In the 1990s, as a docent at the B&O Railroad Museum, Hughes soaked up everything he could on the man who would become his hero.
Largely thanks to Randolph - a bronze statue of whom flanks the Starbucks at Union Station - Hughes' duties were never as onerous as he'd feared or as grueling as his forebears'. By the time he came along in the 1970s, working hours were reasonable, the hourly wage was about $7, and passengers, prompted by the name tags porters now wore, called him "Mr. Hughes."
Technically, he was never a Pullman porter. The Pullman Co. stopped leasing sleepers in 1968. Hughes worked similar cars on the Southern Crescent, the last independently owned passenger train in the United States, as it rolled between Washington and Atlanta and - when time allowed - New York and New Orleans.
"I showered my passengers with love, attention and service," he says wistfully. "As a porter, you were confidant, waiter, entertainer, babysitter, information desk. If you had a family on the car, you'd sing to the kids or tell jokes. You'd tell the grown-ups history, or share what you knew about places we stopped, or just talk if you had a moment. At the end of the line, you'd put your hand out. I have to say, I usually did very well."
There were remnants of the bad old days. Each night, passengers left shoes outside their rooms to be shined - a chore he grew to accept, in part because of the tricks shared by his father, who died in 1984. If a pair wasn't badly scuffed, for instance, he could often get his tip by merely turning the shoes around. But once in a while, a wiseacre left him a pair of mud-caked clodhoppers.
"Even then, I did my best," says Hughes, who never held another railroad job and now works in information technology at the Library of Congress. "I was a sleeping-car porter. They looked better when I was done with them, I'll tell you that."
Few porters left
There aren't many of the old porters left. Two years ago, Amtrak set out to track down as many as they could up and down the Eastern seaboard. They came up with Hughes; Bill Costen, 61, of Hartford, Conn.; and Thomas Dunn, 81, of Washington, a former dining-car cook. Amtrak honored the trio with crystal figurines Monday.
When Tye wrote his book in 2004, he found and interviewed 40 ex-Pullman porters. Since then, more than half have passed away. "An era is rapidly coming to an end," he says.
