March 27, 2008
100 Candles
Retired railroad man, Ed Ashbrenner, still enjoys watching trains at age 100
By RODGER NICHOLS
of The Dalles Chronicle
From the picture window of his home on East Tenth Street, Ed Ashbrenner can keep his eye on transportation in the Columbia River Gorge.
“I really enjoy the view,” he said. “I can see my trains run across the river and airplanes land, and tugboats moving barges.”
Ashbrenner, who turned 100 on Monday, still thinks of them as “his trains,” though he’s been retired from the railroad for 35 years.
That’s because he started with the railroad on the Washington side of the Columbia 80 years ago, when it was the Spokane, Portland and Seattle. (The company was formed in 1905 as a joint venture of the Great Northern Railway and the Northern Pacific Railway. Today, after a number of mergers, it’s part of Burlington Northern Santa Fe.)
Ashbrenner was born March 24, 1908 in Vancouver, Wash., and went to grade school in the next-door community of Minnehaha.
“In 1928, I started serving my machinist’s apprenticeship at the Vancouver roundhouse,” Ashbrenner said. “In 1935, I was called to Wishram as a machinist who repaired locomotives. And I retired in 1973.”
In between, he met a young lady from Battleground, Laura Engelking.
“I met her at a barn dance, halfway between Battleground and Minehaha,” he said.
The young lady later admitted she thought he was cute, but he was with another gal, and she was with another guy.
“I knew a friend of hers,” Ashbrenner said. “He asked me once to go out with a girl to a dance. He took her [Laura] and I took the girl, so I didn’t go out with her the first time we went out.”
Eventually, the two began going together.
“It was the Depression,” he said. “I couldn’t afford to get married.”
After seven years of seeing each other, they did marry on Dec. 12, 1938. Last year they celebrated their 70th anniversary.
“We’re still happy with each other — most of the time,” said Laura, who is now 93. “We got so used to each other we wouldn’t want to be with anyone else.”
Ed spent 45 years with the railroad, 38 of those years at Wishram. He started work on steam trains, but took a correspondence course in diesel mechanics, so that he would be ready when the railroad made the transition.
When World War II came, Ed registered for the draft, but the railroad wouldn’t let him go because they needed skilled workers so badly.
“During the war we worked seven days a week.” he said. “Every other day it was 12 hours. I went five and a half months without a day off.
As a key nerve center, Wishram ran 24 hours a day.
“During the war we had three machinists to help on the day shift alone, a boilermaker and helpers,” Ed said, “During the swing shift they had two machinists and helpers and several laborers and on the graveyard shift they had two machinists and helpers. When I retired there were just two of us. I worked the day shift and he worked the night shift. We did about everything you had to do.”
Though the work remained at Wishram, the Ashbrenners moved to The Dalles in 1956 for the greater school opportunities for their children. They have a son and two daughters, several grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
But the years they spent in Wishram were a real education, Laura said.
“Everybody worked on the railroad. Everybody talked about the railroad whenever they got together,” she said. “And everybody knew your business practically before you knew it. If you talked about somebody, they’d run right up and tell them. But we did make a lot of good friends.’
She said entertainment in Wishram in those days was simpler. Townspeople would go down to the station to watch the big trains come and go. Before Celilo Falls was covered behind The Dalles Dam, they would watch the Indians fishing with their dipnets.
“We didn’t have a garbage collector,” she said, “so we’d take our garbage up to the top of the hill and watch the cans bounce down clear to the bottom. That was one of our big entertainments.”
Laura also learned to paint and to make pottery, and when the family moved to The Dalles, she began teaching classes, which she continued more than 40 years.
Meanwhile, Ed — in his rare spare time — fished and hunted and golfed. He said he hadn’t thought much of golf until Laura brought it up after they were married.
She had played quite a bit of golf in high school with a boyfriend, and suggested the game to Ed.
“The first time, he said ‘Oh, that’s just a silly old game, you know, chasing a little ball around,’” Laura said, “But he tried it once and he just loved it.”
He loved it so much, he played it up to age 98, when his knees began giving him trouble.
He also has a strong history of handyman work. He built an addition onto their house, did plumbing and wiring and worked on his own cars.
“I still do a little work around the flowers,” he said.
The couple have had plenty of time to enjoy his retirement, doing lots of traveling.
“We had a job house-sitting in the Virgin Islands for about four different years, and we just loved that,” said Laura “We’ve been to Europe three times, and been to Hawaii about six times. We’ve been to Canada and Mexico and Morocco and a lot of places.”
Laura, who has been a member of The Dalles Art Center “for about 50 years,” still paints, and Ed still frames them for her.
“I think maybe that’s what kept him alive, I kept him so busy,” she said. “He’s been very good about that.”
Laura has other theories about his longevity
“He’s been really good about eating vegetables and fruit and salads. I think it means a lot when you eat properly.
“One thing about him is he’s generally contented and happy,” she added. “He doesn’t worry, because he says I do enough that he doesn’t need to.”
But Ed wasn’t so sure.
“I did everything I wanted to do,” he said. “I didn’t concentrate on anything to make me live longer.”
But he’s proud of the fact that he was able to still mow part of the lawn last year.
“I don’t know whether I’ll be able to mow it this spring,” he said with a smile, “I might give it a try”.
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