Hello to all Kossaks planning your YearlyKos trip to Chicago! Today I'd like to share a story about some of the people you may be fortunate enough to meet during your visit here.
Riding on the City of New Orleans,
Illinois Central, Monday morning rail
Fifteen cars and fifteen restless riders,
Three conductors and twentyfive sacks of mail
Thanks to Arlo Guthrie's cover of Chicagoan Steve Goodman's wonderful song City of New Orleans, I am a train reader. Sometimes I'm a train rider, but I'm a train reader, every time I see a train engine - I look for its name.
Come over the jump for the story.
To travel around Chicagoland by train, we use two rail systems. The CTA, or Chicago Transit Authority is in charge of most of the busses and the Elevated (El) trains that mostly traverse the city (and some inner suburbs). The El lines circling downtown form the boundaries of Chicago's loop. The other train system is Metra, which is made up of train lines from outlying suburbs into a couple of stations downtown.
When I travel downtown on my photo safaris I take one of the Metra lines (the BNSF, or Burlington Northern Santa Fe) from Aurora to Union Station and pick up CTA transportation while downtown. The BNSF connection is very cool for me, since my mom used to be the secretary to the president of Santa Fe (before I was born). The family always looked for the Santa Fe building when we went downtown. I still do.
I can't claim to have railroading in my blood any more than I can claim to have the circus in my blood because Grandpa Mac ran away and joined the circus when he left home. (I do like to say I come from circus people, though. It explains a lot.)
But I like trains. And ever since I realized that some special trains are named, I have been a train reader.
A lot of the Metra fleet is unnamed. Every fourth or fifth train has a name, usually something kind of boring like "Village of River Grove" or "Village of Lombard." I've mostly seen "Village of" names. "City" really wouldn't fit for the suburbs, and "Suburb of" just sounds silly. I've recently noticed "State of Illinois" which is in Metra's stylish new colors.
(You can see some of the less stylish old colors in the engine behind and to the left of number 404, above.)
One day I watched a train go by that had the name "Oliver 'Ollie' Tibbles." This was unusual. I'd never seen a train with a person's name. I thought, "I wonder who Oliver Tibbles is (besides a train!) or was?"
After seeing and reading the Oliver "Ollie" Tibbles three or four times, I remembered to do a search, the next time I got to a computer.
And mothers with their babes asleep
Are rocking to the gentle beat
And the rhythm of the rails is all they feel
I'm from Illinois. I've lived within 40 miles of Chicago my entire life. So I figured Oliver was probably a politician - hopefully one who hadn't been storing shoeboxes full of cash in his hotel room. Or one who hadn't staged a midnight raid on a local airport, after vowing to leave it be. Someone who hadn't used a stand against the death penalty to influence opinion about years of crooked politics and selling licenses for bribes.
Ok, hopefully not a local politician, period. But who else would we have to name a train after? Al Capone? Tony "The Big Tuna" Accardo? Joey "The Clown" Lombardo?
But Oliver Tibbles was not a politician. He was not a gangster.
Oliver was a 7 year old.
Oliver had two big dreams. One was to get healthy, to beat cancer - to survive the fight against his brain tumor.
Oliver shared his other dream with his mom when he was 4 years old. When he grew up, Oliver wanted to be a train.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a dragon when I grew up. I love that he wanted to be a train.
The Make A Wish Foundation made Ollie an engineer for a day in April 2003, when he was 6 years old. The journey started with a limo ride to Union Station. Ollie was very ill, but dressed in the uniform of a train engineer. He was greeted by Metra staff. His mom wrote:
The train itself was decorated inside and out so that people would know, as the train whizzed past, that something very special was happening that day. This was not a private ride. No, this was one of the regularly scheduled commuter runs that would stop at each station, giving those that boarded an opportunity to share in the power of a boy's Wish.
Mid-way through our train ride, the true moment that Ollie had always dreamed of was upon him ... the engineer came to see Ollie, telling him that he was needed!
So Ollie, in the arms of his Dad, followed the engineer into the train's lead car. On the control panel, a large red button that was beckoning him. Ollie eagerly pressed it - and that glorious train horn blew! He pressed it again and again and we all laughed. I could hear faint cheers from the carriage behind us. They knew Ollie was at the helm, his dream a reality.
[ ... ]
Many people planned to share in this day. But as the giant train gracefully came to a halt, the speaker above the platform suddenly blared, "From Union Station, Chicago ... The Oliver Tibbles Express has arrived!" ... and as the silver doors opened we were completely and utterly unprepared for the sheer volume of people that had gathered.
It was overwhelming ... and quite wonderful!
.
Hundreds of people welcomed Ollie from the train, waving red bandanas.
Goodnight, America how are you?
Don't you know me, I'm your native son
Ollie died in March, 2004. His family stayed involved with Make A Wish. People who were touched by Ollie that day - people who greeted him, rode his train or heard his story, wanted to do more.
They wanted to make Ollie's wish - to be a train - come true.
Debi Tibbles (Ollie's mom) was asked to speak at a Make A Wish black tie fundraiser on May 21, 2005, but was hesitant. Then she learned it was being held at Union Station, and she knew she had to attend. She talked about Ollie, about trains, and about his Wish Ride in 2003. But then she was given a surprise.
Metra Chairman Jeffrey Ladd announced that he had a secret to share with her. Showing a video of Metra staff affixing a light blue decal to the locomotive, Ladd told her it had been named for her son. Then he led the family to the tracks to see and touch the Oliver "Ollie" Tibbles locomotive.
Ollie's mom greets her her son, the train.
The Tibbles family with the Oliver "Ollie" Tibbles
This hasn't been my typical "Chicago Treasures" diary - I've depended on photos from others and on a story to introduce you to some wonderful people in Chicago, instead of some of my snapshots. But, of course - I did get a couple of those. Unfortunately, it was very dark when I took them.
If you travel by Metra, whether you live in Chicago, or during your YearlyKos visit, look for Oliver Tibbles.
He's the boy who wanted to be a train.
I'm the train they call the City of New Orleans
I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.