Higher Education
An Essay by Gil French
College is the place where you go to classes, meet some friends who will remain so for the rest of your life and begin to become the mature citizen who contributes to his school, community and country. It helps complete your education and prepares you for a life of productive and fruitful service helping people and leaving the world a better place than you found it. Or so they told us as we were leaving high school. Little did they warn us about the maturity level and nature of the citizenship of some of the folks we would meet in our institution of higher learning. Now don’t get me wrong. Most of the people I met in Towson State Teachers College were upstanding, virtuous, industrious and dedicated. I made friends with many of them. However, there were a few , mostly veterans returned from World War II, who, of course, were older and more earthly-wise than those of us who had just graduated from high school. I became a good friend of two of these veterans.
Fairly low on our list of pursuits was our college education, although we all eventually became teachers. Our list, however, did include, among other items, railroads and spirited beverages. By some divine coincidence, there was, very close by, a railroad called the Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad, nicknamed, by most locals, The Ma and Pa. This railroad ran mornings, Monday to Friday, from its Baltimore terminal located on Falls Road just north of the 28th Street Bridge and reached its terminal in York, Pennsylvania many hours later. The train often stopped near Towson and we would drive along near the track bed to locate it. When we saw where the train had stopped we would park the car, get out and rush toward the train before it would begin moving. When we found an empty box car we would hop in it. We called this “fropping,” a dandy contraction of “freight hopping.”
The Ma and Pa railroad did not break any speed records on its daily route. Its speed was never more than about fifteen miles per hour, as far as we were able to estimate. The glacial pace did not bother us in the least; we were in no hurry to return to our books and studies. We settled inside of a box car and as soon as the train began to move, we would open a can of beer, which my friend had picked up at a favorite Towson watering hole (I was not old enough to be served in a bar, but in a box car I needed no identification papers.) We knew that it would be a long time on the road and we had made plans to enjoy the ride. In a couple of hours, maybe a little longer, we would be in Delta, Pennsylvania, where the train always stopped. At that point we were nearly always discovered by a brakeman or other railroad worker and had to abandon the car. We told them we were hobos. Needless to say, they didn’t believe us. They ware rather polite and not very disturbed by our presence and would often talk to us about their jobs and railroad lore in general. We always offered them a bottle of beer. They looked longingly at it but invariably refused.
Delta was not very much of a town. It had a modest railroad classification yard but not much more. Mostly, it was a place you wanted to leave as soon as possible. There was a quarry nearby, but neither of us was very interested in rocks. Besides, it was lunchtime and we were hungry. We found a less than elegant restaurant and had a less than haute cuisine meal, probably greasy hamburgers and equally greasy French fries. This suited us perfectly since we were low-budget, high calorie guys.
The rule on these trips was to get back to college by 4 p.m. since I had to take the streetcar downtown to work by then. I would arrive late for work but could easily make it up by working rapidly and accurately. My working colleagues would never complain because they knew that I could outpace them.
Occasionally, we would do some fropping on the Pennsylvania Railroad line from its enormous yards near Harrisburg. These were frequently lengthy rides since the major railroads did not make nearly as many stops as the short spur lines. They had some empty boxcars and were relatively easy to get into. There were a number of railroad workmen around but these were easily avoided. On these rides we expected to be riding royally for many hours and cover fifty or more miles. Typically we detrained at our leisure, when we got hungry enough and looked for a place to eat. When we had enough of railroads, we would always look for some easy transportation back to Baltimore. In almost all cases this meant hitch-hiking and depending on the good nature and generosity of our fellow travelers, who owned cars and were willing to share them. As you can see, my higher learning experience involved several activities that were not listed in the course catalog.
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