Folktales and Legends of the Middle West

by Edward McClelland

  “You been liftin’ them rails in the mill,” he said to Pete Pusic, “but you think you strong enough to lift the dolly bar? It take six men to carry from truck.”

  Eli Stanoski from Monessen was the only man in the Valley who could boast he was as strong as Pete. Steve told him to prove it. He gestured to the dolly bars, lying in the grass.

  “When I was young man, I lift all three at once,” he boasted. “That is how I win Mary’s mother.”

  The men lined up to test themselves against the first dolly bar. It was a hot afternoon, so the straining suitors perspired as though they were standing in front of a three-thousand-degree blast furnace. One dislocated his shoulder pulling on the dolly bar. Another tumbled into the grass when his hands lost their grip. Only three men could lift the first bar: Pete, Eli, and Andy Dembroski, a stranger from Johnstown who had taken the train to Pittsburgh because stories of Mary’s beauty had reached his mill. Steve shook his head and grumbled in disapproval: Johnstown mills were puny compared to Mon Valley mills. They only forged a hundred tons of steel a day. How could a Johnstown man be as strong as Pete and Eli?

  Pete, Eli, and Andy all lifted the second bar, too, but none could budge the third. Pete seemed to make it quiver, but collapsed before he could lift it from the grass. He looked sadly at Mary, sitting on her throne, and she looked back, crestfallen. Then came Andy Dembroski. Andy stripped off his shirt so the crowd could see the broad chest, barrel arms, and horizon-wide shoulders he had built shoveling ore. He clapped his hands over his head, rubbed them together and gripped the dolly bar. For ten minutes, he heaved and grunted, until the sweat flowed from his blond hair and oozed from his chest. Finally, his hands slipped and he fell flat on his bottom. Andy was picking himself up to try again when the deepest bass voice he had ever heard boomed from the crowd.

  “Ho! Ho! Ho!” it chortled.

  “Who’s laughing at me?” Andy challenged. “You come try this yourself, and when you’re done trying, I’ll break your neck.”

  The crowd parted, and out stepped a man seven feet tall, with a back broader than a furnace, and a neck as big around as an ordinary man’s waist. He wore a peasant cap atop his head and size 18 work boots on his feet. His pants and his jacket were too small for his enormous frame. With a hand the size of a paddle, he lifted Andy off the ground, then stooped to pick up the dolly bar with his other hand. As the giant waved the squirming steelworker and the unconquerable bar in the air, Steve Mestrovich rushed forward to interrogate this man who was strong enough for Mary.

  “Who the heck are you?” he asked the stranger.

  “Joe Magarac,” the man announced.

  All the Hunkies laughed. In Croatian, “magarac” means “jackass.”

  “Magarac? What kinda name is that for a man?”

  “All I do is eat and work like a donkey,” Joe Magarac said. He set down Andy and the dolly bar, then took off his jacket and shirt. The crowd gasped to see that his muscles were made of steel, gleaming in the July sun.

  “I was born inside an ore mountain,” he explained. “I came down to the Valley in an ore train, and now I work in the mill, three shifts a day.”

  Steve gestured to his daughter. Reluctantly, Mary stepped off her podium. She was still heartsick over Pete’s failure to lift the dolly bar, and she certainly didn’t want to take the name Magarac. But the Mestroviches were an Old Country family, and a father’s word was law.

  “You’re the strongest man I ever see,” Steve said, presenting Mary to Joe. “You’re the only man strong enough for my Mary.”

  Joe Magarac shook his head.

  “Mary’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen,” he said, “but I have no time for love, only work. I may be made of steel, but I’m not so hard-headed I can’t see that Mary belongs with that young man over there.”

  Joe pointed at Pete Pusic, the second-strongest man that afternoon. It so happened that Father Mahovlic was at the picnic, and he agreed to marry the couple on the spot. The crowd toasted the newlyweds with prune jack, and after the service was over, Joe Magarac had the first dance with the bride, as the gypsy band played a Viennese waltz.

  After the Mestroviches’ contest, the legend of Joe Magarac spread like wildfire all throughout the steelmaking heartland. His foreman posted a sign on the mill fence that read: HOME OF JOE MAGARAC. So widely known was Joe’s name that mills in Youngstown, Johnstown, and Gary tried to lure him away. Joe scoffed at their offers. After all, Joe produced more steel by himself than the entire Youngstown mill. Joe’s reputation was so great that the best steelworker in Gary visited the Mon Valley to challenge him in a steelmaking contest. After three days, Joe was 3,000 tons ahead. The Gary man gave up and returned to Indiana.

  Joe boarded at Mrs. Horvath’s house by the mill gate. He ate five meals a day. For breakfast, a dozen flapjacks, a pound of scrapple, an omelet made from two cartons of eggs, a pitcher of orange juice, and two pots of coffee. His dinner, which he carried to work in a washtub, was three whole chickens, a salad made from five heads of lettuce, and a loaf of bread toasted and slathered with lard. During his afternoon break, he ate ten dozen of Mrs. Horvath’s pierogis. For supper, three 64-ounce steaks and a half-dozen baked potatoes. And at midnight, an entire pork roast with a bottle of buttermilk. Throughout the day, he washed it all down with a barrel of beer, which he lifted the way other men lift a glass.

  Mrs. Horvath tolerated Joe’s appetite because he didn’t sleep in one of her beds, which left room for another steelworker and his rent money. Joe worked all day and night on the number seven furnace in the open hearth. A living machine, Joe gathered scrap steel, scrap iron, coke, limestone, and melted pig iron to feed the hearth. He stirred the molten steel with his bare hands. While other men tapped the vent hole with a blowtorch, Joe poked it open with his finger. After the steel gushed out, Joe set the ladle himself. Instead of pouring it into molds, he poured it over his hands, squeezing out rails between his fingers.

  So prodigious a worker was Joe that he filled the yard with rails faster than the trains could carry them away. There were so many rails piled up by the siding that one Thursday afternoon, the foreman shut down the mill.

  “Keep the furnace warm ’til Monday,” the foreman told Joe.

  When the foreman returned on Monday, he couldn’t find his best worker. He walked through the mill, calling out “Joe Magarac!” Finally, a deep voice replied from a ladle. Peering inside, the foreman saw Joe sitting up to his neck in molten steel.

  “You’re gonna melt in there!” said the foreman, who knew Joe was made of steel.

  “I want to melt myself down,” Joe said. “There’s not enough work in a mill that shuts down on Thursday and doesn’t open again until Monday. There’s nothing for Joe to do on all those days off. I’m going to melt myself down for steel to build the biggest mill in the world: one that can run twenty-four hours a day, every day except Christmas.”

  As soon as he said those words, Joe Magarac’s head disappeared into the cauldron. When the batch containing his body was tapped and poured into molds, it produced the finest ingots the Mon Valley had ever seen: smooth and straight and strong, with no rough spots or blemishes.

  Joe Magarac’s name lived on in the mill he helped build. When a man called another man a jackass, it was a compliment, meaning he worked as hard as the strongest steelworker who ever walked through a mill gate. And some say Joe himself lived on. One day, a fifty-ton ladle of steel slipped loose from a crane while three men were standing underneath. Somehow, it hovered in the air long enough for the seemingly doomed steelworkers to escape. When they turned around and saw it crash to the floor, spewing sparks and steel, they also saw, for a moment, a seven-foot man with a back as broad as a furnace door. Then he faded away and was gone.

  Joe Magarac may not be as famous to the outside world as Paul Bunyan, but he is still remembered in his hometown, even though the steel mill he sacrificed himself to build has been torn down and replaced with a shopping mall. Out
side one of the Mon Valley’s few remaining mills, the Edgar Thomson Works in Braddock, stands a statue of Joe Magarac, bending a steel bar, his shirt half open to reveal his gleaming chest. It’s a symbol of Pittsburgh’s pride in the product it made, and the pride of the hardworking Old Country people who made it.

  THE WABASH CANNONBALL

  abash Cannonball” is one of the most famous railroad songs ever sung, right up there with “The Ballad of Casey Jones,” “Wreck of the Old 97,” and “Rock Island Line.” Unlike those others, though, it’s not about a train that follows a schedule and calls at stations. It’s a song from the hobo jungles, as the camps were called, about the last train an old hobo will ever ride.

  Does that mean the Wabash Cannonball is not a real train? Well, if you asked a young man who went by the name Lucky Slim when he rode the rails during the Great Depression, he’d tell you he never saw the Wabash Cannonball, never touched it, but it always picked up its passengers.

  That second summer of FDR’s presidency, Lucky Slim was headed back to Central Illinois. He knew he could get a job walking beans on a farm near Lincoln, and maybe stay on for the harvest after that. Since his own family had lost its farm, in the first years of the Depression, Slim had been a wandering bindlestiff, riding the rails from farm to farm, town to town, trying to earn enough money to feed himself and keep his mother in that rooming house in Springfield. His father was dead. Officially, it had been a heart attack, but really, it was grief over losing a piece of land that had belonged to the family since the state was settled. Slim had just finished a job with the Civilian Conservation Corps, building a lodge at a state park on the Mississippi River. On his way home, he stopped to spend the night at a jungle well concealed in a ravine between the river and the railroad tracks. From there, a hobo could jump a barge or a train, depending on where he was going.

  Arriving at dusk, after hopping off a train in Granite City, Slim recognized a couple of faces around the campfire—Missouri Joe and Eighter from Decatur. Hoboes came and went. But after he’d shared in the mulligan stew, contributing a can of beans he’d bought for a nickel, he noticed a familiar shelter. Its walls were bricks and sandbags, its roof an old wooden door, stripped of paint by the elements. Slim peered into the opening and called out “Charlie!”

  A face appeared, thinner and paler than Slim remembered from the year before. Pigeon Charlie had earned his nickname because he’d once been so hungry he killed and ate a bird. It may or may not have been a pigeon, but that was the only species everyone around the campfire recognized, and Charlie was a little guy, so it suited him. Now, Charlie looked so withered that his skeleton seemed to be trying to get out through his skin, which was the same ghostly shade as his few remaining hairs.

  Slim untied his bindle and offered Charlie the remainder of a Hershey bar, which on this hot night was melted enough for a toothless old man to eat.

  “You been travelin’, young man,” Charlie said.

  “I have, old man. What about you?”

  “I ain’t moved since I seen you here last summer. I’m settin’ here waitin’ for the Cannonball. I want to make sure it knows where to find me.”

  “There ain’t no train called the Cannonball that comes by here,” Lucky Slim said. “That’s just an old song they pick around the campfire.”

  “Son, there had to be train for someone to write a song about,” Charlie pointed out. “The Wabash Cannonball won’t stop for a kid like you. Only for an old man. It’s the last train you’ll ever ride. It takes you around to all the towns you’ve ever visited, then it takes you off the rails forever. I’m gonna see all the old places one more time: not just Rock Island and Peoria, but all the way out to California, where I picked lettuce in oh-four and oh-five, and even down to Mexico, where we had to go for awhile after we got rough with a boss who lifted up our bags on the scale.”

  Charlie’s face wore an eager look that Slim had never seen on that sad old visage. In summers past, Charlie had told his rail stories only after much prodding, and he could not conceal the regret of a man recounting journeys he could never repeat. Now, though, he seemed certain he would hop the trains again.

  Charlie offered Slim a spot to bed down under his door. The footsore traveler quickly fell asleep. Some time in the middle of the night, he was awoken by the sound of a horn, and the rumble of an approaching engine. He crawled out of the shelter and climbed the ravine to see which train was passing. The rumble grew louder and louder, until it whizzed past at a keening pitch. He heard the racketing of steel wheels on iron rails, the insistent warnings of the horn. But he never saw a train.

  Even before he returned to the shelter, Slim knew Charlie was gone, carried away by the Wabash Cannonball. Out of respect for the old hobo, he sat outside the entrance until dawn. To pass the time, he played “Wabash Cannonball” on the harmonica he carried in his bindle. He sang it for the boys when they buried Charlie by the river. Slim sang the version that appears in The Hobo’s Hornbook, a collection of railroad folklore from the Depression, adapting them for Charlie. It went like this, more or less:

  From the waves of the Atlantic

  To the wild Pacific shore

  From the coast of California

  To ice-bound Labrador

  There’s a train of doozy layout

  That’s well known to us all

  It’s the ’boes accommodation

  Called the Wabash Cannonball

  Great cities of importance

  We reach upon our way

  Chicago and St. Louis,

  Rock Island so they say

  Then Springfield and Decatur

  Peoria above all

  We reach them by no other

  But the Wabash Cannonball

  The train she runs to Quincy

  Monroe and Mexico

  She runs to Kansas City

  And she’s never running slow

  She runs right into Denver

  And she makes an awful squall

  They all know by that whistle

  It’s the Wabash Cannonball

  There are other cities, pardner,

  That you can go to see;

  St. Paul and Minneapolis

  Ashtabula, Kankakee

  The lakes of Minnehaha

  Where the laughing waters fall

  We reach them by no other

  Than the Wabash Cannonball

  Now listen to her rumble

  Now listen to her roar

  As she echoes down the valley

  And tears along the shore

  Now hear the engine’s whistle

  And he mighty hoboes’ call

  As we ride the rods and brakebeams

  Of the Wabash Cannonball

  Now here’s to Pigeon Charlie

  May his name forever stand

  He’ll be honored and respected

  By the ’boes throughout the land

  And when his days are over

  And the curtains round him fall

  We’ll ship him off to heaven

  On the Wabash Cannonball.

  RESURRECTION MARY: THE GHOST OF ARCHER AVENUE

  ust southwest of Chicago, on Archer Avenue in Justice, Illinois, across the street from Resurrection Cemetery, is a bar called Chet’s Musical Lounge. Chet’s is a classic roadside tavern, with a pool table, a jukebox, a popcorn machine, and a large clientele of bikers. But Chet’s has an unusual tradition: every Sunday, the staff leaves a Bloody Mary at the end of the bar for a ghost. The ghost’s name is Resurrection Mary, and she has haunted this stretch of Archer since the 1930s, when she picked up young men dancing to the big bands at the Oh Henry Ballroom.

  An old South Sider named Vince was still telling his Resurrection Mary story to paranormal investigators half a century after it happened. When he did, he sounded just as haunted as he’d been the night he met the ghost. Before he went out dancing that evening, Vince put on his favorite suit—a double-breasted gray number with squared-off shoulders—and his most c
olorful tie, red with Hawaiian hula girls in grass skirts. He cruised Archer Avenue with the top down on his Chevy Cabriolet. The night was warm, and he’d slicked back his hair with enough Brylcreem to keep the wind from mussing it. The Oh Henry Ballroom was going to be jumping, as it always was on Saturdays. Vince had danced to some of the biggest of the big bands there: Harry James, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey. Tonight was just Chet Barsuitis and His Merry Men, from the southwest side of Chicago, but even the local combos knew all the hot numbers on the Hit Parade.

  Inside the ballroom, Vince spent the first half hour downing enough Cuba Libres and smoking enough Lucky Strikes to work up the courage to ask a girl for a dance. By the time the band got started on “Jumpin’ at the Woodside,” he was in a bold state of mind.

  Spotting a pretty blonde girl in a white dress, he said, as casually as he could manage, “Hey, it ain’t right to stand still for Count Basie. Why don’t we cut a rug on this one?”

  The girl smiled, and they joined the jitterbugging throng on the parquet floor. The band played a few more fast numbers—“Boogie Woogie” and “Jeepers Creepers”—so Vince didn’t get a chance to talk to his partner. That he didn’t mind too much. Sometimes girls asked what he did for a living. He was a bookkeeper at the Union Stockyards. Even though he didn’t work anywhere near the slaughterhouse, that gave some girls the willies.