LIFE ON THE TRACKS

“Yard Bull” author Roger Dowling and wife Maureen O’Kane sit with Dowling’s book. “Maureen’s the one that encouraged me to write the book,” Dowling said.

Sequim man writes memoir

by AVANI NADKARNI
Staff writer

To Sequim resident Maureen O’Kane, her husband’s life, both before she met him and since, read like a novel: Vietnam War veteran and recovering alcoholic moved cross-country from Lincoln, Neb., to Seattle, then Spokane, to work as a railroad detective.

“Your job is so different from others,” she would tell her husband, Roger Dowling. “You need to write down the memories.”

After retiring in 2000, Dowling finally took her advice and sat down with a pen and paper. Seven years, two editors and five rewrites later, the result is “Yard Bull,” a 350-page memoir written under the pen name Dean O’Shea that follows Dowling on railroad tracks from the Midwest to the Northwest.

“I had no idea what I’d be undertaking (writing the book),” Dowling said, shaking his head. “It was an adventure in itself.”

Dowling knows a thing or two about adventures.

Many people are not aware, he said, that the railroad system has its own state commissioned police officers. In Lincoln, Seattle and Spokane, Dowling spent his nights on the tracks, sometimes going undercover as a transient, to root out crimes in the seediest parts of town.

“You’d be surprised what goes on in there,” Dowling said. “There are a lot of murders, thefts. These are kind of society’s throwaways.”

As a railroad detective, Dowling said he came across “hobos, gangs on trains, transients, prostitutes” but the memory that sticks out most clearly in his mind is a man he nicknamed “Wolf Man.”

“We got a call of someone howling in the woods near the tracks,” he said. “It turned out to be a guy who thought he was a wolf, yipping and barking and stealing things.”

Thanks to television and movies, people tend to romanticize illegal train travel, said Dowling, but the reality is often vastly different.

“On TV you see people hopping freights, seeing the countryside go by,” he said of stowaways. “(In reality) you’ll probably see a bunch of drunks and we can’t always be out there, so they’re the law.”

Although Dowling says he simply found himself in the field, trains are in his blood. Both his father and grandfather made their living as conductors on steam engines, and Dowling remembers his father sneaking him onto a train when he was young.

“My dad would say, ‘Watch out for the special agents, don’t let them find you,’” he said. “We never thought that could be me one day!”

While much of the story is action-packed, O’Kane said she found a special aspect to it that women could relate to.
“This is a lot about friendship, too,” she said of the relationship between Dowling and his detective partner Henry. “Roger and Henry didn’t get along at first, and now they still keep in touch. Henry even wrote the afterword for the book.”

For Dowling, who admits he more often than not played hooky from his high school English class, said finishing the memoir was difficult but infinitely rewarding.

“It’s kind of scary to put my life out there,” he said. “You find out more about yourself than you’d ever know.”
Another plus of the book for Dowling is that the memories of a generation will be permanently preserved.

“There used to be 70 railroad detectives in Seattle and now there are three,” he said. “It’s kind of representing a generation of railroad police that are retired now.”

As for the roles trains play in his life now, Dowling said he was born into a railroad family and he cannot escape even if he tries.

“When I left I thought I didn’t want to ever see a train again,” laughed Dowling, who is working on a sequel. “But now when I go back, I somehow find myself next to the tracks.”


To receive a copy of Roger Dowling’s book “Yard Bull,” written under pen name Dean O’Shea, call 582-9189 or visit www.TheYardBull.com. People can also send check or money order to On The Mark at P.O. Box 4147 in Sequim.