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WHEN I WAS growing up in the Northern Neck, the most important part of my education didn't come from books or classrooms.
It came one high school summer at Potomac Supply Corp. in Kinsale, where I worked pulling thin boards and thick, heavy chunks of just-milled lumber in an operation known as the grading table.
In a shift that started at 6:30 every morning, I'd hustle my way from one pile of lumber to another all day long, pulling boards and thicker sills off the line to plop them into their designated piles.
The work wasn't hard, but to me was so tedious and boring that I immediately developed an appreciation for any education that could prevent an assembly-line future.
Recently, I met an interesting Stafford County resident who had his own educational catharsis from hard summer work--which in his case came on the railroad tracks in New York state.
Dr. Clement J. Robbins III, a gynecologist and obstetrician here for 35 years before retiring in 1995, got in touch following a train accident in Maryland that was caused by heat-buckled rails.
The pleasant, entertaining 74-year-old arrived with several scrapbooks jammed with black-and-white photos of summers working on student crews for the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad in New York, which eventually merged with the Erie.
In summers from 1948 through 1951, after he'd returned from Army service and was going to school at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, Robbins was glad to join other young men in his hometown of Bath, N.Y., on the crews.
"We were tickled to get those jobs," said Robbins of the rail-maintenance jobs. "They paid a whole $1.50 an hour. You couldn't beat that back then."
Meeting at a railway siding and journeying out to wherever the day's job would take them, Robbins and the other young men would shovel gravel, put down new rails, pound spikes or build new facilities or signals.
It was hard work that did the same thing for the young Robbins that it did for me.
"I didn't mind hard work, none of us did," he said. "But it did give you an appreciation for getting an education. You realized that would be tough work when you were older."
Robbins, who has scrapbooks detailing everything from the work crews to girls he dated in those years, said that a key to the railroad work was learning the smart way to do things.
"There was many a day when I'd swing the 9-pound spiking maul all day long," said Robbins. "The trick was to use your wrists to swing it, not your shoulders. Use your shoulders and there was no way you could last all day."
Robbins, who got his medical degree at the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond, said his affection for railroads started with his grandfather.
"He worked for the RF&P Railroad in Richmond for 53 years," said Robbins. "As a boy, he took me once to Washington by train, getting on at Broad Street Station and going all the way into Washington. That stuck with me."
Though he and the many other young men in the New York Finger Lakes region enjoyed the summer railroad jobs, Robbins said they were eventually phased out, replaced by year-round workers who used mechanized equipment.
Robbins has an amazing recall of details from those summers on the rails. Describing the installation of new rails, for instance, he remembers that each rail was roughly 39 feet long.
"Depending on where we were working, it would be from 132 to 182 pounds per yard," he said. "Most of the ones we worked with were about 152 pounds per yard."
Another critical job for the crews, said Robbins, was checking to see that the outside rail on curves was at the appropriate height. Constant pounding by heavily loaded trains would wear down the rails, he noted.
"That height was determined by the angle of the curve," said Robbins. "We were always checking that."
Though Robbins went on to a successful medical career that made him a well-known figure in Fredericksburg and Stafford, he likes remembering the days when swinging that spiking maul was his biggest concern.
"It was a good time for us, and we got a lot of work done for them" he said. "It was an education, in lots of ways."
ROB HEDELT can be reached at The Free Lance-Star, 616 Amelia St., Fredericksburg, Va. 22401; by fax at 373-8455; by phone at 374-5415; or by e-mail at rhedelt@freelancestar.com.