Terror at the Fair

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Back at the fair after my session with Fahey, I found it difficult to concentrate, although I had committed to a late afternoon interview with a man who had been dubbed “the world’s greatest rail fan” by one of the railroad enthusiast magazines. He turned out to be a heavyset, good-natured fellow of fifty-five wearing a striped locomotive engineer’s cap and a red-and-yellow Hawaiian-style shirt covered with painted metal pins bearing the insignias of what he said were “every doggone Class I railroad there is in the whole of the U.S.A.”

This was Millard Wilhelm of Tulsa, Oklahoma. He claimed to have ridden more than a half-million miles on trains in the United States and twenty-seven other countries and said he had a dozen photo albums to prove it. I didn’t ask to see them.

“Where have you managed to find the time for all of this world traveling?” I asked Wilhelm as we sat drinking coffee in a booth at the Railhead Inn on the fairgrounds.

“Well, for one thing, I’m single, always have been,” he drawled, stroking his salt-and-pepper goatee. “The other thing is that my daddy, may the Good Lord rest his soul, made himself a whole lot of money in oil. So... well, I have never had the need to go to work,” he added without the slightest hint of embarrassment.

He went on to describe his most memorable trips, including one through eastern Turkey—Anatolia, as he called it—in which his train got held up in rugged mountain country by bandits on horseback waving rifles who went through the cars relieving passengers of their money and jewelry.

“Funniest doggone thing, though,” Wilhelm drawled with a chuckle. “When they came to me, I pulled out my American passport and held it up, and they backed away, arms in the air like I was holding a gosh-darned gun on them rather than the other way around. One said something like ‘mer-i-can’ to the others, and they just smiled and bowed and moved on to rob the other folks in the coaches.

“They never got away with a red cent, though.” He laughed. “Somehow the local lawmen found out what was going on and they came galloping up on their own darn horses, nabbing the bunch of them.”

“Interesting. Do you figure the Turkish cops were in on the whole thing?”

“Can’t say for sure, but I doubt it, because they did return everybody’s money and other stuff to them.”

If nothing else, I did get a decent light feature out of the afternoon’s time, and the affable Mr. Wilhelm kept my mind off more serious matters for an hour or so, regaling me with tales of his other trips. Of course, Phil Muller showed up to take pictures of “the world’s greatest rail fan,” even promising to mail him a print of one of the shots at no charge.

“Hey Snap, can’t you find some more people to write about like our water-skiing cutie from down in Alabama?” Muller asked after the porky Wilhelm had waddled off to see the “Wheel’s-a-Rolling” pageant. “Seems like the last several people you’ve interviewed have been old or fat or dowdy or worse, all three.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, Phil, but I’m afraid the sad fact is only a small minority of the people on this planet look anything like the young lady of whom you speak,” I told him. “Just be happy you’ve gotten to spend so much time this summer out here in the sunshine and the blue skies and the cool zephyrs wafting in off our beautiful lake.”

“Geez, you’re almost poetic, Snap,” he said, “but I’d still like to get some more cheesecake stuff.”

“Okay, here’s an idea, you incorrigible old lecher. Get yourself down to the water show, or to the ice ballet on the rink right next door to it, and take a bunch of group shots of some of the young lovelies who are performing. I’ll bet anything whichever picture editor is working today will be delighted to run one of them on the back page with a caption. And just think of the fun you’ll have.”

“Thanks! I guess I should have thought of that myself.”

“Yes, you should have. But there’s no charge for the idea.”

Muller trotted happily off toward the water and ice shows in search of feminine pulchritude while I returned to my desk in the pressroom to write about the self-styled world’s most-traveled train passenger, who had the photo albums to prove it. After I had finished the piece and dictated it to Thompson on the rewrite desk, I set off in the direction of the Deadwood Central Railroad, which ran along the west edge of the fair, paralleling Lake Shore Drive but separated from it by a high wooden stockade fence enhancing the Wild West feeling the railroad sought to create.

Nothing would have shattered the “frontier” image for people riding the vintage train more quickly than a view of the taxis and heavily chromed, sleek postwar automobiles careening on the eight-lane road at well above the posted speed limit.

I walked along beside the Deadwood Central’s track, trying to guess where a saboteur intent on a derailment might be expected to strike. First off, I figured that with the ever-earlier sunsets of these late summer days, Whitnauer probably would look for the least-lit stretch of track and wait until after dark to act. He also would choose a place where the train went the fastest, presumably at about the midway point between the two terminal stations.

Dark and mid-route it should be, then, if I had this figured correctly. It seemed the best spot to wreck a train would be close to the giant Paul Bunyan robot and our new friend Nils Ericsson, a.k.a., Sven the Savage Swede. There were no lights along the rail line at that point, and it was a straight stretch of track where the engineer could “open her up,” as much as possible given the limitations of the old steam locomotive and the length of the route.

I hiked to the spot and, as if to confirm my thoughts, the chugging train, shrouded in the nineteenth-century engine’s smoke and steam, came pounding past at maybe thirty-five miles an hour, shaking the ground. I found myself being saluted by a long blast on the whistle and a wave from the cab of the locomotive. I saw it was none other than L. J. Gunderson, the retired Pennsylvania Railroad engineer whom I had interviewed during my very first week at the fair.

The longer I spent at the fairgrounds, the more the place seemed like a small village. Everywhere I went, I encountered someone I had interviewed or been served a meal by or had coffee with. Familiar faces abounded, and several times in recent weeks, I got hailed by a wave and the call of “Hi there, Tribune man!” I will not go so far as to say these lakefront acres had become a second home, but the place grew on me—up to a point.

That brief feeling of warmth quickly dissipated, however, and I forced myself to refocus on the issue at hand.