About a week ago I didn’t feel like cooking breakfast so I headed down to Clyde’s. Maybe I could talk him into fixing me a plate of eggs, bacon, and grits.
The neon open sign wasn’t lit, but the door was unlocked so I went on in. Clyde was nowhere in sight, so I sighed heavily and cooked my own breakfast after all. I had only been settled in on the other side of the bar a few minutes when he came out of the little room he uses as an office.
“I tolja the other day Ward was running for something,” He said as he spread out the Martinsville Bulletin before me.
There in the paper was a photo of Ward Armstrong and his wife grinning from the window of a passenger train as it slowly made it’s way through Bassett.
“See, he’s in full-blown campaign mode,” Clyde said. “I don’t know what he’s running for, but you can bet your left sock it’s something.”
I sopped up the last of the runny yellow goodness with a piece of toast, ate the last bite of bacon and said, “No, not necessarily.
“Ward’s well-known as a train nut. He’s even got a model train layout in his home that would make any 12-year-old boy cry. Or so I’m told. I ain’t never seen it. A trip to Winston-Salem to get on a train to Roanoke and then get off sounds like something Ward would pay a couple hundred for.
“He likes to dress up in those striped denim overalls and engineer’s cap to read train stories to school kids. Always ends up as a picture in the paper. You can count on it every campaign year. He even found a way to work trains into his last campaign’s opening speech.”
“He Did? How’d he do that?”
“Well,” I started, “he kicked off the campaign at the site of the old Ferrum Veneer plant where his father worked. Right smack-dab in the middle of it he told about how his mom would put him on the train in Bassett, he would get off in Ferrum and ride home with his dad.”
Clyde, eyes wide, said, “Hell Bunkie, you and I are the same age, Ward was behind us in school. I don’t remember passenger trains in Bassett. Do you?”
“No Clyde, I don’t. For as far back as I can remember that station was a REA express station, but I never saw a passenger train there. My uncles tell me they rode the train to Boones Mill, with my grandmother, to visit my great-grandmother. They had to spend the night because the train ran south in the morning and back north around noon. One round trip per day.”
“So Ward was lying?” Clyde asked.
“Not necessarily,” I replied. “Although one of his Democrat colleagues once told me, over a cup of coffee on the 6th floor of the General Assembly Building, that ‘Ward struggles to tell the truth when he’s asked his name’. You can beg until you’re blue and I ain’t telling who it was.
“Now it’s entirely possible that Ward’s mom did put him on a train to Ferrum. I did some research and the last passenger train left Bassett, heading South, the morning of February 18th , 1961. It’s documented in the February 19th, 1961 edition of the Roanoke Times.
“Oh, and before you strip the gears in your brain trying to calculate it, you and I were five years old. That’s why we don’t remember it. Ward was four.”
