March 11, 2021
Volume 51 - No. 10
By Sam Lowe
Clarice Klein, the receptionist at The Jamestown Sun, a daily newspaper in North Dakota that gave me my first job, buzzed my desk to tell me I had a phone call. I let her repeat the message twice before responding because her voice over the intercom had the quality of whipped cream – silky, smooth, and never quite enough.
“Your father's on the phone,” she said. Then, as if to allay any suspicion that I might consider her snoopy, she added, “At least, it sounds like him.” She offered no explanation of why she knew my father's voice on the telephone, and I didn't care. As long as she told me with that vocal display of sensuality.
Pushing aside the recurring daydream I normally associated with Clarice and her ability to get my full attention merely by whispering into the intercom, I picked up the phone. It was my dad, calling long distance from Fargo. He began with an apology because it was a collect call, but quickly noted that my employer could afford it, then justified that supposition with a brief analysis of a newspaper publisher's income versus that of a railroad man forced to walk miles in the cold of winter checking flatbeds and cattle cars for hot boxes. Seconds later, I became aware that he had something more important to convey because he discontinued his usual account of life and all its unfairnesses before getting to the part about how every step he took was uphill in three feet of snow and he had to lug a four-volt lantern from one end of a 135-car freight train to the other while wearing itchy woolen underwear, the defense he always used when any of his children asked for a raise in allowance.
So his version of why the world lacked equality was superseded by the real reason for his call, and his voice took on an edge of mystery as he confided, “Cassius Clay is on the three-seventeen,” one of the passenger trains that stopped in Jamestown on a regular basis. He said it in a tone unusual for him because he was, most of all, a hardworking railroad man who rarely got excited unless the Minnesota Twins were playing in the World Series, an occurrence so rare that only defeating his wife in cribbage came close to equaling it.
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“It'll be pulling into town in about a half-hour,” he added. “Just thought the editor of the Jamestown Sun should know about it.” He made no effort to conceal his pride at being the father of the editor of the paper. Then, rather than burden the accounting department with further expense, he ended the call with, “It's up to you now, my boy. You're the editor.” I hung up and gave some momentary consideration of disrupting the newsroom with juvenile shouts and exclamations similar to “I know
something you don't!” The revelation that Cassius Clay was going to be in Jamestown was front page news. To my knowledge, nobody that famous had ever stopped at the local station before. Unless Wallace Beery counted and those who reported his presence weren't certain it was him because they had only seen him, or somebody that looked like him, looking out the window of the dining car as the train was pulling out of town. But there wasn't time for jubilation. The wall clock said it was 2:34 in the afternoon so the 3:17 was
already passing through Valley City, only about 40 minutes away. It would take ten minutes to walk from the office to the depot, probably another five minutes to locate Cassius Clay because my dad didn't know for sure which car he was riding in, and, despite the fact that this was front page news, the train was only going to stop in Jamestown for twelve minutes.
Although I attempted to conceal my inner excitement over the prospect of meeting the heavyweight boxing champion of the world, Wayne Deery, one of our
Muhammad Ali . . the 3:17 . . and Me . . . See Page 2