ROUSES_SeptOct2019_Magazine

ILLUSTRATION PLACEHOLDER

Tulane team and its fans bound for “the most important game of the season” against Mizzou. For $30.87, or roughly $450 in 2019 dollars, passengers rode 24 hours to St. Louis, where they spent the night aboard their Pullman sleeper cars and then headed further yet on Saturday morning to Columbia, then spent all day in the stadium. After the game, the Special pulled out at 7pm and took close to 30 hours to return home by Sunday night. More bearable in duration was the Tulane Special for the Ole Miss game in 1951, which left New Orleans late on Friday night and arrived in Oxford at 8:30 the next morning. The train returned to the city, traveling through the night after the game on Saturday for an early 7am arrival, its passengers consoled after Tulane’s 25-6 loss that year by a large supply of hot coffee (and perhaps in some critical cases, a Bromo Seltzer). Without question, those travelers who forked over $42 for the Pullman sleeper car when buying their tickets down at the D.H. Holmes travel department enjoyed more comfort than those who saved $10 by riding coach, but all passen- gers received three meals a day in the diner car in addition to a ticket to the game. Visitors to Oxford today can retrace the steps of fans who arrived by train because the old railroad depot, once served by Illinois Central, has been preserved by the university as an attractive special events space. Alcohol played such a critical role on Football Specials that one could be fooled into thinking that its service on these longer routes was a straightforward matter. Not so across the Southeast, where a patchwork of liquor laws ranging from the arcane to the arbitrary pivoted upon the crucial distinction of the train having crossed state lines. In Alabama, passengers might have enjoyed the full cocktail menu except on Sundays, or before 6pm on Election Day, or between 2am and 8am, but once the train passed into freewheeling Florida, restrictions against alcohol sales melted away — save for on Sunday, but only when the train happened to be in the station. Not surprisingly, Louisiana stood as a model of

lost to Vic Schiro by a mere 256 votes. The irony was that Fitzmorris had been a railroad executive before entering politics. Unlike the relatively short hop between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, the Football Specials that carried teams and their fans to the stadiums of distant opponents took on characteristics of an odyssey not suited to the meek, and highlight the stark differences — between that era and our own—of comparatively inexpensive and convenient air travel. In 1926, a Missouri Pacific Special left its Annunciation Street depot in New Orleans at lunchtime on a Thursday with the

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