Lacy Jones

Far and away the gaudiest reflection in the Manhattan glass of fashion is a ponderous, Prussian-cut, 35-year-old professional Bourbon with a Barrymore profile, a dock-walloper's physique and the lacy name of Lucius Beebe. To the 1,500,000 U. S. newspaper readers reached by his syndicated column, This New York, he is known for tattling in Wardour-Street English on the rococo ructions of some 500 select merry-andrews who frequent such recherche Manhattan pubs as Jack & Charlie's, the Stork Club, El Morocco, etc. To his cafe-society circle he is an overdressed young man who devotes himself to proper vintages and a perfumed nostalgia for the good old days.

That so soigne a soul as Lucius Beebe should ride a hobby as undandified as railroading is as unlooked-for as red wine with fish. But last week Lucius Morris Beebe spent a day at the Old Corner Book Store in his ancestral Boston autographing a book, High Iron, that bared his "secret lunacy" to many for the first time.*

A confessed railroading "aficionado" since boyhood, Lucius Beebe treats his hobby as a last lingering vestige of the steel-engraving age he sighs for. High Iron, its chapters on pioneers, power, speed and deluxe trends spaced with 174 informatively-captioned pictures (many snapped by Beebe), is written with the lyric appreciation of an antiquary, the roundhouse savvy of a Casey Jones. A delight for railroad buffs, its expert discussion of locomotive principles should also please all interested in U. S. technics.

Wonderstruck in the vast trainshed at St. Louis ("That Pharos . . . that divides the hemispheres . . .") by the shining blue-grey boiler-shells, brass bells and hand rails burnished in the old manner; at Cleveland, where "feline Hudsons of the New York Central panted in the hot darkness, mousing for green lights among the switch-points"; at Omaha, hearing "the symphony of twelve driving wheels" of a Union Pacific engine he found it all, like Masefield's ships, "beautiful unspeakably." In a disused roundhouse he found an authentic old Taunton-built eight-wheeler which moved him like "a magnum of Chateau Lafite '64, recorked and perfect from the ministrations of many faithful wine butlers long dead."

Of equal interest to Author Beebe is the railroad slang he dug up in his travels. Some of it, and its meaning:

High iron (main track).

Highball (clear track signal).

Red ball (fast freight train).

Hotshot (fast train).

Muzzle loader (hand-fired locomotive).

Varnish (passenger cars).

Bug torch (trainman's lantern).

Company notch (the speed notch conducive to most economical operation).

Smoke orders (proceeding from one station to another without orders, watching for the smoke of an approaching train on the same track).

*D. Appleton-Century ($5).

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