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While Gilbert was shoveling coal in the mid-1920s, U.S. railroads began introducing the first diesel locomotives. Powered by an internal combustion engine, the diesels needed no firebox, no pile of coal—and no fireman. The diesels came onto U.S. railway tracks very gradually, and as late as 1937 fewer than 1% of the nation's locomotives were diesels. In that year the Brotherhood of Firemen foresightedly negotiated a contract with major railroads calling for two-man train crews. Fire or no fire, there was to be a fireman aboard.
Ed Gilbert himself never featherbedded aboard a diesel. Before the Alton line switched from steam locomotives, Gilbert laid down his shovel and moved into a new career as a fulltime union official. Elected president of Lodge 707 in 1931, he moved on to the Brotherhood's headquarters in Cleveland in 1942 as a clerk, promptly started a climb up the ladder of union bureaucracy by wrestling with a 90-day crash course in shorthand so that he could be come a stenographer (he still uses shorthand to take voluminous verbatim notes at meetings). Blessed with an adhesive memory for names and faces, he firstnamed countless delegates at Brotherhood conventions over the years, and in 1953 he first-named his way into the presidency of the Brotherhood.
Spirit of '73. As president of the Firemen, Gilbert has been simply a preserver of past union gains. In a speech to a Brotherhood convention two weeks ago, he characteristically called upon the members to confront the crisis of '63 with the "spirit of '73." He meant not 1973 but 1873.
That was the year the Brotherhood was founded. An Erie Railroad fireman was killed in a train wreck, and a railroading friend named Joshua Leach set about taking up a collection for the widow and the children. Leach was so distressed about the plight of the widow, left without funds, that he decided to form a firemen's life insurance association. The eleven original members called themselves Deer Park Lodge No. 1, took oaths and made up secret passwords. From that small beginning grew the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen (engineman is an old-fashioned word for fireman).
In 1877, members of the young union took part in the U.S.'s first nationwide strike, which erupted when depression-hit railroads imposed wage cuts. Railroad workers struck in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Reading, Louisville, Chicago. Strikers destroyed locomotives, fought with antistrike citizens, finally gave up after battling state and federal troops. Chastened by bloodshed and defeat, the Firemen two years later adopted a resolution declaring that the union would "ignore strikes and hereafter settle our grievances with our employers by arbitration."