When I showed up for work the morning of Tuesday, March 3, 1970, Leighton McLaughlin, the day assistant city editor, leapt to greet me as if I were his long-lost son. Thank goodness, he was smiling. I’d been in Pittsburgh the day before at a United Steelworkers event and, being who I was, took an overnight train back to Chicago, then went directly to work. “We tried to find you last night,” Mac said, but this was decades before cell phones. Then he laid an amazing story at my feet.
Two years earlier, the two biggest eastern railroads merged to form Penn Central. On the surface, things went smoothly at first. But Penn Central was a terrible idea terribly executed, and losses began to cascade. Now there were rumors the company was in real trouble, but nobody knew the truth, which was that PC would declare bankruptcy that June after just over two years of existence.
That was the backdrop, so now the drama: The evening before, while I was about to board that train, night reporter Bill Granger was at some event chatting up a Penn Central officer. The details escape me now, but this man said something inadvertently that led Bill to believe PC was about to announce it would seek to jettison dozens of its passenger trains—just about everything west of the Atlantic seaboard. It would effectively cut off Chicago from the east coast by train.
Bill had no way to confirm this the evening before, and of course I was unreachable. The challenge Mac gave me that morning was to find out if Bill’s suspicion was correct. I had less than six hours, but time didn’t matter. I knew my best hope lay in one phone call. I needed to talk to Saul Resnick.
I liked Saul almost the instant we met in the spring of 1968. Penn Central had just been formed, and he was hired from the Philadelphia Daily News as its Chicago press guy. Saul was pure tabloid—gutsy, in your face, what’s-it-to-you. That turns off a lot of people, but not me. And it seemed that my respect for Saul was reciprocated. Half a century later, we’re still in touch.
I wasn’t acquainted with many Penn Central people, just Saul. I took a deep breath and called him. Here is how he remembers the conversation, after the initial minutes of parry and thrust:
Fred: If I go with this story, will I be embarrassed?
Saul: I can’t really say. But something is happening.
Fred (exasperated): I’ve told you what I’ve heard. Again, will I be wrong and regret having written it?
Saul (measuring his words carefully): If I were you and I were still a journalist, I would consider going with what you have. But of course, you can’t attribute it to me.
I hung up and told Mac that Bill’s lead was solid. Meanwhile, Bill had come in early and worked the phone, too, finding out that Penn Central people had briefed the Interstate Commerce Commission the week before on this matter.
We knew the big picture. What we didn’t know were nagging little facts, such as just which passenger trains would go on the block. Back then PC still had an extensive network of passenger trains between New York and Chicago (via both Buffalo and Pittsburgh), New York and St. Louis, Detroit and Chicago, and Cincinnati and Chicago.
The question Bill and I had to answer was where the cutoff points were. In other words, was Penn Central about to seek to get rid of all its passenger trains west of Albany, N.Y., or Buffalo? And west of Harrisburg, Pa., or Pittsburgh? The deadline for the first edition approached, and nobody—even Saul (who told his bosses he had said “no comment” to all my questions)—was being helpful.
So I made an educated guess—what other choice did I have?—and began to write. My guess was that the railroad was losing so much money on its passenger trains, and was in so much difficulty meeting payroll, that it wanted to toss out everything west of Albany and Harrisburg.
I was half right. A couple of days later, when the railroad really did ask the ICC to chop its passenger trains off the block, the dividing lines were revealed as Harrisburg (right) and Buffalo rather than Albany (wrong). At the newspaper, I don’t think anyone but Bill and I knew of our minor error. We were heroes.
You’re right to wonder why this mattered. Penn Central’s train-off case became the critical event on the road to creation of Amtrak, the government-subsidized company that took over intercity passenger rail responsibility from the freight railroads on May 1, 1971. Rail passenger service had been in serious decline for a decade. But the loss of almost all U.S. mail revenue in 1967 kicked the chair from beneath the privately-owned railroads. Now what had been serious losses from passenger trains turned into gushers of red ink, and Penn Central of all railroads was most exposed because of its huge passenger network. When Penn Central essentially gave up on passenger trains that March, wheels began to turn in Congress that led to Amtrak.
This was as big an exclusive as I ever had, and it really wasn’t mine. I owe it entirely to Bill Granger’s intuition and Saul Resnick’s honesty. In years thereafter, I crossed paths with Saul many times. He became vice president of public affairs of Conrail, the successor railroad to Penn Central, and I never mistook his no-bullshit demeanor for anything but the street-smart attitude of a tabloid reporter from Philly. In other words, I saw through his bluster and liked him. At last report, officially retired for many years, he was writing feature stories for a suburban Philadelphia newspaper, for the fun of it but really to spotlight deserving people in his community.
Bill Granger’s life is fascinating as well. After the Army, he worked for United Press International and the Chicago Tribune before coming to the Sun-Times in 1969. Bill stayed a decade, and by the end of that tenure had begun publishing what finally amounted to 20 mystery novels over a 15-year span. The man had energy to burn, in other words. I still picture him as big, gangly, a bit overweight and with this unruly shock of blond hair. A stroke in 2000 ended his professional life, and the last decade of his life was spent in a veterans’ hospital.
One feature story he wrote stuck to my mind. He called the makers of shampoos and asked, why do you tell people to apply shampoo, rinse if off and repeat? What is being accomplished? Aren’t you just trying to sell more product? For years, I had wondered the same thing, and here was Bill doing my work for me. The shampoo manufacturers hemmed and hawed and gave various explanations. The tenor of Bill’s piece was not one of righteous indignation but mirth and humor. It fit so well with his sunny personality.
By the way, the Interstate Commerce Commission never gave Penn Central permission to remove a one of those passenger trains. It hemmed and hawed, too, and that summer of 1970 declared a moratorium on train-off cases while Congress wrestled with the legislation that would create Amtrak the next year.