Lucius and Charley

Trains Magazine General Discussion
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I have long had a fascination for the books of Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg, they were probably what started me on a railfan career.

the first I remember having were “Hear the Train Blow” and “Mixed Train Daily.” I now have an almost complete collection of their books, including non railroad books, most of them are autographed.

Its interesting to consider that they were one of the first openly gay couples of the early to mid 20th centory, at least as openly as you could be at the time (homosexuality was illegal in most of the country then)

Beebe himself, the one who did the writing, had to be one of the most pompous, snobbish writers Ive ever read, thoroughly racist, as were the times. He never minded embellishing a story regardless of the facts and his writing is a mastery of overstatement and overblown writing. His run-on sentences can take hundreds of words. Here was a man who was obviously very impressed with his own writing.

But still I find it fascinating because he was covering a topic dear to my heart–railroad history-- and all its different occasions as he would say. And he was willing to put in the work to knock out dozens of books, most of them concerned with railroads.

And he and Charley were out by the tracks taking pictures of now forgotten trains and railroads and writing books about them before almost anyone else–thanks you two!! Whatever else there is to say about these two, they, along with a few others like Kalmbach and Carstens, really made the hobby of railfan happen back in the early days.

So I want to make a special thanks to these two for all they did for our hobby. Whatever else you have to say about them they were a part of the few forefathers we have to this hobby. they were out there in the dust and dirt doing it long before most reading this were born.

Trains mag, in a fairly recent issue, named Beebe the #1 railfan. I wish someone would write a bio of these two, they certainly d

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They were Gay?

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FOFLMAO…

LC

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LC…scoot over some![:D]

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From Wikipedia:

"…

Charles M. Clegg, Jr. (1916 - 1979), was an American author, photographer, and railroad historian. Clegg is primarily remembered as the lifelong companion of famed railroad author Lucius Beebe, and was a co-author of many of Beebe’s best-known books.

Born into an old New England family, Clegg grew up in Rhode Island, and during his early years developed strong interests in railroads, electronics, and photography. In 1940, Clegg met Beebe while both were houseguests at the Washington, D.C. home of Evalyn Walsh McLean. The two soon became inseparable, developing a personal and professional relationship that continued for the rest of Beebe’s life. By the standards of the era, the homosexual relationship Beebe and Clegg shared was relatively open and well-known.

The pair initially lived in New York City, where Beebe was a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune and both men were prominent in café society circles. Eventually tiring of that social life, the two moved in 1950 to Virginia City, N

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Since anyone – and I mean ANYONE – can edit any topic and post new ones at Wikipedia, I’d hardly consider it a legitimate source for anything.

However, that these two were “lifelong companions” has already been established.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

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Yes, I know what you mean, some of the earliest books my parents bought me about trains/railroads were Highliners and Trains in Transition. I assume the only reasons they bought them were that they had lots of pictures (I was just a kid so that held my attention better than text) and they were probably sale priced. Once in a great while, I dig them out and thumb through them. The photos are OK in my book, pretty much a collection of standard, 3/4, engineer’s side shots. I do occssionally read through the text. It is flowery in places and rather grand-but not, to me, straying too often into the pompous. I enjoy reading Beebe as I do DPM or even Winston Churchill-a beautiful use of the English language. But, after a few pages, I’m sure it puts my cholesterol up a few dozen points…

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G’day, Y’all,
Lucky you with all the Beebe books. I’ve got a few including “The Big Spenders”, “Highball”, and a few other lesser books. Beebe’s re-telling of the Colorado Chronicle in “Highball” brings out all the flavor of the folks who populated this wild area. So he never let the facts stand in the way of a good story. His sentences may be long (I never noticed) but they read well. That’s all that counted. When I started my south Georgia newspaper career, I tried to write like Lucius. But, luckily, that didn’t last long or I would have been fired for that.

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Kind of like the study in differing styles in Mark Twain’s short piece Journalism in Tennessee?

OK-we’ve officially jumped the topical rails now. Poor Bergie is going to have to put this thread on lockdown and euthanize it…unless someone draws it back to trains.

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Regarding the “pompous and snobbish” part I agree, he did indeed come across that way in print. This may have been because of what another railroad writer, George W. Hilton, referred to as his “ponderous, Victorian style.”

I seem to recall reading somewhere that those who got to meet him found him quite delightful and charming.

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I can relate a downside to that. After Mr. Beebe’s death, the C&O Historical Society wrote to Mr. Clegg asking about the status of Beebe photographs related to the C&O, inquiring about their possibilities for use, research, publication, etc. The response from Mr. Clegg was very much less than cordial. I’m glad they were donated.

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I learned early on to disregard any Beebe written caption. Two of the more egregious examples are the shot, in Vol II of The Trains We Rode", of an SP Mountain w/ 99 in the train indicators, the big ‘Southern Pacific" on the tender (as opposed to the small "Southern Paciic Lines), a skyline casing and a string of hvy wt Pullmans w/ a baggage car in mid-train that the caption identifies as "the pre-streamlined Daylight. Since the larger lettering came out in 1946 and the first skyline casings were on the 1937 GS-2s (concurrently w/ the original streamlined Daylight) and the Daylight never had Pullmans one wonders if he didn’t know or just didn’t care. (The train was actually a Korean War era troop train running as the final section of no. 99 and bound for Camp Cook just north of San Luis Obispo) The other example shows a PRR 4 car psgr train at Englewood which is identified as "a directors’ special behind a K-4s". The trouble is that the picture is of a G-5 ten wheeler which, along w/ the short consist, identifies the train as the Valpo Local, PRR’s contribution to Chicago’s suburban rail network, about as far from a "directors’ special as you can get.

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Amen to that–there was also the “unusual semaphore” cited in a GM&O picture. Anyone who recognizes B&O-style CPL signals knows that those were a pair of lights above the main signal–one centered, and one off to the side. Good thing he didn’t wait around for this “semaphore” to move from horizontal!

But to me, perhaps this isn’t so bad. Maybe I should revisit those books on my shelf. Good (though monotonous) photography, and excellent entertainment, all in one package!

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Like most other kids I nuts about trains, especially the NY Central because of its classy passenger trains and understated livery. One of the first railroad books I bought was “20th Century,” by Beebe. I think it was because of an ad or maybe because of a review I saw in “Trains”. After mailing my precious $5.95, I clearly remember counting each day in eager anticipation until it finally arrived. After one look at it, boy, did I feel ripped! Instead of seeing action pictures of the great train hurrying along the Hudson behind a Hudson or Niagara or pictures of a car I may have ridden in, the book was chock full of editorial text and pictures of people. (It does have a reproduction of an excellent Fogg painting of the train being pulled by a Niagara, however.) I put it away and forgot about it.

Several decades later, when my mom decided to move to a smaller house and I had to clean out my stuff from the basement, I came upon the long forgotten book in a box. Having accumulated several bookshelves of railroad books in the meantime, this is one quirky railfan book in comparison – obviously written from a different point of view. For example:

· 59 of its 180 pages are entirely text, much of it written in prose which must have appeared pompous and florid even in that more formal era. I doubt that the p

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I believe that Beebe and Clegg had their own private railroad car they lived in. I wonder whatever happened to that?

The photography standards set by Beebe in loving and exhausting detail about the 3/4 “wedge” shot are dictatorial in nature. But they sure did set a standard that is very hard to get away from. The thing that always struck me about the photography style was the lack of people in the photos. You might occasionally get an engineer or a fireman leaning out a window, and every once in a while get an in cab shot of someone. But people generally didn’t play the role in Highball and Highliner, which makes me think that the photos were interesting studies of machinery.

I prefer a Steinhammer or O. Winston Link to get more of a feel for what life was like on the railroads. At least the train was part of the countryside, and some of the photos Link had of the locals- some of them staged- made them more alive to me.

There is one shot of what looks like a Durango and Silverton freight train (I think it’s in Highball) that says the railroad was carrying material for the Manhattan project. I know that the Coors family had something to do with the production of heavy water, but I wasn’t aware that uranium came from Colorado or that it was carried by the railroad up there. Is this another Beebe story, or was there some truth to it?

Erik

PS. If Beebe and Clegg had lived in the south, they wouldn’t be “gay”- they would be roomates. There are no gay people in the south.

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I’m pretty sure the car (the “Gold Coast”) is on display at the California Railroad Museum in Sacramento. Quite a lot (most? all?) of LB’s and CC’s photos are preserved there as well.

John