Tales from the Rails

My dad, Charles William Mann, was born in 1927 in Prescott, a small town in rural Arkansas. He left home at seventeen to work in the Houston shipyards. He then joined the Merchant Marines and sailed around the world at the end of WW II. His odyssey continued when he returned to Arkansas and married Mary Frances Ward. After holding jobs as a route salesman for the El Dorado Coffee Company, running a paint-manufacturing plant and selling life insurance, Charles went to work in the train yards of the Cotton Belt Railroad as a painter in 1964 in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. That new beginning led to a position as a union labor representative with the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen, a role which would ultimately carry him all the way to the national offices in Washington D.C. This miscellaneous collection of stories spans the breadth of his life from his childhood in Prescott to white collar Washington D.C. and back again. Much has been omitted or lost, but I hope that all who stop to visit the journey he took will discover something, not just about the nature of the times in which he lived, but about the special nature of the man.