My grandfather, a QA&P lineman

This has very little to do with railroading, but it is about the Frisco, or at least a QA&P employee. My maternal grandfather--James Martin McGuire-- was a career lineman on the Frisco. Most of his time with the Frisco was as a lineman on the QA&P based in Quanah. He, his wife and their children (including my mother) lived north of Quanah in a rented farmhouse just west of highway 6 and a little south of the Red River. The Frisco line from Oklahoma to Quanah paralleled highway 6 and crossed the Red River into Texas a few miles north of Quanah.

The railroad allowed him to build a little motorcar shed adjacent to the right of way near their rented farmhouse. He walked to the motorcar shed every morning, got on his motorcar, and headed into work.

Apparently one of his pastimes was hunting rattlesnakes. NOTE: many folks who live in the country call Diamondback Rattlesnakes Coontail Rattlers due the stripes on their tail just before the rattles. Two of these scans were from articles in the Wichita Falls newspaper in 1952 about his snake hunting hobby.

The third scan is a humorous poem Grandad used to quote about railroad management. He saw it on the wall in a restaurant in Oklahoma. He wasn't overly impressed with the directors and managers of the QA&P...

While looking through keepsakes this evening, my wife stumbled across these things, so here they are.

 

Don't you wonder if they knew each other?? By the way, Grandad was over 6 feet tall. The tail of that snake doesn't look to be a foot from the ground. It may be longer than 5' 2".