Ruth Ann Kowal, the woman in the wheelchair, asked me to read page four of the old federal report into the microphone at the ribbon cutting, and when I did, Mayor Kessler stopped smiling, because the name on page four was his own grandfather.
She had already told the crowd who my father was. Walter Bixler, the reason she grew up, the brakeman who uncoupled a burning car by hand in 1957 so it would not roll into the houses below Eleventh Avenue. And the report I had pulled out of a dumpster, taped to the back of my fathers own plaque, told the rest.
The burning car my father saved the town from was a chemical tank car overloaded by nine tons, shipped by Strickland Chemical, and the man who signed the false weight on the manifest was the grandfather of the mayor who pried my fathers plaque off the wall.
The Interstate Commerce Commission investigated every wreck back then, and the Altoona Mirror archive told the same story. The shipper knew the car was overweight. The brakes failed because of it. My father nearly died stopping it. The town gave him a plaque. Strickland Chemical got a fine.
Sixty-nine years later, Leland Strickland, the chemical familys grandson, paid three million dollars to put his name on the restored depot and erase my fathers. And Mayor Dwayne Kessler took the money and pried off the plaque and told me nobody remembers some dead brakeman. He had his own reason to want that history buried, and it was sitting on page four.
The man who signed the false manifest, the rail official who certified a nine-ton overload as legal and set the whole disaster in motion, was named Kessler. The mayors grandfather. Two families, Strickland and Kessler, who built a wreck together in 1957, buying back the memory of it together in the present day, one with chemical money and one with a plaque he could pry off a wall.
I am seventy-nine. I drove trains for the Pennsylvania Railroad and Conrail for thirty-eight years, same as my father. When I walked past the depot last year and saw four bolt holes where his plaque used to be, and a new sign going up that said Strickland Station, I went to City Hall, and the mayor did not even stand up. The man gave three million dollars, he said. My father gave his arms, I said. He laughed.
My wife Evelyn said, Hal, its just a sign, let it go. I did not argue. But the next morning I went behind the depot, and the plaque was in a dumpster face down, and I carried it home in a wheelbarrow. When I cleaned it, there was an envelope taped to the back, yellow and brittle and sealed since 1957, a copy of the I.C.C. report, put there by someone long ago who knew the truth might need to be found again.
A federal investigation report is a public record, and public records do not care how much a grandson pays to rename a building. Ruth Ann Kowal, who was eleven and lived in the first house below the yards in 1957, came to that ribbon cutting to make sure the truth was read out loud before anyone cut a ribbon.
Leland put the scissors down and said it was ancient history. Ruth Ann said, read page four, Harold. I read the name. And a crowd that came for a renaming heard instead that the two families buying the depots memory were the two families responsible for the disaster my father stopped.
The naming deal collapsed. You cannot rename a towns landmark after the company that overloaded the car, once the town knows, and you cannot keep a mayor in office whose family signed the false weight and who threw a heros plaque in a dumpster. The city council voted to put my fathers plaque back where it had been for sixty-nine years.
Leland Strickland and Mayor Kessler faced the public record, not my anger. Three million dollars does not outweigh a federal report and a town that remembers.
Nobody remembers some dead brakeman, the mayor told me. The whole of Altoona remembers now. My fathers plaque is back on the depot. In honor of Walter Bixler, who stood his ground. I touch it every week, the way I have my whole life, and now I know what was taped to the back of it, waiting for the day a grandson tried to pry it off.