| Trona on the Web: The Stevens Family in Trona |
Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8
A family by the name of Neimeyer lived near the railroad tracks, and they had a little girl Joel's age that he liked to play with. The train usually came during the night, but one morning when Joel was playing with his friend the train was late, and when they saw the train coming, Joel decided to hold a stick on the track and watch the train run over it. The engineer saw them, but thought they were tumbleweeds. By the time he realized they were children, he didn't have time to stop and the step on the engine hit Joel in the head.
When the train stopped everyone in the neighborhood ran to the tracks to see what happened. One of the neighbors (I think it was Webster McNair) took him to the hospital. He had a fractured skull, so they didn't allow him to eat anything for three days. When they asked him what he wanted to eat, he said he wanted a biscuit. They didn't have any biscuits, so they cut a slice of bread into a circle and gave it to him. They said he really gobbled it down. The railroad company paid the doctor bills and gave them an additional one hundred dollars. Mother bought him a suit and hat with part of that money.
At that time the Trona RR had steam engines. The ones I remeber were ran on oil rather than coal. In 1949 the Trona RR bought desel engines much like the ones in the picure above except they were center cab models. When I was 20 I went to work for the San Bernadino City Schools in the maintenance department. One of the men that I worked with there, Jess Kingsford lived in Trona when Joel was hit. He had moved from Trona before I was born. His parents had been friends of my parents, but what Jess remembered most about the family is when Joel was hit by the train.
Joel worked many jobs while a youth in Trona. He worked at the Argus Cheveron Station for many years and as a pin setter in the bowling alley. He was also a varsity Football player and played a tuba in the high school band. Joel joined the Navy when he graduated from high school and after his discharge returned to work in Trona for American Potash and Chemical Corp. and then Stauffer Cemical at west end before finally moving from Trona. We didn't have any way to cool the buildings, so in the summer everyone put their beds outside to sleep. I can remember one morning when we awoke that there was a rattlesnake under Joel's crib. After we had lived there a couple of years, the building was remodeled into two apartments. And then in March 1941 the big strike came along which most of us will not forget as it lasted 104 days. We lived in Borosolvay close to the Billy Goat Hall which was where the union met. The union had a soup kitchen for people while the strike was going on. Our parents never accepted any food from them. Mother had always canned fruit and kept a supply of food on hand, so we never went hungry. The company allowed people to continue to live in their houses without paying rent until the strike was over. Mother said that when the strike was announced everyone just dropped what they were doing and left. There were some men working on a roof who left open buckets of tar. Joel was two and a half years old and found the tar and got it all over himself. Although my father, along with every other employee of America Potash, was a union member my mother never liked or trusted unions. That was very common among people in and from the south. Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Last Update: 02/09/2004 |
