As seen in the Herald-Citizen (Cookeville, TN) - September 24, 1999
By Dale Welch
He was the son of George and Sally Qualls Tudor and came from a family of eight. During his life, he married three women: Martha Suzanne Judd, Goolie Whittaker McCormick and Vola Welch Walker and had nine children altogether.
During his career, he did a lot of jobs on the railroad.
He started out as a coal heaver. In 1912, railroad records show that he was making $1.25 a day for the job.
During the later years of his job with the TCR, Tudor was a hostler helper, a job involving firing the engine to get it ready to go on its daily trip.
Tudor had to turn the engine at the roundhouse in whatever direction it was going that day, either east or west or north from Monterey.
It was also his job to prepare a five-gallon keg of water for the work crews. He would chip the ice and add water so the men would have something to drink on their long days working on the track.
Fellow crew members recall that he had a habit of rolling his false teeth out on his tongue. One day, after he had filled the water jugs and fired the engines, turning one north toward Wilder and one east toward Harriman, he set about his other chores for the day.
But after a while, he noticed that he had lost his false teeth. He hunted for them frantically and enlisted his fellow workers in the search.
They retraced the steps he'd taken that day, beginning in the early morning.
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Someone asked, Did he bring them to work with him?Well, he didn't know, but he thought he did. When the Wilder crew came in, they helped also.Did he have them in his pocket? Nope! Done checked there.
Toward the end of the day, the Hairrman crew came back to the roundhouse. Most of that crew joined in the search. Others went to putting up their equipment and emptying the water keg, keeping the leftover ice for use the next day.
As the ice was being emptied, guess what! Out came Henderson Tudor's false teeth.
The men from the east crew realized that they had been drinking all day long from the jug that contained Tudor's false teeth. It made some of them a little sick to their stomachs to think of what had happened.
As for Henderson Tudor, well -- he was one of the happiest men on earth. He had his teeth back.
After the incident of the false teeth, the crews began getting their own water kegs ready. And Henderson didn't mind that at all. He had two things to smile about.
*NOTE: My good friend Elmer Parsons, a long-time railroader, related this story to me. Fortunately, Elmer was on the Wilder crew that day and missed the false-teeth laced ice water.
Record: 12383C1D9B220F68Copyright: Copyright 1999, 2008 Herald-Citizen, All Rights Reserved.
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