The whistle of John Hess' engine had been going now for maybe five minutes at most. A locomotive whistle going without letup meant one thing on the railroad, and to everyone who lived near the railroad. But there was no horseplay about tying down the cord. Many an engineer could get a simple tune out of his whistle, and for those less musical it could be used to aggravate a cranky preacher in the middle of his Sunday sermon or to signal hello through the night to a wife or lady friend.
And aside from its utilitarian functions, it could also be an instrument of no little amusement. The whistle was part of the make-up of the man he was known for it as much as he was known for the engine he drove. It was tuned and worked (even "played") according to his own personal choosing. E-298 9.5 X 6.2 X 1.4 inches 302 pages Signed by Author.“A locomotive whistle was a matter of some personal importance to a railroad engineer. It also offers a powerful historical lesson for our century and all times: the danger of assuming that because people are in positions of responsibility they are necessarily behaving responsibly. Graced by David McCullough's remarkable gift for writing richly textured, sympathetic social history, The Johnstown Flood is an absorbing, classic portrait of life in 19th-century America, of overweening confidence, energy, and tragedy. From research in the voluminous records, diaries, letters, interviews with numbers of survivors, and a rare, previously unknown transcript of a private investigation conducted by the Pennsylvania Railroad, David McCullough vividly re-creates the chain of events that led to the catastrophe, and then unfolds the incredible story of the flood itself and its aftermath. It was a tragedy that became a national scandal. Then came May 31, 1889, when the dam burst, sending a wall of water thundering down the mountain, smashing through Johnstown, and killing more than 2,000 townspeople. Despite repeated warnings of possible danger, nothing was done about the dam. In the mountains above Johnstown, an old earth dam had been hastily rebuilt to create a lake for an exclusive summer resort patronized by the tycoons of that same industrial prosperity: among them Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon. At the end of the last century, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was a booming coal-and-steel town filled with hard-working families striving for a piece of the nation's burgeoning industrial prosperity. Boards have light shelf-wear present to the extremities. Bound in cloth boards with titles present to the spine. DJ has shelf-wear present to the DJ extremities (DJ is faded along the spine with some chipping present to the edges of the DJ). Signed and inscribed by David McCullough on the colophon page. Includes section of black & white photographs, maps on endpapers.
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