Last of the Rail Yard Lunch Bandits: An Uncle Don Tale

Summer nor winter was ever kind to the physical labor it took to work Cleveland's railroad yards, but my uncle Don and his crew endured there.

For tough as nails workers, the shabby breakroom doubled as a lunch area just around the corner from the grizzled workers' lockers holding bagged lunches, coveralls, gloves, overclothes for winter, and hats proudly displaying their Union's cause.


The weary workmen would cycle themselves to the shack for lunch, hauling out their respective bags often comprised of leftovers or sandwiches, fruit, cookies and pastries, chips, pickles and condiments--a whole array representing kitchens both foreign and domestic in content. A few months after one of the yard crew was divorced, he was suspected of being the culprit in a recent rash of lunch- bag or box theft, stuffing not only meal remains but the containers themselves into the trash.


Every type of trickery and trap had been set but failed to catch or identify the 45-ish sorrow-storied divorced soul as the evil-doer, leaving Uncle Donald with a single last resort that required a trip to the veterinary supply store with the woefully sad and completely untrue tale of a very sick animal.


Two days later in winter's onslaught, lunch rotations were midway through when the behemoth divorced man burst into the rail yard enraged. He was armed with a 15-pound wrench, threatening to kill my now-running Uncle Don, who was only guilty of making a tuna salad sandwich drenched in an oil-based cow laxative that had caused the thief to brown-blast not only his pants, but saturate his outer wear as well. And that uncomfortably dreadful event had been witnessed by the whole crew during the unsuccessful culprit's half- hour's running attempt to locate my uncle. But Don was  hidden on an axle underneath, of all things, a cattle car (and stayed there until the irate worker headed for home, seated on every newspaper he could find in the lunchroom's trash barrel).