Taking the Chief to Los Angeles
 

Jersey Central Railroad Station, Jersey City, New Jersey, 9:55 Am. on Friday, the 26th of August 1947:
My family and I had arrived at the station on the Leigh Valley's last morning commuter at 8:59 Am., riding from South Plainfield. I'm Josef von Franz, nineteen years old, graduated Summa cum Laude from Bound Brook High School and an All State Football Running Back. Slightly taller than six feet and three inches, two hundred and twenty pounds, a police blotter might have described me as crew cut, blond and blue. I'd busted my cherry with Kathy Gifford, and hers too, back in April, and since then with two cheer squad girls on the bus to away games, but I wasn't what you'd qualify as Casanova, I just knew how the parts fit together.

The five of us, Mom, Dad, my seventeen and eighteen year old sisters and I were down from our farm in Neshanic Station so I could catch the Santa Fe Super Chief connected Pullman on the Baltimore