Dennis Baron

I was born and grew up in a train town.  The Illinois Central Railroad is the reason for the existence of Kankakee, Illinois.  All during my life, trains, some rumbling and some gliding, including the City of New Orleans, made their way through the center of town.  They were an essential feature of the city’s life, and part of this was the everpresent, but unpredictable, train whistle.

Like many children growing up in the Fifties and early Sixties, I had a train set, complete with a nicely detailed blue Chesapeake & Ohio engine.  It was wonderful.  The engine had a whistle, under the control of the operator, but it could not compare to the train whistle of the real thing that was the chorus of the daily soundtrack of the city.  The sound of the train whistle was at the same time both haunting and sorrowful and exhilarating and promising.

As a little kid, falling asleep, listening to the train whistle, I thought of the faraway and exotic places where the train was heading, and pictured my future life in these places.

Well, although the train famously pulled out of Kankakee, I didn’t.  I chose to return after going away for college and law school, to work and raise a family.  At all times, the train whistle has continued to hold me in its spell.  I rate my days by the number of times I consciously hear that sound, treating it as a Muslim might react to the call to prayer, or a Catholic responding to the Angelus.  It assembles my focus.

Happily, the tradition lives on.  I have the fabulous good fortune to live three blocks from my son, his wife and their little boy, who, likewise, live well within the allure of the train.

Not long after he was a year old, he started making a downward gesture like the pulling of a cord, with a sparkle in his eye, whenever the train whistle floated over our neighborhood.