Harlan Banks and the Tullahoma Whistle Stop

By R. W. Alexander

Harlan Banks is a hero. He and his dad drive to Tullahoma, Tennessee on a snowy Sunday afternoon in a chopped down 1935 Ford. Before they get to their destination they witness a catastrophic train wreck. Besides the dead, two German spies are alive, whose mission is to infect a town with a stolen chemical virus. Stopping it, that's up to Harlan Banks.
Harlan and a blonde girl who spies are trying kidnap or if that is not an option, kill her. She’s the daughter of the US Army’s Chemicals Weapons Facility. The spies are planning to kill her if her father won’t turn over the keys to the lab. First they have to catch her. She’s with Harlan. After Harlan is shot and the girl escapes, the two set out to stop the spies before they can do any harm.

• Language: English
• Publisher: R. W. Alexander
• Release date: Aug 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463464489

R. W. Alexander

Bob Alexander, writing under the pen name of R. W. Alexander is a true son of the south. Raised in Alabama, he has traveled throughout the country picking up tidbits of this and that where ever he goes. His books featuring Harlan Banks are the results of having of hours of listening to stories of the Great Depression and letting his imagination run wild.

Book preview

Winter isn’t kind to train wreck survivors, if there are any. The great, black locomotive powered by the giant steam engine, rumbled through the black Tennessee night. A million stars and a full moon brightened the dark woods on each side of the track, steel wheels occasionally sparking off mineral deposits on quarry rock laid bare by workers building the railroad added to the scene. Decades had passed since the first spike was driven in the wooden ties that held the steel track together as it snaked through the valley.

Old Smoky, blew steam and spewed smoke high into the night air. These clouds were shredded by howling winds born in a snowstorm in the wilderness of Upper Canada. The mighty steam engine trembled just a little, causing the cars it was pulling to react in the same manner. The engineer pulled the lever that let out a long, lonesome wailing whistle, cautioning anyone who might be out and about on such a cold January night.

Just east of Tullahoma, Tennessee there was the first indication that something was amiss. Rounding the curve that brought the fully loaded locomotive and its train of cars filled with coal, iron ore and lumber through the whistle stop station in that town, the engineer noticed an unusual tremble somewhere in the middle of the 75 cars he was pulling. He slowed down and decided to walk the train, when they stopped, railroad talk for inspecting each coupling and each set of wheels for anything that looked suspicious. He knew to be wary in Southern Tennessee. Randy Jenson, who the youngsters called the old man, because he had ridden this section of the rail for the B&N railroad for the past 34 years. He’d been riding the rails since he was 15 years old. This had been his life. He knew where the bumps and uneven sections of steel were in each mile of track and where minor changes in grades could catch an unfocused throttle unawares.

He also knew the locations of colored lanterns that marked signals along the steel rails warning others of approaching train traffic, but they had those mostly in northern climes. A flashing red light close to town would have been a good thing to light the cold January night. At least any pedestrians that might be out on such a miserable night would know not to try and cross the tracks with #128 barreling down toward the town.

The train was slowing almost to a stop as it rounded the curve just west of Tullahoma. Jensen, the engineer of many years, jumped onto the crushed rock that supported the rails and began refilling the water tank. While the fireman completed the filling of the tank, the engineer walked the distance of the paused train, finding nothing that pushed his alarm buttons. He had done this a thousand times over the years.

When he was finished with that chore, he joined the fireman who had finished filling the water tank, pulled the cord that lifted the door to the coal chute and the hard coal tumbled down the metal trough into the bin that held the fuel, which heated the water, which made the steam that turned the wheels.

The locomotive, now refueled, began chugging and puffing, sending blasts of steam cascading in front of the wheels and the undercarriage of the engine. It gathered speed as it left the whistle stop and began slowly rolling through the dark countryside. Soon it would be steaming at an unheard of speed of 60 miles per hour. This was just another night in the engine cabin for the engineer who had ridden these rails hundreds of times, until the train slid off the tracks.

Tonight, Randy Jensen and his knowledge of the land and any little rise or fall in the elevation led him to adjust the speed as he squinted into the ebony night. Until now he hadn’t seen anything which would make him concern, but just in case, he pushed the chrome handle of the speed control downward to slow the speed of the train. It was just as well, because the 90° curve at Bean Creek was just a mile away and they had to be much slower.

As train wrecks go, it was a fairly quiet derailment for they weren’t going nearly as fast as they had been just a few moments ago; about 25 miles per hour. In fact the black engine simply slid off the tracks and turned on its side, carrying the next 12 cars with it.

The north side wheels of the black locomotive, hit a strategically placed section of a three foot steel rail laid on the tracks. That piece of rail had been cut off a much longer section of track by a blowtorch. The right front wheel of the engine struck the scrap of steel. While the incident itself was almost gentle, the resulting sounds were violent and enormous in proportion.

Chapter 1

"You want to go and work with me? Henry Banks exclaimed in a voice that was as rugged as his appearance. I don’t think you can hold your own with the work I do. You must think you’re a man?

Harlan Banks replied with only a small amount of sarcasm, It can’t be any harder than the work I do at home.

Don’t smart off to me. I can still whip you anytime I want, college boy.

I’m not smarting off to you, but I can keep up with you any day of the week, Harlan said in a calm but firm voice, Besides, You’ll be tired by the time we get to Tullahoma and you’ll be screaming for my help."

Harlan was in an unusual situation. He was definitely not in college---yet. His father, Henry Banks, didn’t want him to go to school because his leaving would put an undue burden on his brother and ma. Pa was using the same thinking that his Pa used on him. Back then though, there was no money to pay for school and no access to funds for such a frivolous pursuit. Henry thought that would be the end of that discussion. He had laid down the law and that was all there was to it!

But Harlan had a plan to pay for his own college tuition. He would work hard for neighbors who didn’t want to bother with chores around the house and save a little pocket money. The big bucks were going to come from the U.S. Government in the form of the GI bill. When he reached 18 he would simply join the army. He would stay in the army until his enlistment ran out, then apply to use the Bill for college. It was a great plan until World War II got in the way.

Now, he was driving the old 1924 Ford mail truck that he had found rusting in front of Mrs. Dorothy Petty’s barn. Mr. Petty died five years ago and since his widow couldn’t drive and she had no one to help her with transportation issues, she sold it to Pa for scrap metal. Harlan had other ideas. He rebuilt it from what he had learned in shop classes at the high school, only he turned the mail truck into a real truck.

Ordinarily, he would have been in school, but today and for the next two weeks he had a job working with his father. He needed to make money for his Ma and younger brother Kenneth. His Pa had casually mentioned there was a lot of building going on in Tullahoma, Tennessee. Contractors were building houses for families who would be working at the new air base that was coming into town. They needed all the help they could get.

Pa hadn’t thought at all about Harlan wanting to work with him. While Henry Banks was talking about Tennessee, Harlan was putting together a plan to get out of school for a couple of weeks; earn some much-needed money.

The Banks family were like millions of households across the country. The long and devastating depression that had gripped the nation since 1934 was just now relaxing its hold on its victims, which was pretty much everyone. That depression still had his parents and many others still locked in its crushing grasp.

Harlan usually had a plan for everything. He was simply going to ask his teachers if he could take time off from his classes in high school to work in Tennessee for two weeks. The instructors were sympathetic to Harlan’s plight. If he wasn’t granted the time off, it would put a hardship on the family and it might even hurt Henry’s chances of keeping his job. One of Henry’s duties was to find people who wanted to work, which wasn’t hard in post-depression America.

Henry Banks was a subcontractor for the general contractor, Mr. Louis Baker who had the responsibility of overseeing more than 200 buildings for the U.S. Government. The United States Air Force expected him to hire workers in all phases of building; laborers, carpenters, bricklayers and roofers to carry out the contract with the government successfully. The government wanted 100 houses built by the time the air force base was completed near Tullahoma.

Henry had worked a little, on and off during the depression. Jobs were very hard to find. He began the search with a brand new pair of ankle high boots, searching for any kind of work in Alabama, Tennessee, and Kentucky. He didn’t even try for a job in Mississippi. Those people were worse off than he was.

Henry did find an off and on job in Illinois, as a carpenter who built houses for a contractor outside Chicago. Harlan’s father employment rested on his boss having enough money to buy building materials and pay Henry’s salary. The carpenter Henry worked for sometimes had to wait a month to get his money from the owner of the construction business.

After the house Henry was working on, doing everything from driving nails, to hanging plasterboard and painting, the work would stop and Henry would be out of a job. After that house sold and it was time to build another one, the carpenter would telephone the general store near where Henry lived to tell him to make his way to Illinois. It was time to go to work.

This was definitely not the best way to earn a living, but it was the only way. There was no employment anywhere in the south, so a body had to go north. If you didn’t like the arrangement, there was always someone to take your place.

Chapter 2

Harlan Banks was lean and lanky, not skinny as his friend Danny Jenkins called him. He’d just turned 16 years old and was proud of the fact that he could carry as much horse feed from the lean-to as most men. He could tote those fifty-pound bags, one on each shoulder, to the mule in the pasture twice a day. If truth be told that last run with the reed bags wore him out. He often was as tired as if he had plowed a 10-acre field with Ole Joe, the mule.

He was lanky and thin now, but he would probably get heavier and grow past the height of his father which was five feet ten inches tall. His left leg was a little shorter than the right because of the horrific fall he took when the big flat rock he was sitting on, fell through the floor of a cave. He had landed at the bottom of a gigantic cavern near Owens Cross Roads in northern Alabama.

He didn’t like to even think about it because the man, an outlaw, who had helped Harlan the most, was still at the bottom of that cave. He wasn’t alive because there were hundreds of tons of rock that fell on the desperado and become a burial vault for the man.

In the Banks family, eyes the color of a cloudy December day were common in the men. Harlan thought his eyes were weird because his friend Danny said that they were the color of tobacco spit with a gold ring around the irises. Danny thought that Harlan’s hazel eyes looked like they were going to be brown, but they ran out of color before that happened.

Tonight he had on his high-top boots which came up to his ankles. He only wore them when it was cold. He had been wearing them since November and they didn’t have a scratch anywhere on them. It would make Pa mad if anything made them look less than new when Harlan outgrew them. At that time his brother Kenneth would be the proud owner of a slightly used pair of Montgomery-Ward tan ankle boots.

Harlan’s wheat straw hair had grown to just a little over his collar. It was out of fashion in a time when boys had their hair cut short. But it didn’t matter because there were no fashion police at Hazel Green High School. As it was, all the students had to make do with what was available at home. The girls cut their own hair but the boys had to wait a couple of months until their mother whipped out the barbering equipment, which included hand operated hair clippers and cut the boy’s hair herself. Evidently, boys are afraid of barber scissors.

Harlan and Henry Banks had driven from their home near Hazel Green, Alabama. They lived on the upper reaches of Alabama, on Butter and Egg Road. From the State Line Road, they simply drove until they came to the Huntsville Road. If you turned right you would go all the way south, until you reached Huntsville, Alabama. Turn left and you would go to Fayetteville, Tennessee. All in all, they were about 5o miles from Tullahoma, Tennessee.

They passed through Winchester, Tennessee and were in the outskirts of Tullahoma when Harlan saw a bright light coming toward them. The B&N railroad tracks from Louisville to Nashville were running parallel to the road where Henry and Harlan were driving. They were riding on State highway 15, just out of Fayetteville. It would soon turn into Highway 50 going into Tullahoma and the construction for the new air force base that would be in operation in a couple of years. If the United States could stay out of the war in Europe, they might not need the new air base anyway.

He watched where the tracks were supposed to be but he really couldn’t see because the night was as black as the inside of a peach pit. A peach would certainly taste good now he thought. He’d had his fill of cornbread and butterbeans back at his home before they’d left the house, but he was hungry again just like all teenaged boys. He forgot about being hungry when he saw something strange.

Henry was driving east and the piercing beam of light was