By Jacob Olson, Special Guest Author
It was a sunny afternoon when I met Polly Roll in the administration office of the Marshalltown Veterans Home. Roll, the executive secretary of the Iowa Department of Veterans Affairs, greeted me warmly and walked with me to the building where David Johnson lives.
“David and his friend Max, another veteran, had been acting like high schoolers during supper,” Roll told me during the walk over. Indeed, I would learn for myself that David Johnson, aged 76 and a former long-time resident of Sutherland, had a certain sprightliness that was both infectious and pleasant. There are reasons to understand why.
David met us with a thumbs-up – the gesture’s meaning, to him, was simple and motivating. “Always looking up, never looking down,” David said, and he began to share his passion that he had maintained since boyhood.
To say that David knows about trains, specifically the “old IC” (Illinois Central Railroad) and its Northwestern line that stretched from Chicago to Sioux City, IA, would be an understatement. He also knew much about the Sioux Rapid sub-division that ran through Laurens, Marathon, Linn Grove, Sutherland, and Peterson. To learn about these trains, David walked the rails, talked, and took pictures. The pictures he took fill his room. Inside one cabinet against a wall are hundreds of old photographs. Bundled together with rubber bands, each one was notated by David’s careful hand and each one tells a story. Together, we sat down at the edge of David’s bed and looked at a bundle. His enthusiasm was palpable, and we were like two kids bonding over trains and history.
As David flipped through the photos with me, he told me about each one. If the photo included a train, David often told me the type of engine. If the photo included a set of track, he told me where the photo was taken and even the milepost. All this was done without him consulting the back of the photograph to jog his memory.
The bottom drawer of the cabinet contained older photos, black-and-white photographs from the 1960s. One was a snapshot of David’s first train ride. It was a “nice February Saturday,” David said. Indeed, the back of the photograph was dated February 3, 1962, in Sutherland. David, who was born in 1948 and who was a member of Sutherland’s 1967 high school graduating class, was just a youngster. David told me that he and a friend waited next to the train for about thirty minutes so they could talk to the crew. To David’s delight, the crew of the freight locomotive that was bound for Eagle Grove, offered him a short ride.
“That was fun,” David recounted!
The Vietnam veteran had done a lot in his life. David was born in Oelwein, but moved across the state because his mom’s oldest brother was the editor and publisher of the “Sutherland Courier.” After graduating from his class that consisted of a whopping 45 students, David joined the Navy and served as a steam engineer on the USS Nitro, an ammunition ship. When he returned, he returned to his trains.
Today, David works at the front desk in the building in which he lives. Still, seeing trains for David is like “meeting an old friend.” In truth, David is surrounded by old friends in the form of old photographs and pictures on the wall that stretch back decades. Within those photographs are contained years and years of memories of an earlier time, a time that no longer seems that long ago.
One of the final pictures I saw before leaving was of an older, middle-aged David waving from the window of a black locomotive. Even though the palm of his hand was open with his fingers outstretched, it seemed that the message was the same as the thumbs-up that David greeted me and then left me with.
“Always looking up, never looking down.”