I’m getting ahead of my story. In fact we need to go back a few years. In 1887 the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway began to build a 350-mile line connecting Chicago to Kansas City and on to the west coast. Railroad planners created towns along the new line at regular intervals so the locomotives could take on water, fuel and a crew change.

Edwin’s dad had worked for the Santa Fe for nearly 40 years, most of that time as an engineer running trains between Fort Madison, Iowa and Kansas City.

Marceline, Missouri was one of those towns, incorporated in 1888 and named headquarters for the Santa Fe’s Missouri Division. Today Marceline’s claim to fame is as the boyhood home of Walt Disney, and they say that Disneyland’s Main Street USA was modeled after his boyhood memories. But in 1914 Marceline was a Santa Fe town, and Edwin Dudley was a 24-year-old dispatcher there with the railroad. Dudley had worked for the Santa Fe since his early teens, becoming an expert telegraph operator while still in high school. To become a dispatcher had been his goal, and he wished to follow in his dad’s footsteps; his dad had worked for the Santa Fe for nearly 40 years, most of that time as an engineer running trains between Fort Madison, Iowa and Kansas City.

In March 1915 Dudley moved to La Junta, Colorado, beginning as dispatcher and in July being promoted to Chief Night Dispatcher.

There was a young lady in La Junta, just eight months Dudley’s junior, who had moved with her family there around 1907, to take advantage of the climate, which was much drier than her childhood home in Greene County, Pennsylvania. Cecil Lantz had married a certain Leon Briggs in 1909 at age 19, and had a young son, Donald, two years old in 1915. In September of that year, citing non-support, she filed for divorce from Briggs. At a July 4 barbecue in 1916, she would meet Edwin Dudley and become his “pal,” and eventually my grandmother.