This month in history (59 years ago)
Russell Hurst served in WWII and then came home to literally marry the girl next door and raise a family. In the summer, he was a general laborer for the masons in the university’s Plant Operations. Then when the heating season returned each fall, he would don his engineer’s cap and ran the train as needed, hauling coal to the Central Power Plant. “As soon as my dad lifted me up onto the well-worn leather engineer’s seat and gave me permission to pull the throttle that made the massive engine lurch forward down the tracks, broad smiles broke out on our faces,” Robert Hurst recalled.
— From the new Stories of the Staff website. It celebrates the history and triumphs of staff, in preparation for the U-M bicentennial in 2017.
