On hot afternoons in the summertime—this was in the middle-to-late 1930's—I sat in the bleachers at College Park in Charleston and when the baseball game was not too interesting I watched for the Boll Weevil at the Seaboard Air Line railway station. It was called the Boll Weevil because when the little gas-electric locomotive-coach was placed in service in the early 1920's the black folk of the South Carolina sea-islands through which the little train passed fancied its resemblance to the bug which had moved northward and then eastward from Mexico to devastate the cotton crops.

The little Seaboard gas-electric coach, of course, devastated no cotton crops. As a railroad train the Boll Weevil wasn't much. There were two of them in actuality, a north-bound and a southbound train, operating each day between Savannah, Georgia, and Hamlet, North Carolina, the latter being a railroad junction point a few miles beyond the border