The Well-Dressed Hobo: The Many Wondrous Adventures of a Man Who Loves Trains

On September 8 at noon, Rush Loving, Jr., delivered a Banner Lecture entitled "The Well-Dressed Hobo: The Many Wondrous Adventures of a Man Who Loves Trains."

America’s railroads have gone through a tumultuous and dramatic era during the past eighty years, and Virginia played a key role through all of it. They were the times of strong, colorful personalities, men like Virginia’s Claytor brothers, Edward Ball, the man who controlled the DuPont Trust and every evening assembled his “likkah-hound” lieutenants for rounds of bourbon and ginger ale, and W. Thomas Rice, a Northern Neck boy like Ball, who ran the Seaboard Coast Line with the iron fist of a general. There, too, were Jack Fishwick of the Norfolk and Western and Furlong Baldwin, who grew up on a plantation near Cape Charles and used an Atlantic Coast Line office car to build a banking empire. Their stories are played on a stage filled with the drama of boardroom struggles and secret deals, all in the romantic setting of railroad locomotive cabs and the old Richmond Times-Dispatch newsroom. All this is told by a man who, from Depression days in Virginia on into the twenty-first century, watched as those dynamic men and others like them saved the nation’s railroads from ruin and then returned them to a new era of glory.

A native of Virginia, Rush Loving Jr., began his career as a photo-journalist at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and from 1965 until 1969 he was the paper’s business editor. He also served as an associate editor of Fortune, the chief spokesman of the Office of Management and Budget in the Carter White House, and for twenty years headed a consulting firm serving clients that included many of the nation’s major railroads. He is the author of The Well-Dressed Hobo: The Many Wondrous Adventures of a Man Who Loves Trains.

(Introduction by Andrew Talkov and Todd Culbertson)

The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.