AGS Grandparents at Work | Saloon Keeper, Switch board operator, Switch-engine engineer | Duplicate Bridge Teacher

by AGS member Rosemary McNerney Winkler

The Saloon Owner

Thomas McNerney, my paternal grandfather, is shown standing in front of his saloon in Kansas City, Missouri, that he called a “Workingman’s Club.” He is in the center in all white. The porter is the Black man in a white apron. A bar porter stocks food and beverages for the bar of a restaurant or tavern and the responsibilities include changing out beer keg taps, restocking alcoholic bottles, and maintaining inventory. The others are patrons. His wife, my grandmother Annie, declared that it is “no place for a woman,” but the ladies knew to knock on the back door and place orders with the porter to fill their buckets with wine or beer. Thomas shut down the Club when prohibition started in 1919. Grandmother Annie Long, worked for the telephone company as a switchboard operator until she married Thomas in 1909. She also worked for her sister as a milliner, tailor and seamstress.

The Switch-Engine Engineer

John Tischhauser, my maternal grandfather, is sitting in a locomotive in the railyards in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His job with the Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe Railway was switch-engine engineer. His father-in-law, also an engineer, got him the job as one had to be sponsored for those coveted jobs. He worked for AT&SF from 1916 until his retirement in about 1960. He was also a charter member of the Albuquerque Civic Symphony when it opened in 1932.

His wife, Pansy Woodward Tischhauser, taught Duplicate Bridge for many years. A Bridge team consists of four players. They are split into two pairs, and one pair sits North-South on one table while the other sits East-West on a second. A second team takes the opposing slots, and each table plays the exact same boards. [In other words, every table at the Bridge event plays the same hand. Whichever team scores highest wins.] My grandmother traveled all over the country competing in Bridge tournaments with her friend Felice Hilton Brown, sister of Conrad Hilton. They rode free on AT&SF trains and enjoyed free Hilton hotel rooms! A person who won enough times became a Life Master which Pansy did. She was fond of saying, “The worst day playing Bridge is better than the best day cleaning house.”

The Cooper

Dennis Long, my paternal great grandfather, is seated on the far right in this photograph of the Kansas City Cooper Union, October 8, 1909. Two of his sons are also in the picture, Dennis sitting next to his father, and Francis in the white T-shirt with a pipe in his mouth. They were all coopers in the huge, bustling Missouri River waterway wharf in Kansas City and made every type of barrel – for everything from nails to whiskey. They are the father and brothers of Anne Long McNerney.

Want to share stories and photos of your grandparents at work? We would love to hear from you! Email us at info@abqgen.org. Your responses may be edited for clarity and length and featured in a future blog post.

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