Today’s question:
My father used to tell us he worked summers as a gandy dancer on the railroad. Do you know where that phrase comes from?
Sorry, no, I can’t say for sure. I should get points for admitting that I’m not sure, don’t you think?
Geez, I’ve been serving up a lot of lame answers lately. I think I’m going to take some time off soon. Every three or four months or so I find that the well has just run dry and that I need to take a break.
Plus, my two sweet patooties are coming home for Christmas, so I should try to free up some time to spend with them. Which really means I probably will need to free up some time to spend taking most of the lame-o presents I got them back to the returns counter.
Anyway, do you remember that whole Arizona colloquium contest thing? We’ll deal with it later. I am still pondering the entries.
In the meantime, we’ll take up this gandy dancer thing.
Don’t you wish you had asked your father about this? I’m not being snarky here. There are lots of things I wish I’d asked my father about before he died.
Like why in the world he always thought that the rest of us would know what a “rod” was. He was always saying something like, “Oh, take it over there about a rod or so.”
Of course now, thanks to the miracles of modern science, we know that a rod means 16.5 feet, but back then, what were we to think? We just mostly took whatever it was we were carrying at his behest off in the general direction in which he was waving and hoped we got it somewhere near whatever a rod was.
But that’s neither here nor there.
A gandy dancer is a maintenance worker on a railway.
One thing I read said that the name came from the Gandy Manufacturing Co. in Chicago that made tools for railroad workers.
Most of the other stuff I read said that was hooey, and there never was such a company, but that a gandy, origin unknown, was a sort of crowbar tool that workers used to lever the rails into a level position. And as they moved around and levered and leveled and all, they were said to be dancing, in a way.
So, I think I got within a rod or so of that answer.
Reach Thompson at clay.thompson@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-8612.
*Clay Thompson writes for The Arizona Republic. You can read his column by going to www.azcentral.com
