Gandydancer's Children: A Railroad Memoir

The late Frank Wendell Call is very much alive in these pages as he relates the fascinating tale of the rich, adventuresome existence he lived as a child in the Nevada desert along the Southern Pacific railroad line. In November 1928, Frank E. Call moved his young family from a comfortable home in Ogden, Utah to a tiny two-room shanty in an isolated railroad station in northeastern Nevada. He went to work as a gandydancer, a track laborer.

Meanwhile, Frank and Johanne Call's six lively children adapted to living alongside the tracks in primitive houses without electricity or indoor plumbing. The colorful narrative by the family's oldest child includes commentaries on railroading and the railroaders' language and describes social conditions and customs existing in tiny-town Nevada in the early twentieth century, from the viewpoint of the children themselves.