I’m not arguing here in favor of death. But on this day in 1948, my mother’s uncle, Willie Keefe, died at the controls of this engine, the Great Northern’s Empire Builder. (Three days later, my big brother, Bruce Keefe Gregory, was born. He inherited the Keefes’ brown eyes, the only one of the four of us.)


Willie got to see some beautiful country between Minneapolis and Seattle, but a heart attack felled him early on that day’s route. Uncle Willie grew to manhood in Minnesota, but his life began in Clarion, Pennsylvania, which looked like this:


Minnesotans fleeing the Great Sioux Uprising of 1862. It began in Meeker County, where my Irish great-grandparents later homesteaded. The Dakota reservation had been halved in size and the government was dithering in supplying the promised beef and flour allotment. The war began in Meeker County when hungry young men were caught stealing a farmer’s eggs.


William was the eldest of ten children born to my great-grandparents. His younger brother was born in the same kind of place, Pennsylvania oil country, two years later, in 1879. The last of the bunch o’Keefes—there were ten—was my ne’er-do-well Grandfather Edmund, born, like the rest, in Minnesota. Their parents were Famine refugees from County Wicklow, farmed in Ontario, worked in the oilfields (it’s no coincidence that I was born in Taft), homesteaded in Meeker County, the site of the Great Sioux Uprising in 1862, grew oranges in Southern California and then, when they were in their seventies, got divorced.

Go figure.

Uncle Willie’s train was the equivalent, in railroad terms, of the Queen Mary. The guides that came with the trip honored the kind of people Minnesotans killed in great numbers—thirty-eight were hanged in Mankato—in 1862. These are menus from the 1940s, Uncle Willie’s time.


And oh, what a menu it was. Especially the breakfasts. As passengers headed all the way to Seattle (the route actually began in Chicago, so it was a forty-five hour trip that covered over 2,000 miles.) they needed a Breakfast of Substance.

And here’s the dining car, outside and in:



Other than the food, the Builder’s great selling point was the observation car, where one might precede breakfast with a coffee or a Bloody Mary and look out upon the occasional formation of buffalo, mothers with calves or a puzzled Grizzly. It had to be, along with the Coast Starlight (I’m prejudiced), one of the most beautiful routes in America.

And you could buy this observation car at Macy’s.

Maybe it was too many of those Great Northern breakfasts that did my great-uncle in. Every death is a loss, but Willie died that day early in the route as his engine was accelerating. He would have felt the engine’s power throughout his body before his body failed him. In those last few moments, his journey was just beginning. He had to be happy as he drove the Empire Builder westward, toward the sunset at the end of his shift.