more conventional pursuits: certain off-brands of music [Abbey loved old-time country and Western swing], photography, and railroads—particularly railroads.”
Abbey’s attachment to trains was forged in the 1930s during family trips to Falls City, Nebraska, his father’s hometown, and Cherryvale, Kansas, where his mother grew up. In fact, one specific incident when he was four or five was a catalyst. “I’d always been told that when I was a very little child, I disappeared one day while we were visiting in WaKeeney, Kansas, and I was found at the Union Pacific depot.” Abbey’s frightened parents notwithstanding, he was probably having a fine time.
Although Abbey’s father was not especially interested in railroads, trains were a ubiquitous presence in most people’s lives, and his father was knowledgeable. “Dad couldn’t be called a card-carrying railfan by any means,” Abbey recalled, “but I know that I developed some of my interest from him. Almost every summer we used to drive west to Falls City, using U.S. 34 across most of southern Iowa. In those days the highway wandered back and forth across the railroad many times, and each time Dad would say ‘Once again we cross the main line of the Burlington!’”
Years later, on a vacation with his grandmother, Abbey rode the Pennsylvania Railroad’s General to Philadelphia. He was mesmerized to learn about one of the Pennsylvania’s great rituals. “I remember the ticket agent making a point of telling me that in the middle of the night, at Paoli, the steam locomotive would be taken off and an electric locomotive put on.” Next morning, in the wee hours, Abbey almost certainly raised the window shade on his lower berth to see.
Abbey’s most resonant childhood railroad experiences came in Cherryvale, home of his maternal grandparents, Samuel Webner Squier and his wife, Luella Russell Squier. Located in the southeast part of Kansas, Cherryvale sat astride the Tulsa Subdivision of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe, the railroad Abbey later claimed as his favorite. It wasn’t Santa Fe’s principal main line, but the Tulsa Sub offered plenty of diversions, including two trains Abbey often rode, the Oil Flyer and the Tulsan.
Abbey’s grandfather ran Squier’s Drugstore on Main Street and was a scion of the community. The young Abbey enjoyed hanging out in the drugstore, partly because of the soda fountain, partly because the store was only a few hundred feet from the AT&SF tracks. And if the Santa Fe action was slow, there were other trains to see on the St. Lo
uis–San Francisco Railroad’s Wichita–Joplin (Missouri) line, which crossed the Santa Fe just a few blocks north of the drugstore. The Frisco was a less glamorous railroad, but its vintage steam locomotives and friendly crews added to Cherryvale’s appeal.
It was on one of those trips to Kansas that Abbey passed a station newsstand and encountered Railroad Magazine, at the time the only nationally distributed consumer title about railroads. “Up to the moment I didn’t know that there was any sort of publication about railroads,” Abbey recalled. “But soon I found myself trying to obtain everything I could read.” And while photography was not one of Railroad’s strong suits, Abbey was impressed to see pictures of trains made simply for their own sake.
As a teenager, Abbey was fortunate to find five like-minded high-school friends. His pals—Chic Kerrigan, Tom Harley, Dave Wallace, Vint Harkness, and Bob McElroy—accompanied him on modest railfan jaunts around Chicago, and Abbey was comforted to discover the hobby needn’t be a lone pursuit. He learned from his friends. “If anyone introduced me to what might be called a fan trip, it was Harley and Wallace. They had found that Roosevelt Road in Chicago extended over the track of many railroads and made an excellent point to watch trains from.”
THE PULL OF JOURNALISM
The first thing to know about Wally Abbey the photographer is that he was first and foremost a journalist, even if he didn’t always describe himself that way. From his first job as a cub reporter on a small-town daily to his last as the public relations director for a major research center, Abbey brought formidable skills as writer, reporter, and historian. These gifts informed his photography.
Abbey came by his interest in journalism honestly. His father, Wallace W. Abbey II, graduated in 1923 from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, then moved on to a forty-four-year career with the Chicago Tribune. As a sportswriter at the paper, he was credited with coming up with the nickname “Wildcats” for Northwestern’s sports teams. The senior Abbey was news editor of the Tribune when Wally was born, and by the time he retired in 1966 was assistant managing editor of the entire newsroom.
When it came time for college, Abbey decided against staying in Evanston and instead headed for the University of Kansas and its William Allen White School of Journalism. There he immersed himself in the work of the University Daily Kansan, the school’s newspaper and the eighth-largest daily in the state. Abbey worked as picture editor, city editor, and, finally, managing editor, supervising the work of fifty student reporters, a telegraph editor, and incoming wire news from United Press.
It was at KU that Abbey met fellow student Martha Jewett, who lived right in Lawrence. The pair hit it off—she was a journalist, too, active on the publishing front at KU, and also a watercolorist—and they were married November 6, 1949, to start a successful sixty-year marriage. Martha’s father was Dr. J. M. Jewett, a geologist for the State Geological Survey of Kansas, based at KU, and her mother was Mavis Laizure Jewett. Wally and Martha Abbey went on to have two daughters, Mary, born in 1951, and Martha, in 1954.
After graduating in 1949, Abbey got his first break in time-honored fashion: he went to work for a small-town paper, joining the Chanute Daily Tribune. Chanute is 29 miles north of Cherryvale and was a division point on the Santa Fe. At the Daily Tribune, Abbey was thrown into all the classic jobs of a rookie reporter, including writing general assignment stories, covering schools and sports, taking news photos, and working in the photo lab.
Then came Abbey’s short but all-important tenure at Trains magazine, the Milwaukee-based monthly launched in November 1940. By 1945 it was the bible of the faithful. Abbey was hired in 1950 as an associate editor and worked his way up to managing editor by the time he left in December 1953. At Trains he joined forces with the soon-to-be-legendary David P. Morgan, who became editor in chief in 1953 and stayed there for thirty-three years. From the perspective of sixty years, it’s amazing to ponder that these two giants were on the same staff at the same time.
Their arrival at Trains was opportune. It was a critical time for the magazine, as significant numbers of readers were drifting away with the relentless passing of the steam locomotive from the American railroad scene. The onrushing diesel held much less interest, at least at first. Publisher Al Kalmbach even briefly changed the magazine’s name to Trains & Travel in an effort to gather in a larger audience. It’s no exaggeration to say that the future of Trains depended on Morgan and Abbey.
Although Abbey was involved in editorial production of all kinds, from editing freelancers’ stories to working with the art department to policing deadlines, his most lasting contribution was as a feature writer. The magazine frequently sent him out on the road to write long-form articles, reporting from the front lines of main-line railroading, illustrated with his own photographs. He had a gift for getting the corporate perspective from management, then mixing it with what he learned in the field, often from working railroaders.
Those early feature stories had a lasting influence. They also helped inspire careers. One is that of Fred W. Frailey, former editor of Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine and a longtime contributor to Trains as a feature writer and columnist. Frailey also went to KU’s journalism school, although you get the feeling he learned more from mentors such as Abbey than he ever did in class. Frailey recalled Abbey in a 2017 interview:
Before I knew there was a David P. Morgan, I knew there was a Wallace W. Abbey. To me, not yet a teenager, Wally had the world’s best job. Every month he would take his notebook and his camera somewhere into America and return with a fascinating feature story. It might be a profile of railroads I’d scarcely heard of, such as the Western Maryland or Litchfield & Madison, or a day in the life of a Baltimore & Ohio train dispatcher in Deshler, Ohio. “Super Railroad!” in the January 1954 issue opened my young eyes to the great empire my grandfather had devoted his entire working life to, the Santa Fe.
A fine stylist himself, Frailey admired Abbey’s prose, which was direct, animated, always loaded with telling details. “The tale I returned to time after time was ‘Look Out Texas—Here Comes The Comet,’ his account of the Katy’s crack freight train between St. Louis and Fort Worth. I’ll never erase from my mind his description of that trip through Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma, of being ‘lulled to sleep at some undetermined point in the night’ aboard the caboose and being awakened ‘with the deftness of a Pullman porter’ as the Comet approached Parsons. Wally, you purposed my life with your stories, infecting me with your love of railroads in a manner that could never be cured.”
NEVER WITHOUT A CAMERA
Abbey professed that he couldn’t remember when he got started in railroad photography, but it was early in life, to be sure. He did recall that as a young child he acquired a small, green fixed-focus camera of unknown manufacturer, probably in the 127 format, which he used to take photographs around the house or on picnics to Harms Woods, a forest preserve near Glenview, not far from Evanston.
By the time Abbey was in high school he was using a 620-format Brownie Bullet camera, which got him started with train pictures. He recalled discussing the Brownie’s suitability for railroad photography with Axel Jensen, who ran a photo store in downtown Evanston. Abbey soon made another improvement by acquiring a 35mm Argus camera before moving on to a Kodak 3A in the 122 format, a folding contraption that could manage a maximum 1/100 shutter speed, fast enough for action photography.
Abbey soon traded up again. With the help of his dad, he acquired from the Tribune a used 4 × 5 Speed Graphic, the standard news camera of the era. The huge device was ponderous, but its lens was super sharp, and soon young Abbey was lugging it everywhere. He also gradually learned the craft of printing, using a cramped darkroom he cobbled together under the basement stairs of his house. “Time passed, and in due course I could develop film safely and even make nice big prints. I’d taught myself how to select a subject and compose a picture of it.”
Once in college, Abbey began taking his camera on jaunts
into eastern rural Kansas. He was drawn to Olathe Hill, where the Santa Fe climbed up the valley of Mill Creek to get out of the lowlands of the Kaw Valley. It was a 12.5-mile bottleneck, even with the centralized traffic control put in before World War II, so the action was thick. Double crossovers at Holliday and Olathe allowed trains to operate in either direction on either track, and the resulting choreography appealed to Abbey’s love of operations. “Doing some walking to find a likely spot along the track for a photo was a lot more fun than was going to classes,” he said.
Abbey’s increased devotion to railroad photography was timely. Whether he fully realized it or not, his work paralleled that of numerous other practitioners who were drawn to track-side in the postwar years. Improved highways, better automobiles, and the explosion of roadside culture in the late 1940s had made it easier for railfans to launch railroad safaris. Each month, their work was beginning to show up in Trains. The popular regular feature called Photo Section was the place to be.
WITNESS TO HISTORY
Something else was afoot. By the late 1940s, railroads were fully engaged in the historic transition from steam locomotives to diesel, a process that would be completed in merely a decade. It was more than a simple evolution in technology—it was a cultural sea change. Steam railroading was rooted in the American psyche for more than a century, with its romantic notions of brave engineers and steam whistles in the night. Steam had a profound impact on the landscape, with its dependence on a sprawling infrastructure of water tanks, coaling towers, roundhouses, and 100-mile crew districts. Visually and aurally, the steam locomotive was uniquely compelling.
In its place came a technology that was coldly efficient, aided by lessons learned in the mass-production automobile industry. In the railroad enthusiast community, the diesel was sometimes portrayed as an evil invader. But its advantages to the railroad industry were obvious, and an epic battle played itself out on main lines across the country. Division by division, railroad by railroad, the steam locomotive surrendered to the sleek, often colorfully painted invader. The drama was irresistible to photographers.
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