A Memory

Sometimes an image, a video, a snatch of melody can trigger a memory. Just today while reviewing some old drawings a remembrance of things past struck me.

Hoff, "Old Times," pen and ink, 2008

Around 1950, maybe a bit earlier, my grandmother lived on the edge of a tiny town in Oklahoma wheat country. There were a few hundred who lived there and a few hundred more who farmed within maybe ten or fifteen miles. During the summer a train came almost every day to load wheat from one of the elevators in town. The railroad tracks passed a few dozen yards from my grandparents' place, and I developed a habit of running out to the tracks and waving to the crew as the big engine came slowly by. Sometimes they would blow the steam whistle--it was a big steam engine of the kind we don't see any more. I used to stand and gape as the huge line of cars rattled past. 

Today I know that the huge engine was really only middling in size and the long line of cars was much shorter. No matter. To this little boy it could have been the Orient Express or maybe the California Zephyr. The big black engine, the mixture of hot oil, coal smoke and dust was intoxicating. 

But one day, the train stopped. Astounded, I craned my neck to the man in the engine's window. "Hey, Little Bud," he cried. "Want a ride?" Without a thought I clambered over and he lifted me into the cab, full of dark oily levers and rods. In those innocent days no one thought twice about such things. Although I didn't know it, the engineer and fireman on the train knew my family. And it was probably no more than three or four blocks to the elevators where they would load. And off we went. 

Hoff, "Setting Watches," pen and ink, 2008

He let me blow the whistle, lean out the window the way he usually did, and dropped me off two blocks away, across from a gas station in town. Men in the station chuckled as I hitched up my jeans and strutted over. "Hey Little Bud! Does your mommy know you're here?" Of course she didn't, but a quick call and my grandfather took me home. You could do things like that in those days. 

Perhaps that memory is why railroads have always fascinated and attracted me. A couple of decades back I made a series of drawings of classic railroad subjects--mostly steam engines and early diesels. The majority of the drawings were done using standard black ink, but a few (eg, right) were done using a very old kind of ink known as iron gall--favored by masters of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Although none of these made it to the market, they remind me of old times, now only memories.

Hoff, "The Big Diesel," pen and ink, 2008

Hoff, "Long Gone," pen and ink, 2008