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When Charles N. Wilcoxon was appointed general manager of the Chicago, Lake Shore and South Bend Railway in October 1909, the year-old railroad already had aroused public outrage and government scrutiny after two collisions killed twelve people and injured scores of others. By the time Wilcoxon was elected president of the railroad in June 1914, the company had been saddled with $120,000 in debts because of court-ordered judgments from the resulting injuries and deaths. New accident claims continued to pile up while the railroad was attempting to overcome the financial burden of past claims. During the 1910s, the South Shore ranked as one of the poorest electric railway companies among interurbans covering comparable territory. In 1914 the railroad earned less than 1 percent on the monies originally invested in it. Injuries and damages steadily rose from 3.20 percent of total operating expenses in fiscal year 1910 to 6.43 percent by fiscal year 1915, while the actual expenditure on injuries and damages doubled during those years. The entire revenue from package freight service during one year, less than $5,000, did not cover the expenses incurred because of accidental injuries and deaths during that same year.
Wilcoxon certainly realized that workers’ injuries and deaths placed potential financial burdens on the company.

The first employee timetable issued a week after his election to the presidency carried a new motto above the railroad’s name: “Safety First.” Wilcoxon continued as general manager while president and, beginning in August 1916, also oversaw the aggressive development of freight traffic to offset deepening deficits. After experimenting with a locomotive leased from the Spokane and Inland Empire Railroad in mid-1916, the South Shore ordered two identical locomotives from Baldwin-Westinghouse for delivery in mid-October. Freight service began the evening of 8 January 1917, with one round-trip each night between South Bend and Kensington from 7 P.M. until 6 A.M.
At about eleven o’clock the morning of Wednesday, 22 November 1916 , thirty-seven-year-old Karl Wilcoxon, Charles’s only son, was struck and killed instantly by a new South Shore Line freight locomotive while the locomotive was switching cinder cars at Michigan City. Karl had been standing in the middle of the Lake Erie & Western Railroad interchange track at Carroll Street in the Michigan City railroad yard, apparently facing away from a slowly approaching locomotive, expecting it to keep to the main track. The new locomotive’s crew was attempting a “flying switch” move by backing onto the interchange track, when the locomotive struck Karl, knocking him down and dragging him for several feet. Under the wheels, an impact fractured his skull and killed him. Although trackmen were working nearby and all four members of the train crew rode aboard the locomotive—motorman A. S. Hill, conductor Earl Ferner, and brakemen R. Lender and V. White—not one of the men saw Karl before the locomotive backed over him.

Immediately, one of the workmen ran several hundred feet east to the railroad’s general office building to call for a doctor and to retrieve Karl’s father. The sixty-one-year-old president and general manager of the railroad ran along the tracks to the locomotive on the interchange track, where he found his son’s lifeless body. A doctor soon arrived at the scene of the accident, but could do nothing. Railroad superintendent James K. Gray took one of the heavy wooden interurban cars on an urgent special run to Chicago to locate and bring back Karl’s wife and his mother, who had traveled to the city to shop.

Karl Wilcoxon knew electric railroads and their equipment. In 1898, at the age of nineteen, Karl ended his education in his hometown of Muncie and began working under his father on electric railways in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, as well as for a railroad construction company on the Pacific Coast. Karl and his wife lived on Roeske Avenue within walking distance of the shops and rail yard. He had been the South Shore’s master mechanic for five months, after working as a signal inspector since 1913. As master mechanic, he was responsible for directing the maintenance and improvement of all motive power and equipment, as well as the supervision of all shop workers.

The day after the accident, the South Shore’s general offices and shops closed for the afternoon. At 7:45 that evening, a Presbyterian minister conducted a funeral service at the home of Karl’s parents. The following morning, the president of the Chicago, Lake Shore and South Bend Railway accompanied his son’s body on a Lake Erie and Western steam train to the family’s former home in Muncie for burial.

Three months after Karl Wilcoxon’s death, the South Shore Line hired railroad safety expert H. L. Brownell for a weeklong campaign of safety lectures for trainmen, shop workers, and Michigan City schoolchildren. A local newspaper reported, “The trainmen were shown some special films that demonstrated how an accident happens when a careless act on the part of the motorman or conductor occurs.” Brownell also showed photographs depicting actual accidents and the resulting injuries or deaths. The safety expert may have encountered some initial skepticism or antagonism from the more seasoned workers, for the same newspaper reported, “Some of the older men on the South Shore declared they never saw or never thought of so many kinds of accidents as the pictures showed.” Brownell won their respect as one of their own, though; he had worked as a motorman thirty years earlier, back in the very beginning of electric streetcar operations in the country. “The South Shore is a Safety First company,” he assured the trainmen, “and your friends will expect you to talk safety to them. Talk to the children whenever you meet them; they look up to you and will listen and heed your advice. Urge them to keep away from the car tracks and not to hitch or flip onto cars. Be a safety-first helper.”

The timing of Brownell’s lectures and the South Shore’s apparently belated activity in the Safety First movement were not coincidental. A jury in Porter County recently had awarded $5,000 to the family of a Michigan City girl who had fallen off the platform of car 72 at the Willard Street stop when the train started abruptly before she had boarded. Witnesses testified about the conductor’s negligence beforehand and his rude comments about the girl after she fell. The railroad unsuccessfully appealed the verdict and $5,000 judgment to the Indiana Appellate Court. In a separate case heard in the Lake County Superior Court on 25 January 1917, Elizabeth Samak sought $5,000 for injuries she suffered when a South Shore car unexpectedly rounded a curve near Hegewisch without sounding a warning and struck her as she walked across the tracks at a public grade crossing at six o’clock the evening of 31 August 1913. The judge and jury in the Samak lawsuit might have been aware of the circumstances concerning the twelve-year-old Michigan City girl and might have grown somewhat impatient with the railroad’s attorney, F. J. Lewis Meyer. Meyer caused a half-day delay in the Samak trial because he had been in Indianapolis arguing the appeal of the Michigan City girl’s lawsuit before the appellate court.

Ironically, the very freight locomotives that Charles N. Wilcoxon purchased in 1916 to raise revenues and to turn around the South Shore Line’s declining fortunes also brought the added risks associated with nighttime freight switching. Yet another man among the 265 employees of the Chicago, Lake Shore and South Bend Railway died in 1917. The interurban’s fatality rate in 1917 corresponded to nearly four deaths per one thousand workers per year, compared with a national steam railroad fatality rate of fewer than two deaths per thousand workers. Railroad officials in Michigan City also reported that fifteen workers experienced serious injuries, a rate of fifty-six per thousand, compared with a national average rate of ninety-four injuries per thousand employees. The following year, though, wartime freight and passenger traffic may have influenced an increase in the risk of injuries to South Shore workers: eighty-six debilitating accidents per one thousand employees, compared with fewer than eighty per thousand nationwide. Also in 1918, two workers died among only 285 employees. The railroad’s officials failed to report accidental injuries and deaths in 1919, 1921, 1922, and 1923, but in 1924 a sizable 10 percent of the total workforce—twenty-four out of 240 employees and officers—endured temporary or permanently disabling injuries. Nationwide that year, only about 6.8 percent of steam railroad employees in all blue-collar and white-collar jobs suffered significant injuries at work. If the data can be trusted to reflect a minimum number of injuries, due to possible underreporting and the lack of data from previous years to trace any trends, then the growing risks to workers after the initiation of South Shore freight trains in January 1917 and the rise in wartime traffic become apparent.

Wilcoxon’s inauguration of freight service on the South Shore just before the American entry into World War I appeared to hold promise for generating new revenue, but a postwar recession pulled railroads nationwide into a slump. Many interurbans simply disappeared during the 1920s. On the South Shore Line, the initial wartime growth in freight traffic and passenger ridership subsequently plummeted during the early 1920s. South Shore deficits brought deferred maintenance to the right-of-way, overhead catenary wire, and train equipment, resulting in an accumulation of hazards for railroaders. Facing a deficit exceeding $1 million, Wilcoxon resigned as president and general manager on 1 February 1924.

Wilcoxon’s wife had barely survived two strokes the previous October and the circumstances of his son’s death may have weighed on his mind. In later winter, shortly after Wilcoxon resigned, he suffered a nervous breakdown. Springtime seemed to bring recovery, though. He resumed normal activities, enjoyed golf outings, oversaw the construction of a new house for his wife and himself, and participated in community events appropriate for a man of his standing.

In July the Wilcoxons took an automobile ride from Michigan City towards Gary on the Dunes Highway, parallel to the South Shore Line. On the return trip, the car somehow ended up in a water-filled ditch. Passers-by pulled the couple and the car to safety and gave them a ride home to Michigan City. Sometime later that afternoon, as Mrs. Wilcoxon slept, Wilcoxon went into an insane rage, crushing his wife’s skull with an axe, slashing her face and shoulders with a razor, and striking her repeatedly with a potato masher. He then hanged himself from the rafters in a closet. Observers at the time missed the resemblance of the injuries he inflicted upon his wife to those suffered by their son Karl under the wheels of a locomotive nearly eight years earlier.

Coincidentally, the next day, three federal judges in Indianapolis ordered four steam railroads to commence the reciprocal freight switching agreements with the Chicago, Lake Shore and South Bend Railway that Wilcoxon had sought while president and general manager. The lead judge in the case was Albert B. Anderson.