(erielack) Newspaper article on EL Memorabilia donations

[Vincent Lee <vincejlee_@_yahoo.com>]

from the Star Ledger yesterday:


Railroad buff's wife is picture of generosity 
Tuesday, March 26, 2002


BY ELEANOR BARRETT 
Star-Ledger Staff 
If one photograph could capture a person's life, for
Bernardsville's Jean Hill, it would be the one taken by her
husband Homer while they were visiting Maine back in the
1940s. 

Jean Hill was leaning back on a shiny black car parked next
to a brick building. Upstaging her small form in the photo
is a mammoth steam engine with "2596" on its nose. 

 
"This was the story of my life. That's what I spent my life
doing," said Hill, 87. 

As the widow of the widely known railroad photographer
Homer Hill, her life is still all about trains. 

Train photographs, train postcards, train bottles, train
hats and anything else that has to do with trains; you name
it, she's got it stored somewhere in the house. 

With Homer gone for two years -- he died at age 85 -- Hill
is on a mission to shed herself of all manner of
steam-engine memorabilia. 

Not willing to just sell or dole the items out to a museum,
Hill's self-appointed task is to find people with
particular interests in railroading. Once located, the
lucky person has a gift coming to them. 

So far she has found a handful of railroad buffs eager to
be on the receiving end of her generosity. 

She gave a man at a local railroading club with an interest
in narrow gauge railroads all the photos and other related
materials she could find on the subject. 

She gave another aficionado reams of information on the
defunct Rockaway Valley Line, which ran from Morristown to
Whitehouse, giving passengers such a bumpy ride it was
nicknamed "Rock-a-bye Baby." 

For her efforts, Hill says she gets her house back. 

"I felt it was hopeless. There was so much left and I feel
like I haven't gotten to anything," Hill said. 

Homer Hill's camera began clicking at the 1933 Chicago
Century of Progress World's Fair. A teenager drawn to the
sound, smoke and grandeur of steam engines, he whipped out
his simple box camera and took his first photos of trains. 

While serving in the U.S. Army from 1941 to 1943, he was
stationed outside Arlington, Va., which afforded him great
chances to spy trains from the Richmond, Fredricksburg and
Potomac line. 

Back home after the war, he settled in with Jean, whom he
had known since childhood, and the two often took off on
train-driven vacations all over the country. When the
couple's son David came along, he, too, became enamored
with trains. 

The elder Hill's interest in the subject eventually led him
to Canada, where he crossed that county by rail five times
on the Canadian National and Canadian Pacific railroads. 

In the process of his travels, he collected more than
11,000 train photographs and 50 volumes of books filled
with negatives. 

Jean Hill says the couple's Hill Press in Bernardsville
afforded her husband the chance to expand his collection
even further by creating postcards made from his photos. 

She has boxes of those, too. 

Homer Hill's name is still easily recognized by those
interested in railroading. "There was no stopping him,"
said Leslie Dean, a volunteer at the National Railway
Historical Society, based in Philadelphia. 

"He is widely known for his photographs. He always chose
good subjects and photographed them well," Dean said. 

Despite his travels far and wide, Hill's favorite rail line
was the Lackawanna, which later became the Erie-Lackawanna,
and is now NJ Transit's Gladstone line. 

And while Jean Hill's life was railroading all those years,
and she still has a police scanner in her home that picks
up the rail channels, she's ready to divest herself of the
accumulated artifacts. 

"I just had in mind that I can't live here forever, so I
figured I would like to find a home for these things," she
said. 



=====
Modelling the Erie Wyoming Divison and the Erie
28th Street Terminal in New York City

Northeast Railfanning Photos-http://leesome1226.tripod.com/

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Movies - coverage of the 74th Academy Awards®
http://movies.yahoo.com/

------------------------------