Robert B. Simpson: The happy chef

The time around Christmas is usually rich with memories, and trains are among the things I remember each year. Not the kind of trains well-to-do kids used to find under the Christmas tree, but the kind you ride. While my normal mode of travel to and from college was hitch-hiking, at Christmas I stayed home as long as possible and took the more certain method of last-minute travel back to school by train. Then, as now, I loved journeying by train.

This year, my daughter and her husband surprised their two boys on the Monday before Christmas with a train trip from Ann Arbor to Chicago for a couple of days of sightseeing. When she and I chatted by phone about the adventure, and about rail trips in general, we discussed the famous railway train, the Southern Crescent. Although I remember the train well, having met it when relatives rode it into Washington for visits, I never actually boarded that particular train. But when my daughter and her brother were small children, my wife took the two of them for a visit back to Georgia, traveling both ways on the Southern Crescent. I remained in Washington, so the trip made little impact on me, except that when they returned, I got vivid descriptions of the food in the dining car. The chef, an African-American gentleman named Lewis Price, had made quite an impression. He was cheerful, congenial, helpful, and an excellent cook. My wife loved his French toast and begged him for the recipe. Begged him going south and begged him again coming north.

After my daughter and I reminisced about the Southern Crescent and the chef, I searched through books of recipes to see if my late wife had been successful and had hidden a French toast recipe between the pages. I found newspaper items, cooking notes, and handwritten recipes of all sorts, but no sign of Lewis Price's instructions for the best French toast ever. Apparently the man resisted all efforts to pry information from him, being made of sterner stuff than I.

Lewis Price had spent many years serving fine food on the Crescent. At one time, he had left that work and been the chef for a state governor, but he tired of the peculiar requirements of that work and returned to the railroad. His son said that his father, with only an eighth-grade education, was limited in prospects, but that he had worked hard at what he could do best. Even though it meant a lot of time away from home, he supported his family well. And with a happy, outgoing personality, made countless friends among the riders of the Southern Crescent.

One was the late Lewis Grizzard, who got to know Mr. Price well during trips to Washington and wrote about him. Others spread knowledge of the famously friendly chef by word of mouth, extolling his cooking and his happy persona. Southern capitalized on his popularity by picturing him in an advertisement for their railroad's hospitality.

On a Sunday in December 1978, not long after my wife and children made their round trip to Georgia on the Crescent, the train was again bound for Washington. Lewis Price and the dining car crew were preparing breakfast. At 5;30 a.m., the Crescent, roaring down a grade near Elma, Virginia, entered a curve at a high rate of speed and left the track. In a disaster eerily reminiscent of the "wreck of old 97," the musically famous crash of another Southern Railway train seventy-five years earlier, the Crescent's three engines and seven of its cars piled into a ravine. Some sixty persons were injured, including a cook from Atlanta who was pinned under a stove for eleven hours and lost a limb. One of the 6 killed was Lewis Price.

Along with the memories that arise at Christmas, there are always regrets. Two of the many I have come to mind: I regret that I never rode the Southern Crescent and that I never met Lewis Price.

Robert B. Simpson, a 28-year Infantry veteran who retired as a colonel at Fort Benning, is the author of "Through the Dark Waters: Searching for Hope and Courage."

This story was originally published January 2, 2016 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Robert B. Simpson: The happy chef ."