Peninsula In Passage

Shirley Duke Shirley Duke is a railroad man at heart. After graduating from Holland High School in 1953 he farmed for a few years before joining Railway Express and says - Railway express carried mail, money, utility meter readings and more. All the slower passenger trains had a Railway Express car. I was a messenger and they gave me a gun but I don’t know if it had bullets – I never shot it. I sorted packages and remember tending to crates of fresh fish, prying open the crate and shoveling ice in to keep them cold. When Railway Express began to fail, I went to the Norfolk Western in Suffolk as a station porter and loaded and unloaded mail, cleaned the station. I left the railroad in 1961 to work for the state agriculture department as a weights and measures inspector. But in 1970 I went back to the railroad mostly as a brakeman until 1976 when they put me in as a scale inspector and I traveled. I worked for the railroad for 34 years. In July 1978, the Brotherhood of Railway and Airline Clerks (BRAC) called a company-wide strike against the Norfolk & Western Railway . Other union workers joined the strike and threatened to bring the Norfolk and Western line to a standstill. Duke was among 3000 supervisory employees who kept railroad running. “The strike lasted 82 days and I worked for three months straight – in Roanoke, in Missouri, wherever, as a brakeman and yard engineer,” Duke says. “ It was a thrill to run the locomotives.” In May, 1986, Duke, his wife and two sons were aboard a special Norfolk Southern 14 car excursion train carrying 1000 Norfolk Southern employees, family members and guests. The company’s chairman and chief executive officer, Robert B. Claytor, an experienced engineer, was at the throttle when the train derailed in the Dismal Swamp. The Dukes had a few frightening moments but none of them were among the 218 injured passengers. In 1965 the Dukes settled in a house on King’s Highway in Driver and lived there until 1988 when they built a house in downtown Suffolk. “Shirley was obsessed with trains,” Charlotte Duke says. “After working a 16 hour day he’d go watch the trains switching cars at Blair Brothers in Driver.” Arthur’s Store is one of Duke’s favorite memories of Driver. It was the post office and men would go there after dinner to hang out and talk. Cecil Arthur and Mr. I. T. Arthur were some of the best people God ever put on this earth. In the 1960’s when I’d take my paycheck in there to cash and Mr. Arthur didn’t have enough to cash it, he’d advance me whatever I needed, asking “How much do you need to carry you over the weekend?” One day I went down there to pay my charge bill and as Mr. Arthur rolled up the top of the metal cabinet with the records, I saw an account in my son name – he was 10 years old. I didn’t even know he had an account and told Mr. Arthur I’d pay if off. Mr. Arthur preached me an old fashioned sermon - “Your son gets cold drinks and gas for his lawn mower and when he gets paid for cutting lawns, he pays me. You stay out of his business – he’s a good son growing up.” Mr. Arthur also preached to the child labor enforcement officer who was casing the crossroads on a report that a young boy was working on a milk delivery truck. Mr. Arthur told him he was right – that boy could better use his time in a pool hall or hanging out somewhere getting into trouble. I drove a truck for Arthur’s store when Cecil needed help. I was paid 75 cents an hour to go to Pughsville and Sleepy Hole Road around the Planters Club to get grocery lists from people there and then take groceries back to them and collect the money. Cecil and I. T. often helped out the ones who couldn’t pay or could only pay part of the bill. The only complaint I ever heard about Mr. I. T. Arthur was “He’s too damn honest” and a lot of that’s gone from the world today. “Newcomers won’t see won’t see the Driver that we saw in 1965,” Charlotte Duke says. “If a person got sick back then you carried a dish to their house.”

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